Member Q&A: am I a qualified cabinet maker? And how did all this start?

A quieter week for questions, but two came up that I get asked all the time, so let's do them properly.Are you a qualified cabinet maker?No. Very straightforward. And building from scratch is only a tiny part of what I actually do in this business anyway.I've always been able to build. My dad brought me up to be practical from a really young age, and we've always renovated our own homes, everything from bricklaying and laying concrete to building decks. On top of that I'm just curious. Understanding how things work is my number one thing. I'll happily watch someone like Matt Armstrong fix a car with zero interest in doing it myself. Metal I can't stand. It's unforgiving and I don't get it. Wood I get, which is why wood is my thing.What we sell is deliberately simple. No ornate carving, nothing trying to be something it isn't. Most of the work is fixing, restoring and refinishing. I do build custom pieces, but they're usually for me: I have an idea, I build it, and the only standards I have to meet are my own. The custom cabinets are the same story. Practical designs, lots of right angles. Even I can cope with that.Where I'm genuinely useful is in seeing what something could be. Take the doors behind me in the video: they came off an old 70s sliding partition, and with a set of brass hinges they're now room dividers.Because honestly, my real job here is curation. Building a collection people want to be part of, want to invest in, and actually enjoy living with. This isn't just about sales. Yes, we're a business, but it's also about entertainment and a love of real, solid things. The more technology we use, the more we seem to need to use our hands. I'm a big believer in that, even while I'm using technology right now to talk to you.How long have you been doing this?Short answer: not forever. On the 1st of November I'll have been full-time in Plots & Pickles for one year. No other job. Apart from the odd consulting favour, this is it.Before that, Plots had been around for about two years. It started with collectibles. The real backstory is on the YouTube channel in our feature video. It's a hard one for me to talk about, so I won't go through it again here, but if you want to know why this business exists and why it means so much to me, watch that.It began as an outlet (I hate the phrase side hustle). Built a website, built a logo, the usual. But I don't tend to do things by halves. At the time we were also running an e-commerce business for a UK running brand. It grew fast, but because it was a licence we couldn't take it any further. So the thought was: why not put everything we'd learned into this instead?I've always been a massive Drew Pritchard fan, and I wanted something physical and real in my life with an online side to it. Something where I could build a brand and a community and do things my way. Every month I did a bit more. Then I got into furniture, and that went really well. I set myself goals to bring in more, and it kept growing. We dropped the old retail business, it became 60/40 this versus consulting, and by the middle of last year it had my full time, energy and attention. It stopped being a distraction and became what I want to do with my life. If the question is what I want to be doing for the next 20 years, it's this. That's a big conversation to have at 45 (I'm 46 now), and it's why this is about more than fixing and moving furniture. It's about building a community, and scaling it globally.Why furniture and not collectibles?Practicality, mostly. Small things got smashed in the post, insurance never paid out, and I spent my life packing boxes. When it was busy, the processing was relentless. I don't regret it, because it got us here, but it became a chore.Furniture is different, and the relationships are different. Order a collectible and it turns up in the post. With furniture I'm in people's homes, we talk about the piece, and it often becomes the statement in a room. There are more stories in that, and it means more. From a business point of view it's fewer orders but more profitable ones. It's harder on investment, and right now it's harder on my back too (twisted it). But I'm out and about more. There's more movement and more tactility to it.So what does full-time actually look like?Full-time times two. The No Wobble Club, a merch brand we've just launched, restoration, custom builds and sourcing. YouTube is growing really quickly, social media too. And it's just me. Every interaction you have with the brand is me, or at most an automated email I wrote.I'm about to get a bit of help, though. My 13-year-old daughter is coming to work in dad's business. She's done it on and off for years already: she can run Shopify, use the EFTPOS, and she does all the curation and styling in the shop. I can say "give the place a once-over", come back, and the whole thing's been rearranged and looks amazing. That eye comes from her mum, not me. I find the stuff, she displays it. Pickles, meanwhile, stays on the operations side, more big thinking than day-to-day.That's this week. I'm happy to share the journey, it's part of all this, and I hope it's interesting. Got a question, or want to know more? Drop it in the comments, or email or text me, and I'll get to it next week.

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