How We Started Our Woodworking Business
We are telling the story of how we started our woodworking business. First, we need to give you all a bit of a background into how we developed a passion for making starting with our childhood.
Growing Up
Dylan Growing up, my dad taught me how to use basic tools primarily because I was always observing everything he did. He can build pretty much anything and always did projects around the house. I loved making things and early on would help him with any project going on. He was always doing some kind of side job for extra money and that example is probably what sparked my entrepreneurial mindset. He never really built furniture, It was mostly decks, fences, and other construction type jobs, but it built the foundation for me to learn from.
Molly I grew up not being exposed to tools or making at all. My dad was a restaurant manager and eventually, an owner, and my mom was a stay at home mom. My primary focus as a kid was mostly sports and pretty much played any sport you can think of. Soccer is what I ended up enjoying the most and played up until the end of high-school. This is how I developed a disciplined nature, I guess you could say. Molly is really good at creating a plan and sticking to it… I am more of the jump around to 1000 things person. In business, the combination has been really useful.
High School & Middle School
Dylan I hated school. I was an outcast for the majority of school as the skater kid. I never found the purpose or value in school and the majority of the time I felt like my time was being wasted. I actually found more joy in finding ways to not do things than to do them, and often times spent more time doing that than if I would’ve done the work. I wasn’t about to do “busy work” while my history football coach sat in his desk and played on his phone. I hated it. During this time I was really into electronics and spent the majority of my time building portable gaming consoles, computers, and learning to code. I also was playing a ton of Call of Duty and Minecraft. I built a website that petitioned our new principal’s actions and even hosted it on the school’s own server via the computer lab. I was rebellious, but surprisingly most adults liked me. I never threw a fit or yelled at a teacher, I would have an educated well thought out reason for not wanting to do something and always followed with what I would do with the time instead. I think many of my teachers respected the fact that I was determined to not be held back by the school system’s inefficiency. I once got permission to skip science class for an entire week to build a cover to go over the science building’s well pump. Do I think this rebellious nature was a good thing? Yes and no. On one hand, it built self-confidence that made me be able to speak to adults with ease, but on the other hand, it did retract from me fulfilling my full potential in school. I would take a zero on an assignment if I disagreed with the nature of the assignment and this clearly hurt my grades. I basically never did homework unless it was studying because I felt it was a waste of time, after all, I just spent the majority of the day at the school. This kept me from getting some academic scholarships and it wasn’t until I met Molly that she convinced me to even sign up for the honor society at school. I didn’t like the person in charge of the society so I never bothered signing up. I managed to finish high school with decent grades, but I hated every step of the way.
Molly High school for me was pretty normal when you typically think about being in high school. I was a cheerleader freshman and sophomore year and of course soccer all four years. I was an A/B student and took all honors classes. Unlike Dylan, I did every assignment and all my homework and projects. I had really bad anxiety when it came to school work. I had to get it done by a certain time or I just couldn’t focus and would have a breakdown. My typical day would look like this. I would wake up around 6:20 to get ready for school while also watching a full TV show on the computer. My family didn’t have cable so I would go to a network’s website and watch last night's show that I missed while I got ready. I would go to school and have some kind of sport’s practice after. I would get home around 5:30 and would instantly take a shower and eat dinner. After that, I would sit and get all my homework done by 8 pm, maybe sometimes 9, and go to bed. Obviously some days varied, but that typically what it looked like. I am a routine person so having this schedule was crucial in me being able to function. I think soccer and sports have made me this way, to do what I’m told, but also put in the hard work when I need to.
This is what it looked like for 4 years. As far as social things go, I am a pretty introverted person, so I didn’t have a solid group of friends, I kind of just jumped from group to group, which could be fun at times. I was basically around my cheer team when football was in season and then around my soccer girls for soccer season and finished out the year with them. I have a few core friends from high school that I am still close with today and they are amazing.
College
Dylan To be honest, I didn’t know what I wanted to do leaving high school but settled on mechanical engineering because it was the closest thing to making. I managed to get a scholarship to a local community scholarship through winning a computer science fair. I build a one-handed Xbox 360 controller that someone who lost their arm could use. The school was terrible and not a very motivating place. I took mostly night classes and ended up having mostly classes with adults. It was high school all over again for me, except I could skip without repercussions. I would come to classes, take role, listen to the first 15min where the instructor would give assignments, and then leave. I never did well learning in a classroom setting. I would just YouTube everything. This stopped the second semester when they required you to be in class which infuriated me and made me resent college further. Justifiable or not, I’ve never liked school and it just wasn’t for me. I don’t believe I am better than school or anyone else there, because I am not, but I just never add the attention span and ability to learn that way. I have paid far less money and learned much more useful skills through the internet and trial and error.
Molly When high school ended, I kind of felt a little lost. As you know I am a routine person and having my routine for the last 4 years, well even for my entire school life, just ending was a shock to the system. Dylan and I both decided we were going to stay home and go to a community college. The stress of money and student loans really scared me, so I was going to start out getting my associate’s with all the core classes done and then move on to get my bachelor’s. I was in school for Exercise Science because I just couldn’t get away from sports. Looking back I am so happy I did things this way. At 18 I was not ready to move away from home. I am an only child and really wasn’t independent at all. If I moved away I would most likely get there, but the stress of figuring out things on my own really stressed me out. So learning about anatomy and biology was super interesting to me. Science has always been a strong subject for me, so luckily these college classes came pretty easy to me.
Part-Time Jobs
Dylan I worked for a custom rustic furniture business throughout college and this is where I found the confidence that I could do what I loved for a living. Although I was mostly labor and rarely built furniture, I was able to observe business practice first hand. It made me realize that I could do this. At the time I had no idea if my employer made much money or how the business was actually doing, but watching his business grow made me want to do the same. In hindsight I can see all this now, I wasn’t thinking this logical at that point in time. I just wanted out of school and control of my own future. At this time I was spending all the money I made on tools of my own. Every dime was spent mostly on used tools and I would flip them for profit regularly. This is how I built up a base of tools so early on.
Molly I had a job right out of school working as a host at a restaurant. I was only there 6 months and I was tired of driving 20 minutes to and from work and also having food caked on my shoes. The hosts also had to bus tables and now just the thought of what I smelt like when I got home is just ehhh. I faded this job out with my full school schedule only working 2 days a week after my morning classes. I started looking for a job closer to home and I landed one downtown in retail. I worked 2 jobs for the last few weeks of my restaurant one, which was just amazing as you could imagine.
Furniture Restoration Business
Dylan One day, Molly and I were driving home and saw this perfectly good coffee table on the side of the road. I made the off-hand comment that “man why would you throw that away, at least sell it for a few bucks”. We turned around and picked up this coffee table. We took it home, painted it distressed white, and sold it the next day for $200 on Facebook. This was the spark of our collaborative entrepreneurial journey. We started buying used furniture, refinishing it, and selling it for a profit. We quickly ran out of space to store furniture and rented a storage unit at a local flea market. We spent every weekend for the next several months from 6 am to 2 pm trying to sell our furniture. We reinvested every cent back into the business and rarely ever made any money. Honestly, we probably made less than $2000 during this time. We were still in school and working at our jobs. Having our own space and generating our own business was motivating though.
Molly After the very first semester in college, we decided we wanted to be more creative. I remember diving headfirst into this refinishing furniture business and having 10 pieces piled into my parent's garage while I painted them. Somehow in-between class and work. We would get old pieces of furniture from the thrift store, on the side of the road, and sometimes even buying pieces on Facebook, painting them, and then reselling them back on Facebook. There is only so much furniture you can paint without going crazy, so we only did that a few months. To close things out with this business we did a giveaway of our biggest piece we had, a china hutch. We put it up on Facebook and had people like our page and post and they would choose what color or finish they wanted the hutch to be and they could have it. This is really what boosted our page at the time and all motivation to turn to social media as a business.
Renting Our First Shop
Dylan I had managed to build out a decently equipped shop under the back porch of my parent's house and my employer started letting me do smaller commissions he received from home. He would basically let me run with it and I ended up doing well on a few small projects like cutting boards and things. At this point, we wanted a full out shop space and wanted to make custom furniture. We ended up finding a place for rent that cost $650/month. This was literally all the money we had and we had to convince the landlord to rent to us without a security deposit. We handed him all our money that day and we had 30 days to sink or swim. I thought we would be fine because I could still work remotely for the furniture shop, but as it turns out we only got two more jobs. One of those builds was the ball pit, which is the first video on our channel.
Molly By this time I had quit my retail job and we were going full time here. We actually were already full time, but I guess you could say I was full time here at the shop. Thank goodness we didn't have any other payments at the time because we for sure wouldn't have made it. This was the most stressful point in our careers. We had a pretty big overhead for us at the time and had no idea if we could make it to the next month. This place was nice because it had a 1,200 sqft shop with an office as well as a reception area and a kitchen that we shared with the other offices in the building, but no one was ever in those. We ended up renovating the entire office spaces. We painted the walls, added new flooring because it was an old blue carpet, new toilets, bathroom vanities and lights, and all new doors. I can't remember if we got rent taken off for doing this for the landlord or now, but we filmed a lot of this process in our vlogs back in the day!
Our First Major Client
Dylan We built a few cool pieces the first month just by getting business through friends of friends. We built two desks, one was even welded, which was our first metalworking project. If there is one thing I’ve learned, is the importance of saying yes and then just finding a way to make it happen. You need this when starting in order to progress. The first decent money we made was designing and building built-in bunk beds. These bunk beds had custom steel ladders we had to fabricate and the install was actually a couple of hours away. It was a big daunting job, but we pulled it off within the budget. This project established us within the community and led to one after another jobs.
Molly That install day of the bunk beds was on Valentine's Day. I will never forget this day, just because it was so memorable and the fact that we worked so hard together made it even better. On the way home from the install we stopped at O'Charlie's for our Valentine's Day dinner and man, it was so good. I don't think we had lunch that day and we were so exhausted, there wasn't enough energy to go home and get ready to go out. We aren't the going out type of couple anyways, so this was a real treat.
Starting YouTube
Dylan I actually wanted to be a YouTuber for years. I uploaded my first video in 2011 of building a portable Nintendo 64. Ben Heck was my idol at the time and watching him make videos full-time on YouTube made me want to do it. We decided to give it go for real whenever my jobs dried up from my prior employer. It was pretty much an overnight decision.
Leaving Our Jobs
Dylan I ended up getting sort of fazed out of work. I never quit and was never let go. We just mutually parted in a weird way. This was actually a good thing because it forced us to get clients to pay rent. We were barely scrapping by. Rent was priority over everything else including school.
Molly Like I said before I had already quit my job at this point. In a weird way and I'm not sure if this is a good thing, having all that overhead with the shop and no money really made us hustle more. We worked day in and day out, I remember Dylan sleeping at the shop all the time because he worked all through the night. I would show up the next morning and he'd be asleep on the couch with an empty wings container from Pizza Hut.
Fading School Out
Dylan At the time, I had been having issues with the dean of my community college. He was the person who awarded me the scholarship and in return, I was obligated to do a handful of things throughout the year. He started demanding I come to their main campus, which is about 45 minutes away, and help with things I wasn’t obligated to do. We were operating a full-blown business with deadlines at this point and I couldn’t be leaving randomly to go help him. I let him know this and asked to schedule things in the future so that I could make arrangements. He got furious and started harassing me on a regular basis. He’d call me and say if you aren’t here tomorrow I am pulling you off scholarship. I had sit down meetings on multiple occasions where he would yell at me and tell me how if I didn’t do what he said that he’d pull my scholarship. I remained surprisingly calm, but this was consuming me and created an absurd amount of anxiety. I told my parents, but they figured I was just being the usual rebellion. It wasn’t until he told me that I would amount to nothing and trashed my business goals that I decided to play offensive. He told me that without schooling and the money I would receive from my future employer that I couldn’t succeed in business. I told him to pull my scholarship and that I would rather pay for school out of pocket than deal with him. I told him how I really felt and then he called the head of scholarships on the phone and handed the phone to me and told me to tell her why I was having my scholarship taken away. I proceeded to explain to her the harassment I received and the belittlement I felt only to have her say and I quote “Well you must have done something pretty bad to have him talk to you like that”. This enraged me and I decided to take back my stance on the situation and not give either of them any satisfaction. I responded with, “Bring me the signed copy of the scholarship I received and show me my contractual obligations”. She told me that they "didn’t have it" and reserved the right to change anything they wanted at any time. I told her to get on the phone with the State of Alabama and see if that flies. After all, the funding came from a state level. I promised both of them that I would not let either of them squash me with authority roles and that I would prove them wrong. And I have.
Molly I didn't have an experience like that at all, but I was not on scholarship. At this point, I was fading out classes. I did a whole semester online to see how that went and then we both eventually decided to take a semester off and see how that went with work. Of course, we got a lot done and realized we didn't need school at all. We both had changed degrees to Graphic Design, thinking that would help with our business, but it didn't even one bit. We were better off using our time more efficiently and working and growing our business and channel.
Where we are today
Dylan That leads up to where we are today. We recently passed 100,000 subscribers and we are pumping out as much content as possible. We still do custom woodworking, but our business model as shifted into primarily content creation. We found we enjoy the content creation model more than custom woodworking alone. We’ve had the opportunity to work with some of our dream brands and are incredibly proud and thankful of how we got here.
Molly Thank you to each and every one of you for taking the time to watch one video, like or comment on a video, or even reading this blog. It means the absolute world to us that you paid attention to us and watched our stuff. You might be just as crazy as us, but thank you from the bottom of our hearts. If we could give one piece of advice, it would be that whatever your passion is, just go for it. Life is to short to be complacent and you have to live your life FOR YOU! It sounds cheesy, but we literally had no money and didn't even know if we could pay rent 2 weeks from rent was due. That didn't keep us from doing what we had fun doing, and we are so happy about where we are today. We still have a lot of growing to do, but we couldn't get here without the work. Work hard and everything will come together.
Want to get started in woodworking too? Check out these project plans to help you get through your next project!