A Mill-Slab Firewood Business

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Prospect comfortable residential neighborhoods in nearby towns. Where you see woodsmoke coming from chimneys, woodpiles alongside garages, or sawdust heaps in side yards, drop off a bundle of your wares. Knock on the door and offer the folks a smile and a cheerful invitation to try your goods for free. Get names and telephone numbers, and be sure to make street maps so you can find your way back should someone call in an order several weeks or even months later.

But don't wait for potential customers to call you; you have to make the sales. Try to make a contact on each block or street in each of your target neighborhoods. A word-of-mouth recommendation from a satisfied customer will be your best sales device.

Your customers will occasionally want to split larger slabs for kindling and for use in small fires, just as they do with cordwood. Splitting logs generally requires a heavy, long-handled go-devil, while slabs can be split with a hand ax or a hatchet-sized hand maul. (You may want to stock a few of the latter to sell or even to give away with a new customer's first big order.)

ADVERTISING

Advertising pays.

For small-scale outdoor ads, work up a poster with a headline reading something to the effect of "Good Firewood, Cheap." In the body of the ad, stress your major advantages: [1] low price; [2] convenience (slabs seldom need splitting, are easy to carry, dry fast, ignite readily, burn hot and clean); and [3] service (custom-cut to length, stacked in accessible locations). Along the bottom of the poster, put a row or two of tear-off tags bearing your name, phone number, and the word firewood, so that interested folks can take one home. (Tear off the first tag yourself.)

Tack up your posters wherever wood users might notice them: on bulletin boards in markets, in feed stores, in suburban malls, etc. (Plastering posters on telephone poles or on the sides of buildings may get you more phone calls from an angry constabulary than from prospective customers.) It's a good idea to replace your signs each week or so. A fresh poster (perhaps printed on a different color paper) makes a good impression; a grubby, tattered, or outdated poster is negative advertising.

Newspaper ads, if handled wisely, can also pay off. Start by trying a small classified ad for a few weeks, placing it in the "Fuel" or "Wood Heat" section. If the ad draws, the nominal cost will be repaid with your first sale. Make your ad simple but unique, so that a casual reader's eyes will be drawn to it. Use bold-print headlines for the main selling points, like so:

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