Welcome to the Young Wood Pro 2025 competition. For those of you just now discovering it and tuning in for the first time, I’m glad you found it. I hope that this contest can serve you well by offering a wide range of insight, knowledge, and perspective. 

For those of you who have followed along over the years, welcome back. This year I hope that you find your continued interest is rewarded with some new and expanded ways of informing you about getting a woodworking business up and running along with methods that have brought others success. Again, this year, I am the host of this competition and also one of the judges. This is my third consecutive year of doing so, and it is an honor to return and serve in these roles again.

For all the new ears and eyes, it is most important that I give you a quick overview of what this contest is. 

Let’s all improve together
This is a contest for young woodworking professionals who are getting started in their woodworking business endeavor, with the contest aiming to spotlight and celebrate their work. The contest itself depends on photo submissions to be judged for rewards and prizes. 

It really is that simple. It is an amazing opportunity to have your work recognized and honored. It’s an opportunity to win! Over the last couple years, it has also established itself as being more than just another contest. 

The Young Wood Pro has become an opportunity to gather information, experience, and perspective to help all aspiring professional woodworkers on their journey. The program fosters an ongoing dialogue focusing on the professional aspects of running a woodworking business. 

Anyone at any age who has the boldness to pursue this line of work has my most sincere respect and we all learn from each other. I have had feedback from woodworkers of all ages stating they have gotten something from our content. Being a part of it and watching what this contest has become, I am even more excited to see where it is going. 

 
New approaches
Returning viewers, thank you for being a part of this. I want you to know there will be some new approaches in 2025 mixed in with what we’ve previously been doing for the contest and online content. It has been my hope to add a more interactive layer to what we have been doing over the last two years. This year we will be doing just that.

I have written and spoken in over 20 Young Wood Pro-themed articles and videos over the last two years. We’ve discussed a large array of different experiences and perspectives that I have learned in my professional career. The majority of all of these can be found online at https://www.woodworkingnetwork.com/community/young-wood-pro.

In the spirit of keeping it fresh this year, my plan is to offer a wider lens of experiences from other successful professionals and former contest winners. Not only will I continue to write articles and provide monthly videos, but the content in both of them will also include these interviews with others as well. 

This will include a new addition of an occasional Young Wood Pro Podcast where an audio version of interview and discussions with former winners and professional will be available. I am extremely excited with the new broad approach and cannot state how happy I am to not have to talk about myself all the time. 

My favorite thing about my role as host is when I get a chance to sit down and connect with someone else who shares the same passion and love of woodworking while being of help to them from my experience. It has also been one of the best ways to for me to grow, learn, and improve as a business owner and woodworker as well.

I strongly encourage you to continue tuning in. 

For those of you who are considering entering this year’s contest, I promise you that that the helpful advice and information will be made available about how to best submit your pics. Since I am also one of the judges on the panel of this competition, I plan on highlighting these former winners in ways that offer insight into why they won and how they went about it. 

On top of that, we will also talk about their experiences since winning and anything else that might be a value to you as a learning opportunity to help you as an aspiring professional woodworker. That includes more tips and information that they have found helpful or learned along their path. The focus this year is to add to a bigger collective of experience for the betterment of all of our success. I look forward to sharing this next year with everybody so please keep tuning in.

#YoungWoodPro is a contest and an educational program sponsored by Grizzly Industrial to help novice professionals improve their skills in business and woodworking. Entries will open soon for the 2025 contest. Learn more about the 2024 winner and finalists.