Ron Wenner, my father and Domiplate inventor passed away last month. The blog post is HERE if you missed it.  In that post I mentioned that I needed to take some time away from Seneca Woodworking, and I wanted to explain that more. 

Since I founded Seneca Woodworking in 2011, I’ve enjoyed working with both my father, Ron and my brother, Kyle over the years. Working with family has its ups and downs, and fortunately the time we did spend working together was full of good memories. With the passing of my father, showing up to the shop every week has forced me to confront that elephant in the room daily.

The last two years have been the most challenging two of my life so far. Between the challenges of becoming a first time father with the birth of my daughter, caring for dad when he needed me,  and trying to run a business in a challenging market, it hasn’t been easy. Over these years, there have been a few times recently that Seneca Woodworking has fallen short of doing our best, and I recognize that the reason for that can be attributed to my lack of time or energy. Adding grief to that mix is not a recipe for making better tools. 

I want Seneca Woodworking to continue to design and manufacture high quality tools that carry on the spirit of Ron and honor his legacy. To do that, I need to give myself a break from Seneca and allow myself some time to move through this.  Since we’re a small company, unfortunately there’s no VP of Operations or general manager to take my place, so we’re going to scale back how we do some things. Hopefully Seneca can continue to operate with reduced input from me for the time being. Here’s how some of that will work moving forward:

-We have a number of preorders open, and getting those filled asap is a priority.

-The team at Seneca will continue making a few of our ‘core’ products, especially ones that Ron was involved in. This means Domiplates, Small Mortise Kits, and Imperial Thickness Gauges aren’t going away.

- Release of new tools will stop for the immediate future. We have a number of things in development that we still plan to release, but I’m not sure how soon I’ll be able to resume doing this. I want to make sure we’re making the best tools we can, and right now isn’t the time to do that. 

-To keep things simple here, we’re going to stop production on a number of our tools.  For example, our bench dogs and squares. I believe the versions of these tools we make are among the best woodworking tools on the market, but some of our competitors make versions of these tools that are pretty good too. While we work through this transition period I want us to be focused on the tools we make that are entirely unique. If you’d like to own Seneca Woodworking bench dogs or squares, now is your chance, as I don’t know if or when we’ll be producing more once our inventory runs out. The same is true for Systainer inserts. We won’t be producing any more of those in the near future so inventory is limited to what’s on hand.  There are probably other things on this list that I’ve forgotten to include.

-”Swag” like hats, bottle openers, and signs will be limited to what’s on hand. Believe it or not we’ve never sold shirts, and I’ve already had requests for them, so there’s a good chance we’ll do this in the future. 

- I want to make sure I can keep our small team employed during my absence, so we may start offering more third party products in our store. This is something most of our competitors do, and we just haven’t had time to focus on it beyond a few items. This might be the time we start doing more of that. 

I’m not sure what else the coming weeks and months will bring, but we’ll try to keep you updated via our email list and blog. 

One thing I’ve always enjoyed doing is connecting and talking business strategy with other business owners I meet through our social media and at trade shows. I’ve lost track of how many entrepreneurs I’ve informally coached through launching or growing their businesses. More than a woodworker, I’m an entrepreneur, and I love when I can help someone take their business to the next level. During this time off from Seneca I’m going to do more of that type of coaching. If you feel like the time is right to take your side hustle full time, or if you’re self employed but want to grow your business to a higher level of income,  drop me an email HERE and lets setup a call to see if I can help.   

-Ryan