Why You Should Pick A Niche In Your Woodworking Business Or Handmade Business By Zach Vaught
Why Niche Down?
As a woodworker, we have something in mind for all the things and skills that we know we can do, because yeah we can really build anything that we wanted to. Our tendency as a woodworker is to let everyone know that we know and we are capable of doing this and that. All of the woodworkers out there do this when starting. But why do you think we need to niche down?
A Niche Develops your Skills
There are woodworkers who are known to do everything that a customer wants, whether it is a table, chair, or cabinets, and they are charging a premium. But there is also a type of woodworker that specializes in only one skill for example building a nice table, and customers go to that woodworker because he specializes in table building. So having a niche allows you to develop a name around you. People will know your brand as a table business.
Niches Systemize your business
The biggest problem that a lot of woodworkers have is growing their business in the wrong way. They might be doing five to ten completely different types of projects and taking custom work on top of that. By doing so they cannot create a system. Every single project you have seems like creating it for the first time. Wrong estimation of work time, underestimate the material cost, and so on.
When you learn something and you do it over and over again, it allows you to eliminate the learning curve. Because you already know what you are doing you can easily finish projects. Furniture or woodworking businesses cannot grow because they never do enough of one thing to systemize it. You need a system in order to grow. You cannot grow if you are always doing random things. You need to do something that you can repeat over and over again.
You can have a standard product then you can create variations, and you can customize the length, the width, the color, and the wood options. This allows you to create a system around building that product and then once you have the system you can start to scale and grow those products.
Niches Scale your Business
If you want to grow you need to remember this; you cannot grow without systems and you cannot systemize without consistent products. For those woodworkers that are doing a little bit of everything. What allows you to niche down is to look for the most profitable and easiest products to sell. With the combination of those two things, it will be easier to find customers and you can justify to your customers the premium price of your products.
Give your customers the freedom to choose, give them options but do not let them just do anything and everything they want sometimes we can allow them but most of the time we can’t.
IG: @zachvaught_