Having a house sell at a profit is a reflection of market conditions at the time, not the quality of the products you made. Listen to the pros.

You need to study business and hire out the woodworking.

In Silicon Valley, Home Depot has classes/demonstrations.. A friend learned how to tile.

I second the suggestion to hire on at a cabinet shop.

Thank you to those of you who offered helpful advice.

A Mat, I did take the tile class at Home Depot. It was helpful and I got a lot of great advice afterward from the (female) associate who taught it, as well as others I met in person who were helpful. I ended up doing about 5 tile jobs in the old house and I have 3 big ones to do in the current house.

Joseph, resources are slim. More skilled tradespeople are needed in the industry. I am not hiring out to people who can demand whatever fees they can get right now, when I can do the work myself. I’m getting the skills. The product I have in mind does not require a broad set of skills anyway.

Oh, I’ve run a business before and I know tech. And I’ve advised numerous small Internet businesses. I’m comfortable with the business end. I just need to get a few new skills to produce a very specific product that fills a need in the marketplace. I will self-fund and can start out on etsy and amazon if necessary. But word-of-mouth (plus an awesome website) built and sustained my last business for more than ten years. That is the best way to go when you don’t need that many customers. The problem is, when you are good, you have to turn people down, and they don’t like that.

Depending on where you live, some High schools have evening Shop courses.

You want to know how to make a small fortune in woodworking.

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Start with a large fortune!

And old joke, but one that is very very true. Those with lots of experience, tools, a great workshop, and skills, still fail in business. Start with studying business first. And become a tool junkie, with a garage full of shapers, planers, joiners, drill presses. It's only a step up from learning all of that to signing a lease for a CNC. That's how you get large quantities produced, cheaply, with low manpower. But, it has inescapable obligatory costs to do that. You have to have your business plan together, along with learned skills.

"a simple semi-custom cabinetry product to sell over the Internet. It will involve shelves and possibly doors, no drawers. The skill set I will need is limited."

I got stopped by this sentence. I don't understand the value of cabinetry, or a cabinetry product that offers doors but no drawers.

Is it supposed to be cabinets with no drawers at all? Is it a resurfacing product? If so how many people are going to be interested in replacing doors and shelves but no the drawer faces?

Maybe I just don't understand what this is going to be and who the potential market is?

As for the people I know who have really gotten into woodworking as an individual and make it turn into something else but on a small scale, the person who said start with a lot of money described the people I know. One inherited several million dollars and a small real estate portfolio. One had a job where he could make a lot of money in 9 months every year and devote a solid three months to building furniture for people. One inherited all the equipment and had an interest.

Bry911, you nailed it! (Sorry for the pun.) Thank you for the advice on jigs. I probably won’t be competing with you. Etsy creatives seem to come up with new products that the big shops haven’t seen the need for yet.

palimpsest, I’m not planning to manufacture kitchen cabinets. That being said, my kitchen corner, sink, and upper cabinets have no drawers. A lot of freestanding cabinets have no drawers. Like bry911, I can’t reveal too much until the product line is ready to launch.

Floored You, I’m not looking to make a fortune. Just an income that I enjoy. I thought about the CNC angle, but that is way down the road and not a requirement for me (unless I go nuts with the door designs, hmmm…)

I need to get a handle on hardware though. I wish I was near a Rockler store - I could learn a lot there, I think. I’ll look for classes and a local cabinet maker as well.

Thanks everyone!

@kelli_ga - It is incredibly difficult to give advice without at least knowing the scope of the project you are looking at and knowing nothing of the design.

I generally don't think getting a job at a cabinet shop is going to help you. A small cabinet shop is still going to have a lot of specialty tools that you are not going to start with. I am not sure learning how to break down sheet goods with panel saws and sliding table saws is going to help you. That is the equivalent of learning how to restore cars by getting a job at an automaker... it isn't going to help you.

Nor do I think classes are going to help you. Again, they are going to teach a method of building a cabinet using some tools or systems and that is great if they happen to be the same tools you have available and worthless if not. In my opinion, you would be better off spending time on Youtube and money on sheet goods to practice.

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There are two things to master to make cabinets... (1) building boxes and (2) finishing/painting. Finishing/painting is far more difficult to master than building boxes.

Cabinets are just a series of boxes. Cabinets are boxes, cope and stick doors are small boxes and slab doors are one side of a box, drawers are boxes... they are just boxes. They are no harder to make than any other large box. I have seen guys build great looking cabinets with a table saw, a pocket hole jig, a drill, some screws and glue.

I personally don't like running large sheet goods through my table saw, so I use a track saw. To get perfect 90 degree cuts I use a copy of the Festool MFT table that I made with the UJK Parf guide system. This allows me to use a full 4' x 8' table rather than the smaller MFT table, but any geometrically accurate bench dog system will work. Making cabinets is really just about making sure your 90° are actually 90° and not 89.5°. Once you can get a 36" tall rectangle with four 90° corners you have mastered cabinetmaking, everything else is about making it more efficient.

Finishing cabinets is a whole other story and can be much more difficult.