We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Handmade Cabinets LLC. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Handmade below.

Hi Handmade, thanks for joining us today. Owning a business isn’t always glamorous and so most business owners we’ve connected with have shared that on tough days they sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have just had a regular job instead of all the responsibility of running a business. Have you ever felt that way?

This is the first time in our lives that we are business owners, so we have already been into the “9-5” world, plus we also went through the hospitality schedule which is more nights and weekends. All of them have advantages and disadvantages. The 9-5 jobs free you during the nights and weekends, so you could have more social activities if your families and friends also have that similar schedule, but the disadvantages are that you need to request a day off if you need to go to the doctor or run some errands that can only be done during weekdays. The hospitality schedule is terrible for socializing, you work when everybody else is off, so your workmates probably become your best friends now, as it happened to us. The good thing about having weekdays off is that you can go to appointments, plus, some entertainment places are actually less crowded those days. As business owners, we have the best of worlds, we can manage our agenda at our convenience, and are able to attend to most social gatherings. However, it also means working more time than you think, more weekends than we want to, we are constantly talking about projects, during dinner, during vacation, etc., we are finishing designs at 7pm, buying supplies on Amazon at 9pm, answering messages at 10pm, posting reels at 7am, it is like you cannot have a regular schedule, as it is impossible to completely disconnect your life from the business. Add to that, the fact that you don’t have the benefits that an employer would offer, so you find yourself working twice as hard. Despite all of that, it is so satisfying to see each of our projects installed and to know that these clients are getting something they will see and use every day, something that will make their lives more functional, or their houses prettier, they will have a piece of us in their homes, and THAT makes us incredibly happy so we wouldn’t change it for anything.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

Hi. We are Nathalyn and Antonio! We are a husband-and-wife duo, owners of Handmade Cabinets LLC. We specialize in custom modern cabinets. Antonio has always been very handy and liked tools. Nathalyn always enjoyed building houses for her SIMS when she was a teenager LOL! And we are both good at math (I guess you really have to like numbers when you are making custom cabinets). Originally accountants (that explains the math part) from Venezuela, we found our passion when designing and building the cabinets we needed for our small apartment back in 2013 in our home country. We built our closets and bathrooms and then family and friends wanted us to make cabinets for their houses too, so that’s how we discovered this passion, and that it was something we could do together as a team: Nathalyn designs and Antonio builds. Unfortunately, we had to leave our country and start all over again. The good thing is that knowledge doesn’t take room in your baggage, and you can take it with you all the time, so we brought it here. After we came to the US, it took us some years to formally create our company and we did it January 2019. It was tough finding vendors and clients at the beginning because our style was not very popular in Central Florida at that time (it is now), but we went ahead little by little, researching the market, learning more every day, always delivering our clients dream projects, and every year has been better than the previous since we started. We are not a big team, so we work on every project ourselves, from taking the measurements and design to installation. The amount of love and responsibility we put in each one of our projects is what make us pride, and what keep our clients coming back to us or referring us to their family and friends.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

For many years we worked in the food and beverage department of a hotel, that was our full-time job, but we knew we wanted to have our own cabinet business. So, in our days off, we would go visit vendors, attend to home shows, research the market and learn. Eventually we found somebody that gave us the opportunity to work with them, so in our 2 days off from the hotel we would work with them as independent contractors, sometimes until late at night, because if we could not finish that day, we were not going to be able to come back until the next week. We continued like that for a couple of years, because at the moment that side hustle was not giving us enough money to make a living out of it. With the time, we started getting more clients and jobs, so we had to ask our boss at the hotel to reduce our hours (but still give us enough to keep our benefits as full-time employees, including health insurance). We would work there 32 hours from Friday to Sunday, and the other 4 days with our company. We continued to grow, up to the point where Antonio had to quit the hotel, Nathalyn stayed there another year to make sure we still had a fixed income and health insurance but continued to help Antonio in her days off. Finally, in 2021, we were able to dedicate our full time to Handmade Cabinets. In total, it took around 4 years of working 7 days a week to fully be able to make a living out of it. Well, sometimes we still work 7 days a week, but we gladly do it because it is our own business. It has been a long journey, but we felt safer taking firm steps like that, rather than venturing to be self-employed since the beginning risking both of our incomes. We are happy with what we have accomplished and learned along the way and would not change a thing of it.

What’s been the best source of new clients for you?

It has been Instagram @handmadecabinets. We do our best to keep our social media updated with Reels/posts of our last projects and found it to be effective in attracting new clients. We manage our Instagram ourselves, so clients can be sure they are connecting directly with us. Word of mouth is very effective too, especially because those referrals have probably already seen our job in person, and when they contact us, they are ready to book.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.handmade-cabinets.com
• Instagram: @handmadecabinets
• Facebook: Handamade Cabinets