"It took me a few moments to realize this was actually happening" | Mike Burns, 3Oak Handcrafted

Mike Burns is the founder/CEO of 3Oak Handcrafted, a custom woodworking/furniture shop that builds heirloom pieces meant to last for generations.
3 Oak Handcrafted: www.3oakhandcrafted.com/
00:00 The first customer
00:38 What customers misunderstand about the business
01:28 Why they're different than their competitors
"I'm Mike Burns. We’re in a place called Balsam Grove, North Carolina, and it’s currently June of 2024. We had just started the business. We opened a small boutique down in Brevard, North Carolina. We had made a couple of products to put in there as samples, and we had a guy come in and he wanted an outdoor table. First of all, you know, it took me a few minutes just to kind of get my head together to realize this was actually happening, what we wanted to do was actually happening. So we worked with them, we came up with a design, we made our first table. It’s an outdoor table, and it went fantastic. And so, that was the beginning of this journey.
You know, one of the things we work with is wood that cannot be replicated. Every piece of wood is one of a kind, and very rarely, but it does happen, people believe that you can put a certain amount of specificity in the wood that you’re going to use for a project, and you can’t. We have had one or two clients that have come back to us and said, “Well, I wanted it to look just like blah,” and I’ve had to explain to them it’s impossible for it to look just like that; every piece of wood is unique, every project is unique, and so that often times is very difficult to explain to some people.
I think what makes us unique is that we’re makers first; we’re passionate about making, and my background was in software, but I was a maker in software, and this is just a different medium. What we look for and what we enjoy is making things. You know, whether we’re artists or not, I don’t know. I think we are, but more importantly, we like to make stuff. And I think that’s a big difference in who we are and how we hire is just our joy of making things."
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