Custom Work Devalues You — Why Offering Custom Work Can Suck You Dry
Maybe you’ve been doing woodworking for years, or perhaps you just started and are excited and motivated because you were able to craft a work-of-art with your own two hands. To justify the time and money you invest into tools and lumber, you need to (and maybe want to) start selling some of your work. In this series, I share why “Custom” should be as far away from your model as possible, if you want to make any money and still enjoy your hobby.
This series is geared towards the 0–5 years of woodworking experience and for folks who do this as a hobby on the side, after work and after family obligations. It’s a pretty wide audience; but…even if you have a lot of experience, I encourage you to read and maybe you can draw some changes to your business.
The word “Custom” sounds great. It makes you appear like you’re specialized, premium, can offer more than the local furniture outlet. In some cases, you can build better, more customized pieces than the local outlet. But should you?
Custom work devalues your time, exponentially — Let’s play out what a custom job looks like. Usually a friend or family member will find out you can do some woodworking and they’ll tell you about the various projects they want done. Instead of you being able to create your work solely from your garage, you now have to go to the clients house. Your client will request you arrive right after dinner, so you’re likely leaving work early, or skipping your family dinner, or buying your own dinner at a fast food joint ($). You have to drive to them ($). You arrive, chat a few to be nice, then they show you where they want this piece, you take measurements while they explode their imagination all over you because they’ve envisioned this for years and are finally excited something is getting done. At this point, you’re stuck. There is no getting out of this. You’re there, they’re there, you’ve come all this way and you have someone who’s ready to put down a deposit, how can you say no? You might even find that you have to do some demolition even to start the project ($$). This is turning out to be a very involved project. It’s highly possible you and your client, will likely not have the same vision. They’ll ask for modifications along the way, they’ll text you images and point out a very subtle detail and ask if that can be added. Again, you’re relatively new at this, so it’s not like you have a truck with loads of tools and years of experience and can consider this is a “quick job”.
By the time you’ve completed your project, and add up every hour, every mile and every meal you purchased as a result, subtracting it from what you charged may result in a depressing reality that your hourly wage may be in the $5 range (or less). One of the risks in offering custom work is that this can drain you and cause you to lose interest.
On my next post, I’ll talk about how your work can suffer by doing custom jobs. If you like what you read, please follow me as I continue to write about things we care about!
