There are countless numbers of people who consider opening their own woodworking businesses daily, but there is only a tiny number of people who actually do it, and only one third of those will be successful.

So how do you know if you should make the leap and leave your job and go it alone.

What It Takes To Run Your Own Woodworking Business

• Do you really want to go pro or are you just a dreamer, because a failed dream hurts a lot more than getting up and going to a job every day.
• When you go pro, woodworking changes.  Right now, it's a pleasant and rewarding hobby, but it will become your job.  Now, you dream about getting out of the office and going home to your workshop.  A professional woodworker dreams about getting out of the shop at the end of the day and pursuing his or her hobby.  It's just like eating chocolate, when its all you eat, you end up yearning for vegetables. 
• Once you work for yourself, there are no deadlines, no one is making you work, no one is keeping an eye on you.  You must have the drive and gumption to make yourself work.
• How will you fight off the temptations - meeting up with friends for an afternoon coffee, having family and friends thinking they can pop around whenever they like for a chat.  If you aren't working, you aren't earning.
• Forget about benefits.  There is no holiday pay, no sick pay, and depending on which government is in power you may not even be entitled to a government pension and unemployment benefits.  You have to look after your health, if you need to get back to work quickly after an accident you may want to look at private medical care.  When there is a pandemic, you may even have to restrict how many people you see to protect your income.  You will also have to work a lot harder to maintain a healthy pot of savings for hard times, because they will happen.
• When you first start out there are no other departments to take some of the work away from you.  You will have to design a website, participate in social media, advertise, buy all the tools and materials yourself, sort out your accounts and submit them to HMRC on time.  You'll also have to look after your own IT and the maintenance of any equipment.  You'll end up spending a lot more time doing stuff you don't like until you can pay someone else to do it.  The likelihood is the first things you will want to invest in is machinery, that can increase your production line to bring in more money, before you even start looking at employing people or outsourcing to agencies to do your admin and marketing.
• If you are serious about doing this, forget about work life balance and retirement.  Get into the mind set you get one life and it's a mix of doing lots of stuff.  When you are the boss, you can build a business that allows you to do all the things that traditionally you might have had to wait until retirement to do, do them now while you are young enough and have the money to do it.  You are also no longer stuck in an office for a set amount of time five days a week, and you are no longer restricted to a two week holiday when it's suits your bosses schedule.  Working for yourself gives you a sense of freedom, that working for someone else never gives you. 
• Measure your success by how happy you are instead of how much money you have.  Self employment can be very satisfying and make you very happy, even if it doesn't make you rich, simply because you get to do something you love and make money from it.
• It's going to be hard work, harder than you'll ever experience as an employee.
• You only ever need a business plan if you are going to ask a bank or other investor for money.  Otherwise write down what you are good at and what you aren't so good at, what training you need or where you are going to need help.  Write down a list of things you need to do and when they need to be done by.  This list should change and evolve over time, it's better to have it down on paper, then to have it rattling around in your head distracting you.
• And finally are you the best at what you do.  It takes around 5 years to master a new skill.  To get ahead you'll need to stand out, there is no point copying what every one else is doing.
• Do you have something that will change the market (market interrupter)?
• There is no time like the present - just do it and start making money from something you truly love doing

Allwood has lots of options to help someone who is setting up shop for the first time, from second hand equipment to finance options to buying new highly productive machinery like presses, glue spreaders, brushing machines and guillotines.  And once you are set up with can service the machines for you to keep them in good working order.

We can give you lots of advice, and design and create a machine that will be perfect for your production line and will last a life time.