Importance Of Effective Marketing Strategies For A Wood Marketing Company
Steve Larosiliere
April 24, 2024
Steve Larosiliere
“You talk to some people that are very sure of themselves, or they come off as very sure of themselves and where they want to be. I think it’s okay to be 35-36 and you’re like, I like where I’m at, but I’m still trying to figure out where I want to go with it, or what I want to be.”
Welcome back to Building a Furniture Brand with Ethan Abramson, the show that talks about the business behind the furniture business. In this episode, Ethan sits down with Stephen Michutka, owner of the Lumberton, Texas-based furniture company, The Wood Pastor.
Stephen’s business is a one-person shop, and he has no intention to change that, not because he can’t expand, but because he can afford to turn a large amount of business away. His goal is not to expand his business because he wants to build a lifestyle company that covers his bills and allows him to spend ample time with his family. While he may one day decide to expand, he is comfortable where he is right now and is in no rush to change that.
Like many other furniture makers, Stephen started by constructing something he needed. Originally an elementary school teacher, he wanted to make a loft bed for his son and had several friends help him during and after that process. He notes that he struggled with finishing the loft bed, and a friend suggested that he should use plans to make things a bit easier.
The next bed that Stephen built was a bed for himself and as he was still teaching at the time, and could use some extra income he started building a bunch of twin beds and selling them for a low profit.
Even back then he took the profit and put it back into his growing company, he recalls he just started buying tools. Then, because using plans had worked so well, he started looking at other things that he wanted to build for the house.
He started working on a dining room table, coffee tables, and essentially a bunch of different types of tables because he grew tired of making beds pretty quickly. From there, it’s just been all kinds of furniture and even cabinetry as of a few years ago.
That story is very recognizable for a lot of people listening, where they started their furniture journey out of building something for themselves. Either they had the skills before but they had never really put it to work in building something, or they had the idea and the dream to build something so they built the first one, then built the second one and they never looked back.
However, a lot of people don’t take those initial builds and turn them into a company or into a business and think “I could support myself and make money on this.” So they keep it as a hobby.
Ethan wonders what gave Stephan that push to turn it into a fully realized company.
Stephen said it took a push from a few people and he was really worried that he needed more experience to call himself a business or a woodworker. It took several people saying he could do it and even then, Stephen had to get out of his head with the initial thought of “I need to be this ultra-fine woodworker.” because there are all different kinds of woodworkers.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be that. I’m not against that at all. It’s just not my style. If I ever went that route, it would probably be just for me, you know what I mean? But I think it was really just taking myself seriously and knowing I don’t need to be perfect to start this. It’s going to be a learning process anyway. I don’t even know when the perfect time would have been for me to start.”
Stephen talks about how he had a lot of preconceived ideas about what he thought he needed to be taken seriously as a woodworker but waiting another 30 years of his life to have the right size of shop or all the right equipment didn’t really make any sense. Also, he realizes if he had waited, he would have been behind on skill and technique.
“I was growing my skills, and then I was adding on other things. As I said, I started with beds and tables, and I did those for a while. As I made more money my confidence grew, and then I got more clients.
I kind of started adding things to the list of either what I wanted to build, or what a lot of people were asking for. I eventually left education and went to work in a cabinet shop for a year, and that’s what got me into making cabinets.
That ultimately, is what helped me go full-time, just having an arsenal of furniture, cutting boards, and cabinetry.”
As Ethan says, discussing when it is the right time to jump in is a big thing that we talk about on this show, with a lot of people. Ultimately, it is a sliding scale for a lot of people. Sometimes it’s having money in the bank, sometimes it’s the fear of leaving a corporate job, sometimes it’s not having the skills and thinking that you need to keep building your skills to jump in, and it’s a starting line that keeps moving and you keep chasing it.
Sometimes it’s smart to hold off and not jump in straight away to owning a business yourself. But sometimes it’s not smart. Sometimes you can talk yourself out of it each and every time and then you just never get off the ground.
So that is a big part of running a business, the confidence to know that you can make it and the confidence to boost yourself when you have finally made that decision.
Stephen discusses how he and his wife are on a mission to be debt-free, so at the moment he is working out of his garage, and while he would like a bigger shop it isn’t an extremely high priority right now. There is a part of Stephen that thinks some help with the business side or even an extra pair of hands in the shop could help out in the long-term but it isn’t a high priority currently.
“It sounds like a cop-out, I honestly don’t want to grow. I feel like I want to maintain what I have. I’m okay with doing what I’m doing right now until I figure out where I want to go with it.
I think that’s where I’m at. I’m not 100% sure where I want to go with it, and I don’t want to commit a lot of money and time to” Hey, let’s see where this goes.” because I am happy with where it’s at right now. It doesn’t cost a lot for me to operate, which means I get to keep a lot of money. I get to spend a lot more time with my family.”
Being happy is a big part of the day, a big part of life choices, and a big part of why people get up in the morning. It’s funny because a lot of people probably have a knee-jerk reaction wondering why wouldn’t Stephen want to grow bigger?
The thing that people need to realize is that it doesn’t cost Stephen anything more to keep furniture stored in his house or to have the shop in his house. If he can function out of that, then that’s perfectly fine. Then there isn’t the $1000’s of dollars in rent going down the drain every month for having a bigger shop.
Scaling is great, but where does it leave you? It leaves you having to grow the number of clients you’re taking on, increase the number of projects you’re taking on, just to meet your expenses. So sometimes, you’re working harder and making less money. It really depends on how you want to scale your business and where you want it to go.
Stephen talks about how with his shop space one of the easier items for him to make are cutting boards. He doesn’t batch them as he tried that once and then found himself sitting on inventory longer than he wanted to, but the introduction of his CNC machine has changed some things.
“I think the fact that I can personalize stuff with the CNC has helped me on the cutting boards. It’s not even like I started pushing or marketing cutting boards harder. I’ll do one, and then people are like, “Can you put my name on it?”, “Can you put a scripture on the back?”
It’s been a huge asset. Not just because it makes things easier in the shop, it’s because it’s just one of those tools that is just really helpful.”
The idea of personalizing actual pieces of furniture is one thing, but going bigger than that, the idea of personalizing your brand is so incredibly important when you are a smaller operation.
People don’t go to mass market furniture stores because they know the person who owns it. They go because it’s there, or because they see an advertisement. But for a smaller shop, a one-person shop, you are the face of it, you are the brand.
Being out there as yourself is a big, big part of what the clients are seeing. Stephen and Ethan talk about the visibility and social media side of owning a small business and Stephen shares a bit about his experiences growing his brand and social presence.
It used to be that people didn’t expect you to have a website. Then as time moved on, people did expect you to have a website, and that’s where they would find you. Then people moved past the website. Now if you don’t have a social media presence, then people are like “Where are we going to find you?” And, and so on and so on.
While this is mostly for specific types of makers and furniture shops, it is something that is at least somewhat expected now to be in the modern furniture business.
It just keeps building. And yes, this is for a specific type of furniture maker furniture shop, because not all people are looking to go that route. But some people are and that’s what you have to do now to be in the modern furniture business.
There are multiple ways for somebody to approach social media and there’s strictly the business side as strictly a portfolio of their work. The other side is where you bring the personality into it.
It’s really about bringing a community around you, and whether that is in your personal life, in your local area, through the internet, or through social media, it’s about surrounding yourself with good people to keep yourself afloat when things are good, and when things are bad.
To see more from Stephen, check out the links below!
Instagram: @thewoodpastor
YouTube: The Wood Pastor
This episode is brought to you by Jobber – getjobber.com/ethan
