If you've been a long-time viewer of our videos...you've probably heard this a few times! Every single week it's, "Maybe one day we'll expand beyond the garage..." But when?! When will you finally do it?! Uhh....technically this past week, I guess. It might not be a commercial space yet, but we're one small step closer to our "big goals" (or "pickles" for some of you out there lol) Let's start at the beginning. Why did we feel like it was time to "expand beyond the garage?".

So, you've officially decided to start making money with your hobby. That's a big, exciting step!! You want to find a ton of customers who love what you do and keep coming back for more. But how do you do that? How do you find customers that appreciate your work and are willing to pay for the time you've spent mastering your craft? What traits do those kinds of customers have? Being able to tell if a stranger will make a good customer is a skill that takes A LOT of practice.

Over the past couple of weeks we've been selling quite a few cutting boards to Realtors as closing gifts...more boards than we had in our inventory, actually! So it was time to re-stock! Easy enough, right? Apparently not... You've probably watched some of our past videos where we batched out a ton of boards (if not, check them out!) and it was a fairly seamless process. We have an entire checklist written up of how to buy, mill, cut, glue, sand, and finish the wood for the b

So as most of you probably know, our business plan here in Houston is to sell closing gifts to Realtors who will deliver our packaging and advertisements to a homeowner with a big, new, empty house. That homeowner will then see our marketing and know that we build quality furniture! Our problem is, we only have 1 piece of furniture up on our website right now for them to buy (a farmhouse coffee table) so we decided to remedy the problem... Since so many people are still worki

We get a ton of questions on both Instagram and YouTube about sales: "What products should I sell? How much should I charge for my cutting boards? How do I find people to sell my work to?" The majority of these questions come from people who have been woodworking for years (even decades, sometimes!) and have now decided to turn their hobby into a business. BUT - we've noticed that a lot of these SAME questions come from young people, too!! High schoolers taking shop class are

As usual, we had quite a bit going on this week. We were following up with some Realtors and a couple other potential clients. We also started building the furniture set we talked about in our last posts and live streams! But the most important thing we did this week was our very first meeting with an entire Realty office! Following up with a potential client (like these Realtors we've been sending boards to) is such a funny process sometimes.... We have our initial interacti

That's the lesson we learned this week! When you start a business - the things required of you are not always written out super clearly and there is no manual or handbook teaching you how to operate. Sometimes you just have to anticipate roadblocks and be okay with being PATIENT. It's not supposed to be easy. This week our patience took the form of dealing with the bank.. So before we get into story time, let's run through a quick recap of our week - because not EVERYTHING ab

In our last post and video, we talked about how we just got back from 2 weeks of flying Atmospheric Rivers with the Air Force out in Reno, NV. We made a few sales while we were gone during that time, but we still had a couple more sales to lock down and finish up once we got back! One of our sales was a work from home desk that we delivered right after we got back and the other sale was supposed to be just a single coffee table! BUT - it turned into an entire living room full

So we just got back from a 2-week research mission with the Air Force. If you read our last blog post, we just had a record-breaking winter storm pass through Houston leaving a lot of us without power and water....and right after all that happened...we had to pack up and leave to go fly for our Air Force jobs! Not many people know this, but we don't JUST fly through hurricanes! For the last 2 weeks we were flying through Atmospheric Rivers over the Pacific ocean. An Atmospher

This week we're sharing what we consider to be our most valuable sales strategy! The best part is...it's also one of the easiest - literally anyone can do it!! We utilized this tactic while building and assembling a St. Patrick's Day charcuterie board as part of the #makeyourownparade campaign. This campaign (and video below) is sponsored by Carhartt - who teamed up with Guinness this year to make some pretty sweet St. Patrick's Day gear. Since St. Patrick's Day is probably g

There are a ton of YouTube videos on the internet teaching you some awesome ways to use your scrap wood. You can make small projects, gifts, or maybe even some shop furniture with leftover cutoffs from bigger builds. That's not what we used ours for this week.... You probably won't find any YouTube videos on how we utilized ours....lol Because we burned all of it in our fireplace to keep us warm after a MASSIVE winter storm rolled through Houston and took out our power and wa

We had a lot to do this week - ranging from sales calls to building a desk and engraving boards! Not to mention that we had to take a trip to our Air Force unit to knock out some work there. All of a sudden our 7 day week turned into 3 1/2 days in the blink of an eye! So how did we handle it?! Obviously all of the work still had to get done...for both our Air Force jobs AND our business. There's always a way if you're open to change... Our solution was to start splitting up j

Well, our furniture business has officially been open for about a month now. So how'd it go?? What'd we do? How much money did we make?! All fantastic questions. Let's take a deep dive into our first 30 days of builds, accomplishments, and sales. The first thing we did this month was take you guys on a shop tour. We hadn't done on in kind of a while, so we figured we'd show all of our big changes - we had a few pretty significant ones. If you didn't get a chance to see that v

We got a couple of little shop projects done this past week to make our building processes go a little smoother, but the most EXCITING part about this week was that we started selling! It's what we've wanted to start doing since we left North Dakota. It's the whole reason we did all of this work over the past year getting our prototypes and marketing done properly. We are so excited to be officially "open for business" and ready to start taking cutting board orders from realt

First off – it’s the morning before we leave for WorkbenchCon 2020!! Wooo! In 10 hours we’ll be on the road to Atlanta to meet some awesome new people and hang out with those we met last year. If that’s any of you reading this – we’re stoked to see you! Seriously – I’m chugging this coffee in preparation. If you’ve been following along with our 100 Serving Board series, you know that so far we’ve built 100 serving board/charcuterie boards to sell to realtors as closing gifts.

So here we are…in a new city (a HUGE city)…with our shop all set up and ready to go…but we know NOBODY! This may sound a bit scary or sketchy or intimidating, but it’s the reality of the situation. So where do we go from here? We need to find clients who have the potential to lead to more clients and who have good connections within the community. If you remember the post we did on our Modern Sliding Barn Door, we talked about that EXACT person…realtors!! So, logically, that’