would you guys like to know how to start a successful woodworking business that sells furniture for 30 000 and more per item [Music] well today we have cameron the owner of blacktail studio who's going to show you everything about his thriving woodworking business let's get into it [Music] cameron thank you so much for joining us of course it's our pleasure to share your story and mostly everything that you do in this woodworking industry so tell us a little bit about yourself your background and how you got involved or started your woodworking business sure started i believe in 2016 i was a ems pilot and ems pilots have a great schedule we had seven days on and we had seven days off so i needed something to do with my time and we just moved into a house that had an oversized garage so i've always liked building stuff i've never been like a woodworker but i just decided i needed to fill my time with something i found out the tools were really expensive so then i decided to try to sell some things to maybe pay for some new tools and would happen to be what you ended up eventually doing and yeah i understand anything else i'd pick the name blacktail studio to leave it kind of open and maybe i want to do metal maybe you won't do that okay and once i learned how specialized woodworking is i was like i can't do this for metal i can't do this for other things so i really focused on the woodworking what is your monthly average revenue has it been steady over the last year i've really scaled back my woodworking revenue just because i've been focusing more on social media and that would increase yeah woodworking you know it varies it might be thirty thousand forty thousand one month and next is you know nothing the next month while i'm building those yeah um i'd say on average price fifteen 000 a month okay cameron let's talk about scaling and growing revenue for a woodworking business what would you do today to do that i think a lot of people need to not be afraid to potentially charge what they're worth early on you know once i started charging five thousand dollars for a table i was like wow now i've made it you know nobody will ever pay more than five thousand dollars and i started getting orders and i couldn't keep up and i go maybe i'll try eight and then eight went to ten went to fifteen did you know now i'm turning down orders several times a week for twenty thousand dollar tables and i would have never got there if i would have been too afraid to raise my prices to something that i was not thinking someone would pay camera we gotta talk to you about your youtube channel more than 1.3 million subscribers incredible number how did that come about how long did it take and most importantly how did that change the way you do business and what has that done for your business i know lots of questions i don't know it the youtube's been awesome it changed everything it went from me being kind of a small woodworking company making furniture trying to profit from that to really kind of being my main focus now because there's more potential with youtube than there is you know i'm only one guy can only make so many tables in a year but there's no limit how many views i can get what kind of surprised me is how many customers i get from it because i'm giving everything away and i didn't know if that would hurt me giving away all my quote secrets or tricks that i've learned right but what i found is i've got countless dentists and doctors that they said they got on youtube to build their own table they're like i'm handy i want to do this and they go that was way too much work i just want you to build me a table so it's been great for business it's been great for things you know like ad revenue um yeah it's just change the focus of which direction i take things and try to make more better content than cranking out a ton of furniture that's awesome uh you guys i want to take a second please support our channel take a nanosecond subscribe if you haven't already hit that like and the bell so that you don't miss any videos [Music] for someone watching right now who's starting into woodworking do you think it's a good idea to start a youtube channel yes no why how has it benefited you as well youtube specifically is maybe not for everybody i think people should do some sort of social media and as much social media as they have the bandwidth for youtube has been amazing for me and it is a kind of a bigger time commitment because you need to do a little bit of production whereas tik tok or instagram you can take a picture and keep working so youtube's good but it might not be for everybody do you do all the editing yourself for youtube i do i do everything myself wow okay because i know that's time consuming and you have to have the knowledge and skill yeah i personally don't want to touch it yeah i know i film it edit it light it build it everything okay well you've got an incredible story and quality of product as well and i want to tell you guys keep watching later on the video because cameron's going to share something incredible that will help you build tremendous trust with your clients and have an awesome reputation [Music] tell us a little bit about your startup cost when it became an actual business how much did you have to invest tools etc and how is that broken down my story might be a little different than you know a traditional business because i was doing i was flying full-time so i was just doing this in my spare time and i just bought one tool at a time you know you can do a lot with limited number of tools and now if you watch my videos i have like every tool and it's a ridiculous amount of tools that i have didn't happen overnight though no no and it was you know i made my first big sale and i bought my first big purchase like you know two thousand dollar planer and then you know a couple more sales i could buy some more tools so basically you know a couple hundred dollars initial startup cost and took it from there with what you know now what would you tell our audience hey get this tool because it's a must that tool is a must and you can pretty much create a table what would it be yeah i'd say you know a really good circular saw actually a circular saw doesn't have to be a really good one a really good sander that's something that makes a big difference and then just you know piece everything together you know buy things craigslist i have blogs on how to buy tools for pretty inexpensive and which tools i recommend buying used and which tools i recommend buying new might be an easy question for you but what's your monthly overhead what's the biggest expense for you in the woodworking industry um well as you know you pulled up to my house so this is a detached shop you don't pay any lease or rent uh no my wife will probably start servicer getting me on that here pretty soon but right now um it was part of us buying this house it was a little more expensive than we would have bought normally and i asked my wife mike well what would a shop this size lease for and she's like this much month i'm like that's our whole mortgage i'm like why don't we spend a little more on the house and have this and save myself the overhead do you go through tools on a monthly basis you spend a few hundred bucks just consistently because they break or anything or not tools tend to last but a lot of consumables you know sandpapers and finishes you know but that's just hundreds of dollars it's not thousands of dollars gotcha so pretty minimal it really is that's cool let's talk about skills and techniques that you have acquired over time to become this good somebody watching that doesn't have the knowledge and skills that you have what resources can they go to to learn that's the best way sure sure so when i started out nobody was really making these types of tables these epoxy tables i shouldn't say nobody nobody was showing people how to make these epoxy tables so everything i learned was through my own trial and error and i made a lot of mistakes and this epoxy is expensive the wood's expensive i actually just released a virtual workshop i used to host in-person workshops but i don't know if you remember around 2020 something happened that made it hard to get 20 people into a small room together so now i made a virtual when i hired a film crew this is the only one i didn't film and edit myself because i wanted to do a really good professional job and so it's like three and a half hours long but it's got everything you know to go from never seen epoxy before to be able to make like a you know ten thousand dollar table for your clients and you've designed and created that workshop yeah i created that workshop it's available online um okay it's on my website so it's something i'm really proud of and i tell people it won't necessarily make you a pro but you'll skip the first two years of that learning curve two years is a lot what does that add up to like 700 days so we'll make sure we leave a link to that in the description below [Music] let's talk about proper margins because you make you you can make a small coffee table to what is this a 12 foot in the back here uh nine foot nine foot so is that a high profit margin sale versus a smaller coffee table can you just elaborate on that a little bit sure i've talked about this in some of my videos before because there was a desk that i made that i had a slab it was really pretty slab but i got it on sale it was kind of a funky weird slab and i bought it for 200 okay i ended up selling a desk for seven thousand dollars and i paid about 800 for a custom base for it which is great margins and there's been other ones you know that have been you know spent 50 on the wood plus legs and things like that so it you know can vary from 90 profit to you know 40 and generally um the smaller ones i can make almost for free out of my offcuts of these big ones but the big ones i i generally try to you know be you know 60 70 that'd be a good sweet spot yeah [Music] i want to follow up on people that are watching right now who have a job and they're thinking when do i leave that job to go full time here can you just overall explain that world of switching i think it's different for everybody i think that it's kind of a fallacy to think oh you got to go all in on something and you got to commit to it you got to quit your job and do this get your commercial space for me i just put my toe in the water and i wanted to see am i good at this is there a demand for it it's smart i think a lot of people realize like hey i might not like this it seems great but you know maybe i hate dealing with customers maybe i'm not great with furniture maybe i don't like running the books or doing everything that comes with running a business so for me it was just start small and see if it's something that's you know worked out well for me [Music] you mentioned a course that you've designed earlier in the video how much revenue do you hope to achieve with that course and more importantly what kind of benefit is it going to provide to the customers of that course sure so so far the first four weeks i haven't done any advertising yet but we've sold between three and 400 of them and they're nine dollars so pretty fair yeah thirty some thousand so i mean i've paid for the the production of it and um i still need to figure out the marketing um because i'm good at social media but i haven't done facebook ads and you know google ad center the adwords i'm not even sure what it's called which would be important for the course you think i think there's a lot of people searching this that aren't on my social media that would benefit from that so that's going to be kind of the next step is figuring out how to market that okay guys on that note we have an incredible podcast with a google ad expert so check out our podcast upflip.com forward slash podcast to learn how to be an expert with google ads [Music] let's quickly touch on must have equipment for somebody getting started how much should they budget what are the pieces of equipment they should buy et cetera yeah it depends because a lot of people have tools already you know they might be a homeowner that has you know basic tools some people might not i'd say you know at least a thousand dollars is probably a good start and like my sander i have it's like 550 which is a ridiculous amount when you have never used one like this but it gives me such a better finish that i couldn't live without this tool and so i really recommend you know buy those really expensive tools that are going to touch your project last whereas the circular saw is going to be the first thing that you know touches your table that sanders the last thing so spend the money there i want to ask about all this wood here i've always been curious like where do you find this wood do you turn down a lot of offers of wood tell us how you source it and any tips and tricks on finding the best stuff sure i happen to live i'm in portland oregon or outside of portland and i'm one of the best places in the world to buy at least big walnut slabs 20 minutes from here i have the world's largest supplier of walnut slabs so i go there 95 of the time i've bought stuff on craigslist before you know you can do that but it's kind of hit and miss i've had good experiences and bad experiences in terms of choosing the right type of wood what can you share on that like what do you look for what's what's a good piece versus junk is it dry and that's i think it's all the new woodworkers because you get on craigslist and they go yeah it's ready to go and you find out eventually that it's probably not dried entirely or correctly which then it means you know might be years before you can use it [Music] how do you market right now and how do new customers find you for the most part yeah everything social media that's it yeah i think when i first started i spent 20 on instagram ads or something like that and it was nothing comes from it i don't see why anybody would spend money on marketing when social media is the best advertising it's the most authentic they get to see the entire process of you creating potentially what could be their piece of furniture so yeah all the social media nothing else obviously you have a website so if i'm watching uh tick tock what sources actually do you use or platforms you mentioned um so youtube is a large focus uh instagram price second i should do more on tick tock but i'm kind of get stretched thin what do you do different or unique that helps people find you but your website or yeah i i do have a pretty good website it's i'm not a tech person but i built it myself it's just a you know template type of website i went and found a woodworker that i thought had a nice website and go i want to copy that and so if people like mine by all means just copy the general layout because i just copied it from someone there you go we call it rnd or rip off and duplicate yeah yeah that's what i did and you know put up a bunch of photos and i didn't know what i was doing i didn't realize you're not supposed to upload the highest res photos to your website because it bogs it down and google will shelve it my wife found out like a year in that i had like they were like a thousand times larger than they should have been and she's like oh yeah this is not good so don't worry about the optimization of it spend the time you know just get something up good you know so more people can land and then you'll figure the rest out later [Music] quickly touch on your website like who designed it who hosts it who manages it what the cost of operating is and how important is it to your business if at all sure i do everything and i i do all my photography so i'm like i gotta learn how to host a website it's just squarespace i just found a template i liked pretty straightforward yeah it was actually really easy but on a one on a scale of one to ten how important is it for your business i think one is crucial i think like like a two or sorry no no like a like an eight like okay i was gonna say two yeah no like you don't have to have it first thing i feel like that's like a ten you know where someone has to have it before they do anything but it is something that you know maybe after that first etsy sales like all right now i'm gonna get my website to give yourself a little bit of credibility yeah drive people to your website show you that like you're an actual business right out of all the orders that you get i know you say you turn down a lot which is a good problem to have you're picky and you want to be unique how many of the orders that you receive or the estimates that you give out make it to completion if someone's emailing me like that's the easiest thing in the world if you're at a home show and there's a thousand booths that's hard you know you got to try to grab someone's attention but there's no reason for you not to close someone if they've seen your prices if you you know they've reached out they want you they know how much it costs sometimes the timeline gets in the way if it's too long but for the most part even that doesn't bother it so if i'd say if i want to do an order and i send out a quote you know like we're gonna do this um 90 90 you get it closed yeah that's awesome uh any any reason for that besides what you already mentioned like is it the way you have conversations is it your website that really proves your product i mean i just want to see if there's anything else we can extract from yeah to help our viewers close their videos as well i'm very honest with them i think if you tell someone like one big truth you know i had a client he wanted a kitchen island and he says um hey what do you think about doing a wood kitchen island and i go i don't know it's probably not a very good idea and he's like huh and i'm like not the inside i go but we don't choose wood because the most practical we choose wood because it's what we want so do you want it and he's like yeah and he bought a fifteen thousand dollar kitchen island from me that sounds so if i would have said yes sir absolutely yes we'll do it for you yeah no problems like it's like oh god this guy is a little little needy so just just being real being honest you're having a conversation with with your buddy you know and people respond to that [Music] why don't we show our audience a little bit about your projects uh maybe this huge slab here sure you've mentioned it briefly where are you at in the process so far at this point sure so this one we're in the home stretch now it's been the epoxy's poured that's what you see here i've done my first round of touch-ups which is these shiny spots here filling it in there yeah so i just have some more touch-ups and then a lot of sanding and then the finish so i should be able to finish this in next week or two can you make a full-time living doing woodworking and what other sources of revenue can you have doing that as well i get this question a lot the answer is some people can you know i can i don't want to say that you know quit your job today and go start woodworking tomorrow and you're going to get rich right yeah you might not be good at it you might be way better than you know someone like me it's different for every person i have really leveraged social media you know things like instagram where you can post tools you have along with an affiliate link even early on as you know getting an extra thousand dollars a month and you know that could be a lot of money when you're just starting out for sure why do you think some creative businesses like this fail at times what would you say with your experience it'd be so hard for me to accurately say i'm sure it's different for everybody i've always been afraid of getting too big you know it's i could have easily taken on a dozen employees and been cranking out tables could i do that for the next 15 years i don't know and that would you know i think some people do that but no risk no reward so you know that's worth it to some people but for me i wanted to keep it small know it's sustainable for a long time [Music] how do you decide what something is worth i mean how do you price your product it's the old cliche of you know it's worth what someone will pay for it okay and be careful if you get on etsy because if you can get an etsy right now and i guarantee you can find one of my tables that somebody from serbia is saying that they can make for 1200 like they'll take my photos off my website oh wow all the time so you can't just compare apples to apples because you don't know what you're going to get with that so you can't say oh the market says 1200 that's what i should charge like i mentioned earlier it's a lot of the you know raising your prices and if people keep paying it you know maybe keep going and just see what the market dictates mm-hmm so there's no trick to it you just kind of i guess dance to the market and see see what it meant i do think there's a little something to not going too cheap you know if you're in this higher end custom furniture because people don't want the cheapest thing you know they might think that means lower quality even if you make great furniture for that lower price point so i do think you got to be leery of going too cheap but also realizing if you don't have a huge catalog and a large presence online people might not want to spend twenty thousand dollars when they haven't seen anything you built [Music] this is gorgeous curious where you got it what you intend to do with this sure this is old growth redwood this is beautiful it is beautiful and before people start firebombing the comments they did not cut down an old growth redwood tree for it did not disclaim it right yeah believe it or not these are this redwood and you can't even see it as well as you're going to be able to see but all this swirling grain is what makes it so pretty but the loggers didn't want this this made bad two by fours because they want straight grain so what they did is they lopped off these gnarly sections and left them so this log had sat for like a hundred years wow and now this company has come down in california and they're salvaging these and turning them into slabs that we can use for furniture what did you pay for it nothing wow and so this uh company reached out and said hey we want to get with you on a youtube video like you know what do you want and i'm like like anything and so that's so cool i get a lot of walnut and they have walnut but i was like i don't need wall and i've done a lot of that um so they showed me this and i'm like yeah i'm all in so this is about 4 500 slab whoa but this is gonna once this finish is going to hang up on the wall and just gonna be like a cool backdrop just for your own just for me [Music] where would be a good place to start to sell your first product too uh i tell everybody actually etsy does that really work i stay away from like facebook marketplace or craigslist but etsy does a really good job of getting i actually got in front of a designer that ordered my first five thousand dollar table from messi so that's a good place to start absolutely besides social media that you mentioned over and over yeah i mean you should still do everything but you got to put them for sale somewhere and you can sell them on instagram but it's i think an etsy shop is a totally legit place to start gotcha by the way let's circle back to what we mentioned earlier in the video you guys we mentioned an incredible hack that you've implemented and that you do so why don't you share that with our audience it's no big secret really but i think that if you can just show your mistakes if you show a big failure you know social media something like that and say like oh this didn't go right you know maybe something like that table that i messed up sharing that story with people it really resonates with people and makes them think wow maybe i can trust them with my project or my order because look what he did when something went wrong is that not the case with most i don't think i think most people are too afraid they feel like especially starting out that you lose credibility and you need to be an expert but people respect that you're human and make mistakes but will also know how to fix them you know it's a simple thing right but it's like it's a game i know it shouldn't be a hack but but i suppose i suppose it is now if enough people aren't doing it right in our industry okay what systems and software do you use to track orders and really anything else in your woodworking business is anything few enough orders these days that it's not super hard i do have a simple app that's just like a list you know of like this client and it's due by this date so i can glance you know a year ahead or eight months out and be like who's next and god when did i tell them i'd have this done by is it a specific app for woodworking or no it's i think it's like do exclamation point maybe it's like just in the app store i don't even know just something that works for you at this point yeah and then i have quickbooks and all that but um when we bought this house my wife uh got into my books who again she's a good business person and i'm not a traditional business person and she goes oh my god these are a disaster so she hired me a bookkeeper so i do quickbooks and all that but bookkeeper keeps it all straight [Music] is there ever a reason that someone should turn down an order oh absolutely yeah elaborate on it what do you mean if a client starts out difficult they're not going to get easier through the process especially you know maybe a 50 000 one and it doesn't dollars aren't related to it sometimes the cheapest customers are the ones that are the most frustrating a friend of mine just had this he told me how he was having just the worst time with this client long story short four months later he gets the job done and the guide says it's not good enough and this guy is in a way better woodworker than me he's incredible and susan for his deposit back he won't pay him so now my friend has to pay like legal fees and it's in california and it's all this stuff and he knew from the start because i knew this first conversation he had with this client just stay away from him but he was lured by that money [Music] we noticed that you have this makerspace database on your website yeah tell us a little bit about that and what benefit does it bring that could potentially be another business down the road but i use this big commercial shop because i can't have these huge industrial machines to go flat on the table and so i'm really fortunate because we have this amazing one for 75 for 30 minutes i can go use all their machines in my videos people always ask me they're like where do i find one like that in my town and finally i was like maybe there should be one website with all these spaces these maker spaces of tools for rent and i've actually it's no longer just on my website it's now its own website it's called makerbook.io okay check it out yes yeah makerbook.io and let's say you have a nice shop and you're a hobbyist but you want to generate some extra income or you're someone has zero tools like we talked about do you need a thousand dollars to start up maybe you don't have any money okay but you can go rent time in someone's shop you don't have any overhead you don't have any warehouse space or garage it's like renting an office suite basically for us a professional person by the hour you know you can go in and use these really really expensive tools for a small amount of money you know some places are 20 bucks an hour you know to use these tools there's no profits from it yeah you're just still building it's the beginning right now this is kind of giving back to all the everybody that needs it and if it makes money someday great but for now it's you know priority no it's just let's see if people want this and if they want it then everything else will come after that all right let's fly through some brief three questions blitz thank you guys for submitting questions cameron here's the first one from justin what were some of your downfall setbacks and how did you get over that challenge logistically it's hard flipping tables and moving them but every table is different you know sometimes i have to enlist help but just figuring a way out to logistically move these big tables okay justin also asked what steps did you take to grow your business when it wasn't where you wanted it to be my business got to where i wasn't expecting it to be faster than i thought so it kind of outgrew me so okay and last but not least from adam orbitz thank you for your question why did you leave being an ems helicopter pilot and was it worth it first absolutely was worth it a second is something i had to give i was not spending enough time being a pilot studying things like that i just wasn't gonna be safe so i had to pick one or the other okay awesome thank you guys for your questions where are most of your customers from just pacific northwest global and what are the logistics for shipping large items like what's the furthest ship i always tell people don't limit yourself to local you know they talk about should i go to my local home show and it's fine it's something but vast vast majority of mine are throughout the u.s and it's mostly lower 48 you know continental u.s okay that's the law the furthest i've shipped i have three tables going to italy um in like the next two months that i go that's my next project's up that's pretty cool so that's going to be uh it's going to be something so shipping wise tell us what process you're going to go through to make sure that item gets there in one piece instead of 100.
I use a freight broker for my domestic shipping which is a really good way to save money on shipping actually tell us more about that who who are they yeah it's called freight quote.com it's not an ad or anything but i shipped my first item through them went really well they contract with old dominion they contract through everybody but you pick who you want the next time i said i like old dominion i'll just call them directly and they gave me a quote for a thousand dollars to ship this item and i thought well maybe i'll go back to freight quote cause that seemed high my cost to ship with old dominion through freight quote was four hundred dollars what because they're they're they get the the bulk rate that's not cool they act like you know this broker they get like mass discounts you know to the little guy yeah so save me a ton of money that's awesome it's a good tip for you guys let's talk about going from hobby to an actual business how did that happen for you i i did it you know one piece at a time and i didn't really have a choice in the way i saw it from it just became a business it wasn't like i went and filed my llc paperwork and i just talked to a lawyer and i got my insurance i just started selling stuff and people kept buying it and i was like my wife is actually really good at business she runs her family's company it's a good sized company so she helped me through the way you know along the way of like hey what do i do here and other than that of just a little bit at a time and just kept getting bigger and bigger what was your first sale my first sale was a barn wood coffee table on etsy for three hundred dollars and i i was stoked you're stuck yeah celebrated pop that champagne bottle no i didn't sold quick i was like five six days and i'm like i'm look at this like i'm gonna be rich that's when your hobby turned into a business right i guess i guess so and i uh yeah it's come a little way since then it's awesome cam talk to us about your order process if i wanted to order custom furniture give me the a through z timeline estimate everything sure on my website i have a form submission and that kind of saves me a lot of phone calls and things initially so i can maybe direct them to someone else if it's not something that i'm ready to take on and any anymore i turn down a lot more orders than i accept that i accept i'm the problem to have yeah it's it's great it's good for the uh woodworking side of things but i want to make a amazing piece of furniture that's also an amazing video and i want to make kind of more exceptional stuff maybe even higher end that i'm at now so okay and so we just have a conversation through email or on the phone and just decide if it's a good fit awesome we'd love to hear from you guys on what you think cam should build comment below give us some unique ideas and i'm sure you'll be reading through some of those comments i'm in responding back to it awesome how long does it take for you to make a table and how many products do you go through a month i guess a couple questions of whether you know from inception from having that first conversation to delivering a table right versus how long i physically need to spend working on it once i get a slab home usually about six weeks but i give the clients about a year timeline whoa how come so long if it takes you six weeks to get it done i got other clients okay but so you set the expectation yeah from today's order date and that's another piece of advice i can give people is just under promise over deliver and that really uh resonates with people is you tell them hey it's gonna be eight months to a year and then four months later they're like oh yeah let's go people that order this they kind of get it you know it's stuff takes a while people that are good are in demand so honestly don't tell someone three weeks wow if if it really is three weeks tell them at least six weeks to you know 12 weeks well this has been incredible we love wrapping up our interviews by asking you a question on what is your favorite business book who's got time to read man i gotta i gotta run a business well that's true but it's important yeah uh i actually i actually really like tony robbins but uh audio books probably right any title come to mind uh what was it uh what's the you you bet you know it it's the money the come on help me out here uh one of the cameramen in the back he's got a tip of his tongue yeah well cam this has been incredible i trust our audience have enjoyed listening to you hearing your tips hacks and your story we appreciate it greatly anytime likewise i trust you guys enjoyed this incredible episode with cameron the owner of blacktail studio what an incredible guy knows what he's doing i trust you guys will execute on everything he shared with you we appreciate your support we love you a ton take a second to like subscribe and hit that bell so that you don't miss any of the up flip content as we do this for you thank you for watching