Over the years I’ve been asked many times how I make money. The answer is a bit diverse, but ultimately, I’ve always walked into any hobby or project with the mindset that it needs to pay for itself. In this post, I’ll explain how to use your skills to make a living, plus discuss the very important knowledge of how to accurately price your products or your skills.

Gaining Freedom
I think it’s safe to say we could ALL use a little more FREEDOM in our lives, wouldn’t you agree? Some of us want more free TIME, some of us want FINANCIAL freedom, some of us want freedom from our emotional and physical BURDENS. Those last two are definitely a lot harder, but even the first two seem pretty impossible amidst the chaos of our daily lives.

When I started my business, I wanted my time to be my own, not so I could lay on a beach, but so I could justify spending my time working on things that aligned with my personal goals and values rather than punching a time clock and commuting far away from my farm and family.

Building a business while also working full time and starting a homestead from scratch didn’t make for a whole lot of free time, especially for the first few years.

And, during the time I’ve been self-employed, Adam and I have found ourselves at different stages between financial ruin and financial freedom. I am a risk-taker, and act on faith more often than not, which has made for some very… interesting seasons. But two years ago, things really started to turn around, and those risks and all that time really started to pay off.

Becoming Self-Employed
The people who say “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” are full of crap. No matter how much you love what you do, there are always going to be aspects of work that will be just that: work. I always warn people wanting to quit their job and stop punching a clock for some jerk, that they’re about to trade in 40 hour work weeks, health benefits, sick days, vacation time, and a predictable paycheck to work 80 hours a week with no benefits or work-life balance for an even bigger jerk, themselves.

Finding the Work/Life Balance
Learning how to balance my work and my life being self-employed has been one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced. When I quit my tech job to become a failed furniture maker, I thought that would get me out from behind a computer screen and mean I could just play in the Woodshop building cool stuff. What ended up happening was I was spending 40+ hours a week doing administrative work to get my business off the ground, regularly pulling all-nighters in the shop, and still missing client deadlines, all to make about $3 an hour. Needless to say, it also took me way too long to realize that that business in that state was a zero sum game and that I should quit, but I was too busy trying to make a broken model work to notice little things like an ever-draining bank account and total creative and emotional burnout simmering on the back burner until it was way too late.

One funny side effect of sharing my journey on social media while I was in the midst of building a farm, a business, and a life from the ground up was that I started to get tons of questions from folks wanting to do the same. Questions like: “how I was managing my time and doing SO MUCH,” “how I was building an online following using social media,” and “how my business was generating the income I needed to support my farm, to hire my friends to support their families and to build a craft school to support our community.”

While I was fairly comfortable teaching the woodworking, gardening, and homesteading topics I’ve spent the last 8 years of my life pursuing, I wasn’t NEARLY as comfortable at the start speaking to business-related questions, because being a serial entrepreneur since I was six, I’ve only gotten REALLY good at one thing in business: Failing.