So You Want To Start A Firewood Business? By Hometown Acres
Considering starting a firewood business? Check out this blog where Adam from Hometown Acres shares several things to consider when starting a firewood business!
Do You Have a Market?
To learn how much firewood will cost in your area, I suggest going and checking out your local marketplace. Remember that the there is a degree of bartering involved, so do not expect that the price you see to be identical to the price that the seller gets.
After getting the price checked, collect your firewood to sell. Ensure that you have high quality firewood to make sure your customer is happy.
You can also check your price based on the duration of the post you listed. If you listed a quart of wood for $250 and it failed to sell over the weekend, it means that your price is too high. But if everything sold almost instantly, that means that your price is too low.
Who is Your Customer?
You also need to know what your firewood is for, and what is your niche? Are you selling for regular household use? Or are you going to sell a premium one in smaller packages like bundles, quarter cords or half cords?
Smaller packages are more sellable. I’m currently only selling bundles of wood. We may get back into selling cordwood in the future depending on how the production goes. However, we are charging a premium price for selling smaller quantities.
Where Will You Source Your Wood From?
When we first started the business, we bought a property with 44 acres and about 30 of those acres are wooded. So there is plenty of wood here to supply a firewood business. But I’ve found that it is very time-consuming to produce your own firewood.
We’ve started to supplement what we cut on the property by partnering up with a tree service company. We just spend 4 to 6 hours with the tree service and they will bring back two to four dump trailer loads of logs from trees they’ve worked on.
I found this to be a better use for my time and maybe you will find the same. But figuring where you are going to be sourcing your raw materials from is a big factor to think about.
What Kind of Capital do You Have to Invest in This Business Idea?
If you go right down to basics you can start a firewood business with nothing more than an ax and some trees. Or you can find a tree service to bring you wood that’s already cut up, then you can go ahead and split it with an ax and sell it.
That’s what I started doing when I very first started, the only problem with that is you leave a lot of the quality control to the person who’s blocking up the wood so what I would recommend then is upgrading to a chainsaw to handle that part yourself.
As the business grows and you increase the equipment list you gain more and more control over what the finished product looks like. So when you buy a chainsaw now you’ve got control over the length of your firewood, then once you buy a splitter instead of an ax, now you can place where that ax head is going to be going through the wood exactly where you want. Instead of freewheeling it with an ax.
Bottlenecks
You need to consider bottlenecks. We talked about where you are going to get your firewood from, which could easily be a bottleneck in production. That’s number 1.
How quickly are you going to be able to take your raw material and turn it into something you can sell is number 2. If you are just using an ax you have only invested $50 in the business but your bottleneck is going to be production, That’s number 3.
Additionally, firewood takes at least a year to season properly, so if you’ve got cherry or maple you can technically sell that within six months, but if you’ve got oak that can take around two years.
A good rule of thumb is to let your firewood season for at least 12 months before you sell it. All of those situations are bottlenecks that you need to consider before starting a firewood business.
How Long Will it Take You to Procure a Cord of Firewood?
When I first started and I was just using this Polaris ranger with a hydraulic splitter and a chainsaw.
I kind of figured it took me about seven hours to produce a cord of firewood from going back in the woods, cutting it, and bringing it back. Now that I’ve got the tractor, a faster chainsaw, and a commercial log splitter I think I’ve gotten that down to about four hours to produce a cord of firewood.
Probably two hours back there in the woods cutting, limbing, getting the wood out of from the trees I can split a cord an hour with that Easton-made ax and then I probably have about 45 minutes to an hour of stacking.
What Are Your Goals?
Are you going to do this full-time or just as a hobby and a side hustle? Because if you are going to do this full time, I recommend borrowing a little bit of money to get the business started. You need to produce firewood in a hurry.
I normally recommend growing the business organically. But if you wanted to do this full-time you need to get equipment to produce firewood faster or make the process easier.
You Can Never Have Enough Firewood
If you are planning to sell 20 cords, double it and make it 40. If you are planning 50 then double it to 100.
From my personal experience, I sell 1,015 cords of wood per year. I need to take down the ads/listing by October because of the very high demand for firewood.
According to Joe from Ohio Wood Burner, it is unacceptable to ever run out of firewood.
Usually, the drying time for firewood takes 6 to 18 months, depending on the species. One thing you can do to circumvent this is to buy a firewood kiln. But you need to sell a lot of firewood to afford a firewood kiln.
Process Flow
This is going to change over time especially if you have acquired a new piece of equipment, but it is always good to have an idea before you start.
If you enjoy cutting, splitting, and stacking firewood, then this is for you. But if you don’t I wouldn’t even consider building a firewood business.
If you are going to do this just to make money do not do it. You’ve got to enjoy firewood, and you’ve got to enjoy being outside to be able to survive this business. You need to love your work, and love what you do.
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