On Fri, 03 Jun 2005 14:34:02 GMT, "Mike in Mystic"
wrote:



I don't know anything about Tom Watson's business model, but if you ever
looked at his website and the things he made when he was a pro
cabinetmaker - I bet you will get an idea of how that kind of business
works. And then look at Tom Plamann. 'Nuf said.

Sucks that it isn't just about being really skilled at making furniture, but
alas.

Mike


I was only able to make nice stuff because I lived in an area with a
lot of wealthy people in it. The Main Line area contains several of
the richest zip codes in the country.

For the last fifteen years that I was in business I never worked in a
house that was worth less than a million dollars and most of them were
in the three to seven million range.

The work you can do is driven by the market that is available to you.

My business model, if you could call it such, was simple.

I wanted to do all the work, including marketing, designing, selling
and producing. I wanted to have a life that didn't take a lot of
money to run. I didn't want employees.

The marketing was done by getting to know which builders and
architects were involved in my target market. A letter of inquiry,
followed by a visit with portfolio in hand was the next step. Most
cautious builders and architects will try you out on a smallish
project, which I would discount until I was running close to cost.

Once you're in, if you are a one man shop, you have to find a way to
handle all the work that a busy design/build firm can throw at you.
If you can't they'll start looking for someone else.

Since I wanted to be a hands on sole proprietor, this problem could
get dicey.

Eventually, I found that I was better off not trying to handle all the
needs of a company and started to solicit only special projects,
allowing a lot of the bread and butter work to go to others.

Towards the end I was only doing word of mouth work for individual
homeowners - because that was all that I could handle.

Had I been interested in growing a business, this would have been
insane, but that isn't what I wanted.

I knew too many guys who had started out as good mechanics and wound
up growing a business monster that needed constant feeding. They
spent too much of their time trying to feed the monster.

The design work started out as a necessary chore but became one of my
favorite parts of the business. I learned it on the fly by stealing
bits and pieces of the good drawings that I would get from architects
and designers. Later I spent a good deal of time reading and studying
designs from the classical era on.

My area has a lot of people who want a very traditional look in their
homes. On the other end of the scale are those who want only modern
stuff. I happened to get typecast as one of the traditional guys,
which was partly a result of the market and partly that of personal
temperament. It is almost always the case that a shop will get known
for a particular kind of work and this becomes their niche.

When you have a niche and the beginnings of a repeating client base,
you are really in business.

When I would begin to get a little bored with another run of base
units and bookcases, with the same details as the last few projects, I
would try to find a job where the customer would let me play a little
bit.

I did a lot of design drawing that went into overhead but wound up
paying off in sales. Sometimes I would like the design so much that I
would sharpen my pencil enough to get the price to where the customer
would have been crazy not to take the deal.

Oddly enough, these jobs often wound up being very profitable because
they would lead to additional work - at better margins.

I don't know what to say about selling. I often thought that
customers felt comfortable with me because we had similar educational
and cultural backgrounds. I think a lot of them thought of me as a
charming anachronism - a hippie carpenter who never went corporate.

On the production side, I wanted to take everything from rough lumber
to finish and installation. Eventually I made certain compromises and
would buy out prefinished doors, drawer fronts and door boxes, if the
time demands were too great. When I realized how I was being taken
away from my vision of what I wanted to do, I slowed down and started
making it all myself again.

Once I turned fifty I started to have a number of physical problems
with things like bad knees, a chancy back and a good bit of arthritis
here and there.

I knew that I had to back off on the work load and was gearing up to
turn the business into a pure one off furniture shop, with a mix of
items that would be built on spec, mixed in with commissioned work.
I was hoping to do a fifty fifty split between the two, with an idea
of growing the spec business to a point where I was well enough known
that I could increase my margins and reduce my hours on the shop
floor.

A visit to the doctor, who said that I was looking at twin knee
replacements within a short time, if I didn't get off my feet,
convinced me to get off the shop floor.

Most guys that I know who have small shops work about sixty to seventy
five hours a week. About fifty or sixty of that is spent on the shop
floor.

Now I spend about forty to fifty hours a week, mostly at a computer,
or dealing with client contact, with some visits to the production
facilities to see how things are going. I have better health
benefits, a better retirement program and make more money than I did
in most years of running the shop.

Had I decided to make my one man shop into an actual business, I would
have had to mortgage the house, move out of the 1200 sq footer that
I'm in, into larger quarters, buy different equipment, hire people (a
very difficult problem), and spend all of my waking hours running a
business.

I decided to go help run a little piece of someone else's business.

The cool thing is that I get to make whatever the hell I want now - as
soon as I finish the exterior trim on the house, the painting, the new
fence, refinish the hardwood floors, plumb the new bathroom, etc. -
which I never had time to do when I was working for myself.

As JOAT often remarks, "Life is basically good."

If you want to work with your hands, as I did - I think that's great -
but remember that you will age and that you might not always be able
to do what is easy for you to do today.

If you are any good, it is actually pretty easy to grow a business -
what is hard is not having it grow to overtake your whole life.


Tom Watson - WoodDorker
tjwatson1ATcomcastDOTnet (email)
http://home.comcast.net/~tjwatson1/ (website)