Thread: Timber pricing

I sell all my timber at a $ / meter price. It is dry but not dressed.

If someone wants timber dressed or cut to a certain size they pay the rough sawn price plus my workshop rate to cut/ dress.

I tell them up front what my price per meter and advise I'll try and find a piece from my stock of the appropriate length/s (I don't cut to length, as you can't sell 300-600mm shorts easily). I then tell them my workshop hourly rate.

The ball is in my customers court to decide if they want me to finish their timber, find a friend or pay someone else.

It very much depends on how you see your business operating. Do you establish yourself as a total service provider or are you a basic material supplier? All services take time and time is money. If you are not being paid for your time, then dont offer the service. If the customer wants an unoffered service then they must be prepaired to pay for it. By placing a high price on a product, so as to accommodate all requests, well may put you out of the general market. A good long term marketing principle is a good product at a fair price with prompt service. It is a temptation, in the early days of a business, to go the extra mile and provide extra services to encourage sales. But as business picks up you are forced to either employ more people or refuse a previously offered service. This doesnt go down too well with customers. A good product sells itself.

This is an interesting topic for me because in the not too distant future I intend to purchase a small one man sawmill and start cutting some of the trees here. Sawn boards are a much more salable product than logs or trees. The problem is how to sell the logs from here on the farm and the related question of price? The solution is to have a agent that I can trust who I know will always do the best he can for me. For me I would be having quite a range of products, Hoop Pine with small boards that are knotty to large knot free boards. I would also have durable and hard Eucalyptus, [Gympie Messmate], and rainforest Qld Maple, Red Cedar, Silver Ash, and others that are uncommon but the better word is rare. The product range would be special orders and standard sizes. I would also expect that the agent could process some of the boards into t&g and also make pallets with the lower end of the market. To do this, I would porbably need several agents who specialize in certain products. The more valuable the product, the further away the agent could be. Maybe some of us small producers of timber should combine to have some common agents for everyones benefit?

i thought it was very high for the timber you speak of in the add , because its not that rare in the first place and it is a weed in nsw . and he said would be good for fence posts , now i already know how heavy that stuff is ( cos i have some + plus i have a fair size tree of it to cut next winter ) and i rekoned on it being a few hundred bucks per post and would be a hell of a dear fence .


johno