Brent Jarvis: Clean Cut Woodworking

January 20, 2022

Brent Jarvis: Clean Cut Woodworking

Welcome back to a brand new episode of the Woodpreneur Podcast. Today, your host Steve sits down with Brent Jarvis of Clean Cut Woodworking. Unlike most of the other guests on the podcast, Brent is a manufacturing company, not solely a woodworker.

Brent is located in New Orleans, Louisiana, where woodworkers are a bit of a rare breed. Despite, or perhaps because of that fact, Brent really enjoys working and selling his products in the region.

“It all started about seven or eight years ago, something like that. My daughter said she wanted a bed for Christmas. I built her a bed with a jigsaw and our palm sander basically, so that was where the woodworking pretty much started. I got the bug and went from there. I did custom orders for about two years just building a shop, getting tools, doing that. Then I thought, hey, I can make some money off of this.”

Brent Jarvis

Starting Manufacturing

Before his woodworking business took off, Brent’s main job was at an oil refinery. The peculiar hours he would work, flipping from days to nights and nights to days, meant that he had the opportunity to develop his side business.

After handling custom orders for a while, he came across an order where he needed a router sled to complete it, so he went ahead and built one. While his impromptu sled got the job done, he hated it and thought there must be a better way.

“I said, there’s got to be a better way. I know we’re going to be using these things a little more often, so I started looking around. I went out and bought about $3,000 worth of different materials to try to prototype something.

Before that, I purchased the woodpeckers one. Before that, I’d purchased the TOT one and other big names on the market, and I hated them, couldn’t stand them. So I returned them and took everything I hated about them, all the knowledge that I gained from purchasing those and not liking them, and created my own.”

Brent Jarvis

Brent’s invention was created out of necessity, he didn’t like what was available, and he figured he could make his own router sled, so he went out and did so. After about six months of R&D, he made a post in a woodworking Facebook group about his new product, and his DMs instantly exploded with people interested in purchasing their own.

Steve’s Advice Corner

“It’s kind of funny because I was thinking about this last night after you actually reached out. I tried to narrow this down, and it’s crazy because it’s all over the place. Boiling it down to your actual question itself, I’d have to say where I’m at right now, without going forward with an actual e-commerce website, is an email list.

I’ve got over 600 customers’ worth of emails right now, and I’ve just finished up final prototyping on the dust collection for this router slide. That was the number one thing that I needed to get done because it just made a mess, and people couldn’t do it with their doors closed or in their basements.

I’m expecting by February 1, I’ll have the dust collection in full production, like that inventory in my hand and ready to be sold because right now, it’s being manufactured. So how do I get the word out to these people besides just social media?”

Brent Jarvis

Handling customer management is one of the most common challenges facing growing businesses in the wood industry and outside of it alike. Fortunately, Steve has a tremendous amount of experience handling this kind of problem.

“I will give you two strategies. The first one is to get every one of them into an email list, load them into a CRM or a mailing list software, and send them an email blast, but I would schedule them to go out monthly. The best thing about Clean Cut Woodworking and your tools is that it’s you. You have an unfair and competitive advantage that people can literally reach out to the person making their stuff.

The other thing I would do is I would create a Facebook group, just for your customers, and allow them to communicate and bond with each other. You can pop in once a week, and you can tell them what you’re doing and what you have. Then you have the opportunity to create a custom audience out of your own people.”