Woodworking - Selling Your Projects For Profit
By Ernie Sharpe

If you enjoy woodworking as much as I do than I know you get the same warm glow of pride when you have finished a project. There's nothing more pleasing that starting out with a raw piece of rough lumber and ending up with a beautiful project like a knick-knack shelf or bookcase.

There's another great feeling when you are a woodworker and that's when you decided to sell your products at a local craft store or craft show. The feeling of pride and accomplishment that runs through your body when you make your first sale. Nothing can be better. It's amazing how humble we all get when a customer takes our product to the register to buy that shelf we put in our booth just yesterday. What a feeling of fulfillment.

Of course on the flip side we now realize we are not just making a project from that beautiful piece of walnut we love so much. Now we have to watch what we spend on the lumber. The market will only pay so much for a shelf or a small bookcase. Competition is tough out there and we have to be competitive if we are going to continue to be in business. Also we now have to make multiple pieces of the same product so we have plenty of stock. It's unbelievable how much stock it takes to fill a booth for the craft show.

It takes some capital so that you can buy in bulk in order to get the best price. Your workshop has to be organized so that you have room to store the bulk lumber. You need to figure out a way to uniformly finish your products so they all look approximately the same when finished. It's almost like you need a time and motion study done to make sure you're not wasting time and energy.

Now to make things harder you have to spend a few hours a couple of days per week making sure your booth is properly stock and displayed well. You also have to keep bookkeeping records for purposes of income tax, Oh what a difference this is from just making one piece at a time for your home. This also is the time when you must make sure you have plenty of wood project designs with diagrams, drawings and instructions so you don't make a mistake in building your products. There no time allowed in your budget for error. Even though you may be working on a high profit percentage if the item you're selling goes for around $15.00 the dollar profit isn't that high on any one sale. That's where volume comes in but in order to get the volume up you need more finished product stock. Its like a big circle. The you make the more you have to sell, the more you sell the more you have to make... and there you have it the circle is complete.

About the Author:

My name is Ernie Sharpe and if are new to woodworking and would like to get some basic knowledge then I invite you to visit my lens on woodworking secrets. I'm sure you will enjoy it very much. If you are looking for plan and design packages that you can download to your computer then I invite you to visit my site: http://www.woodworkinginretirement.info