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How to start my own company blacksmithing?
January 5, 2016
10:24 pm
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t-stan
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I want to open my own forge. I am 27 and a father of 3. I have taken classes built my own forge and practiced quite a bit. I can't stand going to work anymore. All I want is to blacksmith from home and raise my kids. Can someone please show me how to begin this. I understand how to blacksmith well a little haha. But I am not looking to just bang metal. I want to do this for a living. Any help would be greatly appreciated. 

January 6, 2016
11:15 am
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Morgan A. Kirk
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Well, while it is an option, getting a paying job as a smith is difficult. I can't say I will be the most helpful, but this is how I might go about doing it.

First off, do you have shop space where you are doing your forging? If you have a permanent setup, it will be easier to call yourself a shop, and you will have a base of operations, more or less.

What I suggest is making a good amount of items to sell before you actually start selling, then continue to work on projects to sell for a while. Thing is, as obvious, your income will drop extremely as soon as you try to transition from your job to being a smith, so it will be hard to keep up with paying for a while. That is why I am suggesting you accumulate items to sell, continue to forge items, and start selling before you try to switch your career choice. 

Hopefully some other members can help. 

Also, Rashelle Hams posted a topic recently on this site about a job opportunity for the summer; perhaps you can speak to her.

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January 7, 2016
11:10 am
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Rashelle
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Ok here was my approach. First get as good as you can be with the realization you can always be better. I took classes targeting my weaknesses and areas I wanted to be stronger in. Take a curriculum type classes such as the upcoming one with Mark Aspery, or others directed at where you want to go with blacksmithing. Realize that you may be aiming at hearthware but the market may want architectural. So be prepared to find your niche.I dedicated most of my disposeable income into getting better. Go to the mentoring center events, meet others, go do demo's, help out at events, get your name out there. Get recognized, enter contests. Get good at an aspect, then expand out from there.

Something to remember is if you want to quit working for others and work for yourself you will then be responsible for taxes,  equipment, fuel, power, water, paperwork, supplies, scheduling, all the rest of the overhead. Your life might become your job and your job your life.

I got lucky at the point where me and Dean Farmer were starting up Wolf and Bear Forge as a hobby business, I got myself hired at Trackers. That enabled me to continue to improve blacksmithing and be employed at it while Dean went back to school for business management. I'm now looking for Summer help for Trackers. Meanwhile I continue to research and learn more. Which means if I'm not working at blacksmithing, I am usually studying it or volunteering at Fort Vancouver, or demoing somewhere else, or even just going into work and making what I feel like making on my days off. Someday I may even consider myself halfway decent at it.

So in short, like Morgan said. Don't just up and quit the day job. Work your way out of the day job. If you do demo's where you can sell stuff, make a good stockpile before hand. Try to set up a display with your business card if you can't sell while demoing, remember those are not mutually inclusive. It's hard to watch displays or inventory while demoing and hard to demo while talking up a client and selling them stuff. So if you want to do both at once get with another and take turns. Slowly work your way out of your job while building reputation, client base, skills.

Enough from me for now.

January 9, 2016
6:24 pm
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t-stan
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Thank you so much you guys. 

February 17, 2016
3:07 pm
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DaveTheGreat
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General advice - a lot of craftsfolk are terrible at sales, scheduling, bidding and the like. This is actually pretty true across most career fields - doctors are well-known for being awful at running their own offices, contractors are often bad at soliciting clients and there haven't been many self-employed scientists for generations because they fail at grants & patents. 

So find an office person/sales person, even if it's just part time, even if you have to get a spouse or relative to do it. Until you build up a client base or a lot of orders, this person is actually more important to your business than you are. That's darn hard to accept, but all the hammering in the world won't put food on your table if nobody is buying it. 

The second bit of advice: ease into it. Keep your day job until your PAID smithwork takes up too much of your time to keep going in to work. This may take years, but unless you have a pension or are independently wealthy, this is what you have to do. People who try to set out on their own too early end up running out of cash and having to backtrack a lot, losing time and money. Let your work make the decisions, not your heart. You are ready to go to part time with your current job when smithing MAKES you go to part time, and you quit when smithing pays enough to quit. Never before those points. 

Then, I would try to find one thing that you can do a lot of business in (kitchen knives, or SCA/Renn Faire props, or garden tools) and concentrate on that more than anything else at first. Generalize more later, but for the first few years do one type of thing and do a lot of it. People who love your kitchen knives are likely to tell their friends who may also buy kitchen knives, but people who buy knives are really unlikely to tell their friends to buy your sculptures. It's just too much of a stretch at first and too much variety may result in too low a volume. 

And I guess lastly, try to avoid getting into an area that already has a ton of people doing it and not a ton of people buying it. "Tactical" knives comes to mind right now - knifemaking is incredibly popular right now, but knife-buying is pretty much at the same level it has always been. It would be a really bad idea to rely too much on hunting/pocket/tactical knives these days. 

February 18, 2016
8:49 pm
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Lee Cordochorea
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Get a copy of Duct Tape Marketing by John Jantsch. No, it's not about how to sell duct tape. It's about how market in a way that "sticks. " It's basic marketing 101 stuff, but packaged for a lay person to understand.

Read it. Read it at least twice. Even if you hire out your marketing it is still good to be familiar with the basics.

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