Stable Job, Good Money, Great Benefits... I Quit - Blacktail Studio

hey this is Ken with black tail studio and this week we're gonna talk about black tail studio specifically how and why I started this company but maybe more importantly why I decided to give up my dream job as a helicopter pilot to become a full-time woodworker a couple years ago I watched the about me for the samurai carpenter and he had a really good point he mentioned most people would probably get a good woodworking montage instead of staring into my eyes for the next 15 minutes so that's what I'm gonna do for you is I'm gonna give you some cool woodworking b-roll footage spliced in with some kind of Ken Burns photos from my flying career while I explain what got me to the point I am today enjoy so I graduated from Oregon State in 2004 and I just really really didn't want to get a real job it wasn't quite ready for it so hung out for a couple years until I decided that I wanted to learn to fly helicopters and in 2007 was fortunate to get some loans for my family cuz flying helicopters is super expensive and started taking lessons and I went at it pretty much full-time as full-time as you can and Oregon with some inclement weather during the winters anyway and it took me about a year and a half until I got all my licenses all my certificates so I could technically be called a professional helicopter pilot although at that time you're not really a professional because you don't really make any money so I started flying as a flight instructor at a Corvallis Oregon for about a year and a half but I didn't really get any hours and hours or what you're after you know you don't really care about the money at that point you need to build up a lot of time so I took a chance I applied for a job outside of Houston Texas and had two phone calls with the guy and he said how soon can you be here and it was a little bit scary cuz I'd lived in the northwest my whole life I didn't know I told him you know I three days drive and two weeks notice at my current job and he said no problem so I packed up everything I owned put it in trailer behind my four cylinder Tacoma and I drove to Houston without even negotiating a salary I got a little nervous halfway down when I realized I didn't even know what I was gonna be paid good thing was he was a super reasonable guy and that was some of the funnest flying it's probably the best piloting I've ever done there's so much technical stuff that I did in these little bubble copters these Robinson helicopters I did down in Texas well you're never gonna make a ton of money at a job like that's what you can get what I did get was a ton of experience and that's what I was after so I was so grateful to them for giving me a chance on someone they didn't know bringing me in it from across the country and really paid me a fair wage more than he probably had to at the time but from there it was time to go try to get my first real helicopter pilot job and that's flying the larger turbine powered helicopters and I got a job with pH I incorporated which is oil rig company they fly off to the oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico and for someone from the Pacific Northwest we'd never seen an oil platform this was super cool experience for me I loved it I generally end up taking the contracts where I would live on the oil platforms for you basically work seven days on then you have seven days off so I would live offshore and the people from Louisiana Southwest Texas are amazing the food is amazing and the fishing is amazing that was probably what I did the most of while I was down there cuz I would fly in the day and then as soon as we were done I would go get my fishing gear drop it down and I had the most fun catching all these crazy fish red snapper sharks grouper cobia Barracuda I mean everything was down there and you could see I mean all kinds of amazing stuff just hanging out on these platforms I've seen whale sharks you'd see sea turtles you'd see all kinds of cool stuff so someone again from Oregon who doesn't get to see all these cool tropical fish it was kind of a dream for me to live offshore hang out with these guys and then go fishing at night almost as cool as the fishing and the flying down in the Gulf of Mexico is the schedule and the cool thing about being a pilot is you don't really work that much so down there I had 14 days on and then I had 14 days off so I had to have something to fill my time and this was kind of the first introduction into me becoming a woodworker because down there houses in 2009 they were basically giving them away I had a beautiful house on a golf course that I bought for like ninety two thousand dollars and it was a foreclosure and it was a disaster and it took a ton of work but that was kind of getting my feet wet and home improvement learning how to fix things myself and what I ended up doing was spent about two years fixing it out of pocket doing as much as I could myself hired a few things out but ended up turning that into a rental property that I still have today after I get this house fixed up I decided to move back up to Oregon to live with my then girlfriend now wife Ilana and continued to commute down to the Gulf of Mexico for about another year or so doing that 14 days on 14 days off schedule which wasn't the most fun having it on an airplane every two weeks but I was able to make it work until 2015 I believe it was that I applied for a job with Life Flight network which is one of the air ambulance services up in Oregon and Washington and was fortunate enough to get my dream jobs line and this is what I've been working for my entire flying career was to be able to be one of these life flight pilots so 2015 was a big year for me because I choked that I got a new job a new dog and a new wife and I hope to never get another one of any of those and never thinking a couple years down the road that I would actually be voluntarily quitting my job as a pilot to become a woodworker but a little bit more on that later and one of the questions I get from a lot of people is how do you get started woodworking how do you show people we can build if you really haven't built that much stuff yet and what I did I just started small I never intended to start my own woodworking company when this got started so I built us a coffee table and it was my first attempt to do a really nice solid wood slab coffee table from some cool walnut slabs I bought on Craigslist for pretty cheap and it actually turned out pretty nice I was pretty proud of myself we still use it as our coffee table today so I recommend fill your house with as much stuff as your wife or husband will allow and then maybe see if your friends your family are interested in some things and if you're you don't feel confident in your abilities yet if you're not sure if you can really do a project see if maybe they will cover the materials and you will do all the work for free and then you can build your portfolio up show people what you can make without really having to risk commissioning a project for a client who you don't know and maybe it not turning out so well and I continued this way for a little while until we kind of ran out of things to make and I ran out of money for new tools so my wife actually suggested that I start my own company that I started a side company selling these things and I was really glad she did because I wanted to do it but I didn't really have the confidence to start it myself I wasn't sure if I was good enough so it was really great have her support and have her suggest that actually start a company doing this again this was just a completely part-time company never ever thought this would become my full-time job and this was in December of 2016 when we started black tail studio and if you're curious where the name comes from it's not a great story but black tail is a native deer species to the Pacific Northwest goes up California all the way up into Alaska and I was a fish and wildlife major at Oregon State so I love the black tail deer and Studio is what was available if you're picking your company name look on Instagram Facebook YouTube whatever you think you might do especially the URL the website make sure all of us available so you don't want to have to have you know a dotnet type of website so woodworking was taken I can't remember everything fabrication was taken wind up planning on studio which now it just seems so natural I'm so happy that I have it but that is how we created a name for blacktail studio in December of 2016 and about the time we started this company my wife told me that I should have an Instagram page and so I said okay great idea so I took some pictures and I put them up and nothing really happened I had like two likes they were from robots that told me to follow for woodworking plans or whatever they were so I didn't think much of it and just left it at that and about a week later she asked how the Instagram was going and I said oh I don't think great well nothing's really happening and so she asked for my phone and I gave it to her and she had it for about 20 minutes and she hands it back to me and I had like four new followers and 20 likes and I was like blown away like whoa where did these come from there were real people that were actually liking my stuff and she showed me what a hashtag was I had never heard of a hashtag didn't know what a hashtag was I didn't know how Instagram used it and I was fascinated by it so she gave me a little crash course on that and then I started posting daily I started just hash tagging and posting and I some reason found out that I am pretty good at social media and Instagram was a little bit slow to take off but eventually it took off really well and a lot of ask what the secret is the Instagram what the secret is with YouTube I don't have you a lot of secrets but one thing I'll say is don't post anything that you wouldn't click on you see a lot of grown man posting selfies and that's not something that other grown men are generally looking for so I just try to post things that I was interested in and if I wasn't sure if someone's gonna like it I just asked myself the question would you click on it and if I wouldn't I didn't post it and that has been my overall recipe to Instagram and pretty much all my social media not long after starting all my social media pages I decided that I wanted to make my first epoxy table and I am definitely not the first person to make an epoxy table but at the time there really wasn't many people doing it so there wasn't a lot of information out there so I bought $40 worth of epoxy which was a ton of money for me at the time and these two really ugly altar slabs because they were what I could afford and I put a bunch of painters tape underneath and I dumped the epoxy in with a way too much blue dye and it started pouring out under the tape I was panicking my wife's out there laughing at me I taped a bunch more on there got the leak start stopped and then the epoxy was about 3/4 of an inch thick and it started smoking and it started cracking and I had no idea what was happening why she's looking mushy good why's it doing this I had no idea she picks up the container of epoxy and asked did you even read the instructions and of course I didn't and the problem was of course you can't pour that particular epoxy that deep I didn't read any instructions I didn't know I just wasted a whole $40 of epoxy that I ended up having to break out of this slab repour it ended up salvaging the table didn't do a very good job on the table but I still have it to this day I should throw it out but I just can't bring myself to throw out my first epoxy table from there I kept making epoxy tables with this old-school boat epoxy that you could only pour about eighth of an inch at a time and it was a slow go and it was not that fun and luckily for me about I don't know a few months to a year into this epoxy table some deep poor epoxies came on the market which really changed the game for everybody at the time and it made it really accessible for people to pour these inch and a half two inch thick tables and not have to do these micro pores like I was doing at the time so again I never got into this expecting to do epoxy tables but that was something I kind of became known for and I ended up becoming pretty good at making these epoxy tables and people kept ordering them again I was still just doing this part-time the order started to come in and they kept coming in and I would raise my prices a little bit and people would keep ordering and it kind of continued like this for the next couple years in the midst of making these projects I decided to try my hand at YouTube and my recommendation if you want to get into YouTube just get into it don't worry about being good yet it'll come later my first video was actually ten videos that were one minute long that I didn't know how to edit I didn't know how to put videos together so I did 10 1 minute segments and it was awful I ended up believing those videos he can't even find those anymore on YouTube but that's how I got started and I ended up making one video on an epoxy table build that I was really proud of and it's still up today was my very first epoxy table build on YouTube and it did okay got like 20 or 30 thousand views at the time which I thought was great and I was not gonna do another table build video after that cuz I'd already done one and I said let's just go ahead and do a build on this dining table I was building a nine-foot dining table for someone here local in Portland and that video took off I couldn't believe it it to this date it has like 5 million views and that was really what launched my YouTube career and that was pretty cool because I only had you know maybe two three hundred subscribers at that time and that launched me you know into the twenty or thirty thousand so that was really cool to get started with my youtube career in the midst of making all of these tables and making all these videos I was still a pilot and something about being a pilot is you really need to study you need to know your emergency procedures you need to know your company policies you need to know the FAA regulations all of these things I felt like I was starting to slack on and it was something that was really hard to admit because you don't just have your life in your hands you have the lives of your crew who is your friends who had they have families that they want to go home to and if you're not the best possible pilot that is not fair to them and I had some long discussions with my wife and we made the really really hard decision that I was going to put everything behind Blacktail and quit my dream job as a pilot because I felt that passionate and when I was flying all I want to do is woodwork all I wanted to do was make videos make more content make more tables and so this year in March of 2020 I decided to quit my job as a pilot job I've been working at my entire life the job that I spent $70,000 in flight school to get the job I never thought I would quit decided to give all that up and put everything behind Blacktail I have a lot of conversations with some people like you who maybe don't even love your job as much as I loved being a pilot they say hey I want to quit my job I want to make tables should I do it and unfortunately I of course don't know everybody's individual situation so as much as I want to encourage people to follow their passion I also don't want to encourage them to make a decision where now they can no longer afford to support their family so I want to be really upfront about my situation as far as the income goes because it's gonna be a little different than yours and I probably don't make enough selling tables that I could have quit my job as a pilot and I certainly don't make as much from the YouTube ad revenue but I could quit my job as a pilot the Amazon affiliate links that you see linked in all my videos I don't make enough doing that to quit my job as a pilot but all those things combined I feel like it's gonna make me just enough so I can justify doing this full-time so I have a lot of small different revenue streams then if you were to say start a cabinet shop and not do any social media so my story's a little bit different if you do want to support me I really do appreciate it if you click through those Amazon links they do get a small percentage - at the end of the month it can add up to a decent amount and actually makes a pretty big difference in my monthly income but that's not gonna be the same for you if you want to start your own woodworking company so what is next for blacktail and really just a lot more of the same I have only been doing this seriously since 2016 so I want to become a better woodworker I am far from a master woodworker at this point I want to get better with hand tools I would love to learn to make a guitar I would love to learn to make a rocking chair or a dining chair and I'd like to keep doing innovating a little bit some things like this fire table I just built that was something I've never really seen before on a table maybe it's not gonna be the next big trend but it's just something to kind of spur some creative juices and people and get people thinking outside the box so I want to keep doing everything I've been doing and then more I want to expand my youtube my goal is a million subscribers in the next two years which might be optimistic but I would appreciate it if you're not subscribing already to hit that subscribe button cuz that's what enables me to keep creating content keep making videos not really like this one but the videos you see every other week that I release every Thursday if you're curious so that is what is coming up for blacktail and I really appreciate it if you would come along for the journey okay I have talked about myself for way too long I thought this was gonna be like a five minute video and Here I am rambling 15 minutes later so every week I like to end my video with a little call to action because I like to give credit to the people that make it all the way to the end of the video so this week start your question or comment with your dream job because I feel like I am now doing my dream job every day is Saturday for me so start your question or comment with your dream job all now you watch the whole video and I promise I will answer all of your questions first so thanks again for watching this entire thing and please subscribe for more videos have a great day

Channel: Blacktail Studio

Views: 138,881

Rating: 4.9523144 out of 5

Keywords: should i become a pilot, pilot jobs, airline pilot central, helicopter pilot jobs, helicopter pilot, helicopter flying lessons, helicopter cfi, helicopter licence cost, helicopter flight school, helicopter lessons near me, medevac pilot, becoming a helicopter pilot, woodwork, woodworking business, woodshop, professional woodworking, what job should I do, what career should I have, what career should I do, what should my job be, entrepreneurship, be your own boss

Id: -FYbG-eszts

Length: 16min 30sec (990 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 11 2020