4 MUST-HAVE TOOLS when starting a woodworking business | Maker's Money

When we first started our woodworking business, there were a ton of new tools that we wanted. We wanted a new Festool Domino, we wanted a better table saw, we wanted a miter saw, a track saw, the list went on and on. We were always crippled by the question, what tools should we get next? And maybe you've asked yourself this question before. Well, not only are we gonna share our thought process on buying tools, at the end of this video, we're gonna share with you the best tools we ever purchased for our business. Buying tools for your business is the topic of this episode of Makers Money. When I first got to college, I wanted a mountain bike so badly. Jenny and I went to school in the desert in Arizona, and there were some amazing biking and hiking trails right across the street from the school. So my first week when I was unpacking my dorm room, my mission was to find a good mountain bike that I could go on all these trails with across the street. I mean, take a look at the picture of what was right across the street from the school. I was so excited about the thought of biking for hours in this beautiful landscape. I wasn't a biker, I'd never done it before, but I was interested to start a new hobby and really take advantage of what was right across the street from the dorms. I blew all my money on this mountain bike. Every last dollar that I had saved up from lifeguarding the summer before, I totally blew on the nicest mountain bike I could find. So I got the bike, I got all the gear, I got patch kits and tire tubes and everything else that I thought I might need, and I chained my bike up to the bike rack, and there it sat for six months. I just got so overwhelmed with homework and all these other groups and signing up for everything under the sun that I just had absolutely no time left to take the bike out on the weekends. Not only that, but the clubs that I joined, when they wanted to go camping or do other fun stuff, I couldn't go because I didn't have the money. I blew it all on a stupid mountain bike. Don't we do this with tools also? Don't we buy something at Home Depot because we're really excited about the new tool and it's on sale and we imagine ourselves using it, and then it just kind of sits in the corner for six to eight months without us touching it? I know I've seen tools that I've never even thought about having, but just because they were on sale, I thought, wow, for that price, I can't afford not to buy it. But if you're trying to run a business, the game changes. How do you know what tool to buy next? How do you anticipate the needs of your customers? Should I be prepared for personalization? Should I think about all the different things that we might make for a customer? How do you know what tool to buy next if you're running a business? Should we shop around for deals? Well, our strategy is gonna make a lot of people angry, so buckle up and get ready. So the first time we started our woodworking business, because we've done it twice now, we bought tools at random, just like we've been talking about. We had quite a few impulse buys. We'd try to catch things on sale. We would buy things off the discount rack. It was just really inconsistent. And when we did wanna buy a new big tool, we would do hours of research to try to figure out what the best one was. And that was bad because we would spend thousands of dollars on tools that we thought we needed, but really didn't end up using hardly at all. Maybe you've done the same thing. Where's your unused pile of tools? Let us know what it is down in the comments. And if you don't think you have a pile, ask your wife. I'm sure she knows where it is. Boom, roasted. But once we started our second woodworking business, we finally got it right. So we're about to share with you the strategies that we use to buy tools for our business without overextending ourselves or wasting a bunch of money. Step one is to identify a need. What do your customers need out of your work? The important thing to remember here is not to imagine a need. You need to have a need that actually exists, not something that could exist in the future. Do they need personalization? If you're selling closing gifts to realtors like we were, yeah, that's a pretty big deal because you need to be able to personalize all of their closing gifts. So we talk about this in the stud stack all the time, but within your product development process, you need to be solving a problem for your customers. So if your product requires a certain feature to solve the problem for your customer, but then you need a certain tool to create that feature, that's when it's a need. A need might also be a part of your process that's taking way too long. Maybe you need a new tool to speed it up a little bit. So here are a couple of questions to ask yourself to identify a need versus a want. What part of your production process takes the longest? Are you losing sales because of a missing feature? What do you enjoy doing the hard way? Either out of pride or because that's the way your grandfather taught you. If you're genuinely trying to run a business, you may need to update some of your techniques. So now that we've identified a need in our business, whether that's for a feature for a product or to try and speed up the production process, now we wanna go find and purchase the tool that's gonna save us the most time and don't waste any time here. We wanna buy a great tool that does the job really well. We're not looking for the best tool, okay? We're not spending hours and hours researching the best type of sander, okay? You're gonna waste more money doing research than you are if you just bought the three highest rated sanders and returned the two that you don't like as much. That's gonna be a much faster method than doing hours and hours of research. We are huge proponents of buy once, cry once. Buy the best version of the tool that you can afford and don't look back. If you need something better in the future, then buy it in the future, but at least it solves your problem right now. So let's pretend you build furniture and you waste a lot of time sanding. That's like the longest part of your entire process. Well, if you're still using that DeWalt sander you bought at the Home Depot, it might be time for an upgrade. If you're making money, the finish is one of the most important parts of the entire piece. So you wanna make sure that you're sanding really well and really efficiently. So it might be worth looking into a Festool or a Mirka sander. When you pair a nicer tool with world-class dust collection, with high quality consumables, you're gonna find that you save so much more money in time instead of using the cheaper version of the tool. If you're running a business and you're accountable to the bottom line, you can't wait around for a sale. You're literally losing money every minute you're not using that new tool. Businesses don't fail usually because they spend too much money on tools. Most maker businesses fail because the person in charge doesn't spend enough time selling. So whatever tools you buy, try to minimize your shop time as much as possible and maximize the time you spend making sales. So in summary, you need to find a need and buy the tool that fills that need ASAP. Don't wait around, don't wait for sales, just take care of business. Don't mind the pun. So as promised, here's the list of the best tools we ever bought for our business and we waited way too long to buy all of them. Keep in mind, we do not take tool sponsors. So all of these are our raw, unfiltered opinions. But there are affiliate links for all of these tools down in the description right below the like button if you're interested in picking some of them up for yourself. Number one, the Mirka Dero sander with Festool dust extraction. This has changed the game completely for us. It's such a high quality sander. We can do things so much faster and the dust extraction is great because it minimizes all the dust in our shop. And speaking of dust in the shop, our big Laguna dust collection system works amazing. It really sucks. Davis suffered with a little Harbor Freight one for so long. The new Laguna one is just so much easier to use, clean, change out bags, maintain, everything. So much easier. And then we have the Glowforge Pro laser engraver, which I know we catch a lot of heat for this, but this has been a really great laser for figuring out if laser engraving is something you need in your business model. You can spend your time selling instead of playing laser repairman. It's very easy to use, especially if you are brand new to laser engravers. We know you can get more laser for the money somewhere else, but you are gonna waste so much more time in the setup process before you even engrave a board that you're making a profit on. For anybody who's trying to figure out whether or not a laser is for you and your business, we highly recommend the Glowforge Pro. And the last one is the track saw. Oh my gosh, we waited far too long to get this thing. We were struggling with circular saws and trying to make our own tracks, and it was absolutely miserable when we started making multiple tabletops. We are so thankful that we finally bought the track saw when we did. It was very, very worth it. I can hear your keyboards clacking away now. Those tools are expensive. How in the world am I gonna buy all those? I'm gonna have to take out a second mortgage to buy all those tools. I'm really confused at how to manage money in a business. Well, that's the topic of the next episode of Makers Money. Subscribe so you can see when it comes out, and until then, catch you on the next one. This video is part of a series called Makers Money, a series of videos that we made for people just starting out in their businesses. So if you wanna see all the videos in a playlist starting from the very beginning, click here.