Austin Keenan: Keenan Slabworks

 

Welcome back to a brand new episode of the Woodpreneur Podcast. Today, your host Steve sits down with Austin Keenan of Keenan Slabworks. Austin started his company back in February of 2017 with his father who had been looking to retire from his job as an attorney and had always enjoyed dabbling in woodworking.

 

Originally, the project was only supposed to be a hobby, it was never supposed to grow into a business. However, they started to get paid to mill for people, dry their wood, or build things for them, which turned that plan around. When they were hired to do their first log removal, which was a large black walnut from a nearby town, they realized that they did not have the equipment needed to do any urban log removals.

 

“We didn’t even have a mill. We were renting a chainsaw from a rental facility nearby and trying to hack our way through some of these logs. Getting started, we had no idea the differences in chainsaw chains or anything so we kind of butchered a couple of the initial first logs.”

 

• Austin Keenan

 

From Hobby to Wood Company and Passion

 

Since Austin and his father jumped into woodworking intending for it to be a hobby, they ended up doing some things inefficiently early on, but their enthusiasm for the process and learning new things kept the excitement going strong. One realization that hit the pair quickly was the need for a bandsaw mill, and after researching many different options they purchased one, which fulfilled their desire to learn new skills.

 

The bandsaw mill ended up becoming part of the attraction for their business early on. People would come by because they had never seen a bandsaw mill before and they wanted to try to use it. Austin and his father happily demonstrated by tossing a log on the mill to showcase what it could do, and then people started asking to buy material from the pair of them for their own projects.

 

Though Austin had no intention of developing it into a business, he thought it was a really cool project and his friends thought so as well. Whenever he would post photos to his personal Facebook account of a project they worked on, it would get a lot of interest, and one of his customers ended up providing Austin with advice that wound up turning his hobby into the business it is today.

 

“I was speaking with a customer, he was a woodturner and he said, “Hey, you should try selling some of your slabs on Facebook marketplace.” At the time, I had no idea what that was and I didn’t know how to use it. So of course it was something new to learn, and we made a listing. We milled 60 or 70, black walnut slabs and put them on Facebook Marketplace, and those got 20,000 views in less than a day.

 

I realized that this is incredible! This is free marketing right here. I was getting messages sent to me like every three to five minutes, I had to put my phone on silent when I went to bed at night and I woke up and I had like 100 messages that I had to respond to. All from this tool that I didn’t even know existed.”

• Austin Keenan

 

 

Building a Business from Scratch

 

Though their business started out as a sawmilling hobby, Austin and his father began to add more and more services to Keenan Slabworks over the years. They do everything from removing a log once it’s been felled from somebody’s property, to milling it, to drying it in their vacuum kiln, to getting it planed down flat through a nearby furniture manufacturer.

 

Once that process is finished, they offer finishing services as well, building tables, bar tops, or any other sort of flat surface for their customers. Around 10 or 15 years ago Austin learned how to weld, and they can incorporate steel bases for customers as well and recently they have been getting into epoxy as they have been getting more and more requests for river tables in recent years.

 

Austin notes that there wasn’t a definite lightbulb moment that made the business real for him, it was just something he always wanted to do. He got to the point where he would wake up in the morning thinking about what he was going to mill that day, or the projects he would need to work on.

 

“I realized that I wanted to do this more than any other work I’d done in the past, teaching, selling cars, paralegal office work, this is what I wanted to do. I spoke with my dad about it and I said, “Hey, look, I want to do this full time.” And he was on board with it.”

• Austin Keenan

 

 

A Bright Future Ahead

 

With all of the progress that Austin and his father have made with Keenan Slabworks in the few years that they have been in business, they have no intention of slowing down, and the next major change for the pair is going to be the creation of a designated building.

 

He explains that they are planning a space that will have a dirty room for handling sanding, prep work and other messy parts of their projects, a clean room for epoxy pouring and finishing work, and a metalworking space for their steel table bases.

 

They also intend to put in a retail area that will allow them to show off the work that they create for people to really understand what it is they do, and a storage space for dried and finished slabs for customers that don’t want Austin and his father to do the finishing work for them.

 

 

Steve’s Advice Corner

 

When it comes to specific advice for Keenan Slabworks, Austin explains that the biggest challenge they are experiencing right now is refining and streamlining their social media content. He recognizes that he needs to hone and develop those skills to introduce more people to their business which will allow them to sell more products and services to people, but he needs advice on how to go about that.

 

Steve explains that a big part is to show different parts of the business through different highlights on each platform. He advises Austin to use Instagram as the place for finished products, for example, but his Facebook could instead focus on their slabs for sale. He goes on to note the importance of filming content in the moment, and then editing it afterwards.

 

“Treat your Instagram story like a TV show. Get on and everyday record and see if you can record it natively on your phone. Record it on your phone in one-minute increments and then upload it later. Don’t just hit record in Instagram stories, because once you have it on your phone you can just go back and edit it later.”

• Steve Larosiliere

 

Website: https://keenanslabworks.com

Instagram: @keenanslabworks