This Fence Picket Project Made $700 in 5 Days + 8 Things I Learned Starting My Woodworking Business

all right guys so I've been wanting to start a little business on the side that I can make a little extra money so what I decided to do was I got some of these ac2 pressure treated pickets and a couple ac2 pressure treated 2x4s and I'm going to make some planter boxes and sell them on Facebook and just see what happens now my original intent was to make 6t by 3T or thereabouts raised garden bed boxes but when I went to the hardware store they were totally out of 6ot pickets so you got to Pivot sometimes and that's what I'm doing here so I am going with 4 foot pickets and just roll them with the punches and we'll see what happens [Music] baby I feel all right so I got the pickets and the 2x4s cut and I'm ready to start putting them together now just make sure you pick the most presentable side for the outside everything all with Onin all right just got to make another one of these and then put the the other sides [Music] on let me breathe theep let me get away there's no place well there it is so I'm going to use a sander real quick to take off some of the uneven edges the pickets aren't always perfectly even cuz they're pickets they're not for woodworking so they will require some touch [Music] up all right so there we have it now let's just get some pictures of it and get it [Music] posted so I'm going to type up a quick ad on Facebook I'm probably going to toss it on one of my local Facebook uh sales groups as well too I went back and took an additional picture just to kind of show the scale of the raised plant planer bed because a lot of people can't tell a scale from a picture and if you don't put anything in there that lets them approximate the size uh there'll be a lot more iffy on it so let me get this ad typed up I got the pictures in the title's new raised garden bed box approximately 4 ft Square price I'm putting mine for $60 I'm not really sure how much to ask so I'm just going with it here it is and it's about about 5:47 on a Friday and I'm just going to publish that then I'm going to put it in a couple local Facebook groups and we'll see how it [Music] goes all right so I just got done with some pressure washing and it's 6:27 so not even 45 minutes later it was actually sent at 6:14 I got a response saying that they were interested did in the the raised garden bed so let's see if we can sell it here so this is going better than I had even hoped she replied I put the $60 price and she said she wants two but she's also going to need a few more after talking with her dad so it looks like I may be selling five already less than 45 minutes later so I'll keep you updated on how this is [Music] going all right just to give you a little update I have another person who contacted me and they wanted a custom design where it's raised off the ground uh they're actually coming by to meet me in a few minutes here uh to kind of go over the plan and I'll let you know how that goes one of the frustrating things about you know selling on Facebook or selling this kind of thing like this is you don't just build it and sell it as if you were a store uh people are going to want to know additional details and you just kind of got to do the rigar roll of back and forth messaging and for me that's the that's the worst part I like building things but that part gets a little old but it's part of the deal if you want to if you want to do it you got to do it well they just came I didn't record it cuz I didn't want it to be weird but I got a deposit on a custom build so I'll let you know how that goes [Music] boom all right so here it is laying on the ground got the 4x4 set up there and then a frame for the base to set on now we just got to flip it over and see how she looks real quick all right so I finished this custom build here for the the person who ordered the custom one and I'm going to be delivering that uh tonight and I just got another $400 order this person wants to me to build them some L-shaped boxes of the same design as my original design but just make it a 8 foot L instead so I gave them a quote for that and uh they ordered basically $400 worth and I'm going to get that done and have it to them in a few days [Music] here [Music] well I just delivered it got 120 bucks from that if I build any of those again I'm going to be listing them for at least 160 but that's part of the process you learn how long it takes to make something um and you adjust accordingly but basically I got a little bit of profit out of it and they paid for me to get experience making that kind of planter and I think I'm going to be listing that and offering it as an option for people in the future so let's see what else we can sell this [Music] week so here's the custom ones finished for one our order they're 4x6 got little braces in the middle put a little angle on them and I think that makes them look a little little nicer okay guys so the reason that I initially did those different scenes of me cutting the pickets with different tools is I wanted to show that you don't have to have any one specific tool in order to just start uh you could use a circular saw Handa what have you they'll they'll do the job now that doesn't mean that there's not an easier tool for the job and one of the things that you can look into once you start making money from woodworking is tools that will make things go faster and easier for you that way it'll up your profit margin um so already I've sold enough in less than a week to buy myself a tool that's going to do that for me so let's check this out this miter saw is going to vastly increase my speed and ability to do this and since I made enough to buy this already and literally what is it it is Tuesday so I I posted the listing on Friday and by Tuesday I've already got enough buyers in enough uh things sold to to pay for this miter saw so in order to keep that going get my profit ratio as far as time goes a little higher I'm going to I'm I'm going to use [Music] this all right guys so in the first five days I sold over $700 worth of raised garden beds so that was pretty exciting for me I just want to share some things that I learned along the way and uh hopefully you'll get something out of it first raised garden beds are seasonal and you only have a window to get them out so you may feel some pressure to produce the garden beds as fast as you can and that can cause some stress obviously gardening depending on where you live there's a window where people are going to be interested in buying a garden bed and where they need to get their items planted so you can't take forever to get the stuff done once they order the item so I I was feeling pressure to try to have it done in two days at the latest and that you know that can add up so you you just need to consider that and maybe pre-produce as much as you can second you need to charge for everything gas tax uh fasteners like screws Nails glue Etc all those little costs add up and if you forget to charge the additional cost for what sales tax you pay or the Fasteners you got you're going to think you're making 20 or $30 profit or whatever on each item but when you actually do the real numbers you're making a lot less than you think you are also timeliness is important when responding to requests or inquiries about your product if you take too long they're either going to move on to somebody else or to a different product so you got to you got to be able to respond and you can't just wait until the end of the day cuz you feel like it a lot more of my sales that were successful were ones that I responded to very quickly the ones that I didn't generally didn't go through another thing I learned is where you live can make a big difference on your business whether it be from cost so cost for you if you constantly have to run into town for supplies and you live like I do 20 minutes outside of town and you got a big old V10 truck like me then I'm burning 8 miles a gallon on in that truck and the gas cost and the time costs can add up quickly and you just got to consider that you may want to buy as much as you can ahead of time to reduce the the number of costs if you live in town great and you live close to where you can buy your items from that's good more power to you but even if you live outside of where your customers live then that may be an issue too also where you live as far as a customer base is going to matter my County only has 9,000 people in it so my customer base is going to be a lot smaller than somebody that lives in a medium to larger sized city if I want to advertise in a larger area then I'm going to have to deliver further and that's going to affect my bottom line as well and I may not be able to compete with somebody that lives in a larger area because for them running a product to somebody locally they're going to have a lot more local people to run products to and not have to go as far so that's something to consider another thing I learned as far as the delivery goes that offering delivery to customers can make a real difference because a lot of people don't have a truck so making it convenient for them uh especially if you have a larger item like a raised garden bed making it convenient for them them can be the difference between a sale and no sale so you want to consider offering deliveries and if you have a truck even better unfortunately it is annoying to have to deliver all your items to customers but that's part of the business and at the end of the day if you're making making enough of a profit to buy more tools or whatever then you know it may be worth it to you another thing you need to consider is availability of materials like I said I have to drive at least 20 minutes into town to go to the nearest hardware store where I can get the parts I need and partway through making these raised garden beds they ran out of some of the pickets I needed and I had to go twice as far so 40 minutes One Direction just to get the pickets I needed and when you're in a big truck again everything adds gas adds time adds cost and these things matter so you you may want to have your supplies on hand so that you don't have to have to do that as much and also you don't have to worry about them running out another thing that I learned is just because one idea worked doesn't mean another one will so I tried after the raised garden beds a couple more products and they weren't as successful I mean a lot of people like them and uh comment on the listings and all the these type of things but they haven't been nearly as successful as the raised garden beds so really I think your first year is going to be learning what sells when and I think in some ways this type of business is a lot like gardening you got to be willing to experiment and test things this year in order to have a good year next year and from then on so figure out what works don't be afraid to spend your your first year figuring it out cuz next year I can guarantee you I'm going to be ready to go for raised garden bed Seasons I'm going to have stuff made ahead of time so I can just sell left and right I'm going to have product on hand and I'm going to be ready to go and it's going to be a lot more successful year for me and when I figure out what other items sell when I'm going to have those ready too all right my camera died on me so let's continue on here another thing I learned was that you can't compete with the big box stores on price for items that can be mass produced so don't even bother trying I one of the things that I tried making to sell was trellises and not the more expensive kind but the kind that you can basically get in the big box stores and I had one listed on Facebook and then I'm in Menards and I see this lady looking at a trellis and I go check it out and it was a price that there's no way that I could I could match that price so from what I've seen and what I've learned basically you need to either make things that are inconvenient for big box stores to to sell or have mass produced which is the raised garden beds cuz they're large items that take up a lot of room and aren't that expensive that's just not something that's going to be good for them profit-wise so that's a whole or things that are more intricate and difficult to mash produce well I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it useful if you did please go down below leave a thumbs up leave a comment if you think I did something wrong or could have done something better also if you have any ideas on some things that might sell and what time a year they'll sell just leave a comment and let me know I'm trying to work on figuring that out myself so far I've been somewhat successful but I always could use some input also feel free to subscribe and I hope you have a nice day

Channel: David Can Make That

Views: 331,139

Keywords: side hustles, springtime side hustles, make money woodworking, raised garden beds, easy woodworking side hustles, start a woodworking business, side hustle ideas, selling on facebook, woodworking, carpentry, diy

Id: U3usF52V6mA

Length: 17min 59sec (1079 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 20 2024