Got two questions:
1. Got a choice between Tavern and Workshop now. Which one should I get if I am looking for money-making building?
2. Following to above: how to best optimize each of them?
For now I've been living from investments, poker games and bounties. About time I start getting serious scratch.
You can have both. There are two external plots so in theory you can build one as a tavern and one as a workshop.
I am not up to date on tavern optimization. All I did was turn gambling on, made sure that my bartender is good (Doyle and Ansel have innate bonuses, Doyle is an extrovert and pretty smart from the get go, and his advanced age), and got my assigned NPCs different jobs. The job assignment in the tavern is random but you can control it by controlling your NPCs' melee, ranged, domestic, willpower, and dancing/performance stats. Then comes the part of raising tavern reputation up to 1000. I did a bit of carousing there too to help raise the reputation faster.
For the Workshop, you set it to Manufacturing, you assign high discipline NPCs as workers (be on the lookout for the Workaholic trait from your random captures), you assign an intelligent foreman (needs to be a servant, slaves can no longer become foremen, so you can free some slaves if you want), and you wait one day. After that the workshop will generate production points. It will generate more the more upgrades you have and the higher the average worker discipline is. Tech points require certain tools and machinery upgrades. You use the production points generated as well as materials you can buy discounted from Aimee's Goods in Stokke Hills to create knives, rifles, or auto rifles. Knives are sold next door to the market. Rifles and auto rifles sell more in Hamah Bay. The trip there costs money and, more importantly takes, a lot of time so what you can do is create rifles/auto rifles for 7 days, go to Hamah Bay, sell it, go up and kill the two respawning charucks for some stat gains and 60 meat each, and go home. The charucks respawn in 5-7 days, enough time for you to hoard more rifles/auto rifles and sell them. Be on the lookout for market saturation. When you sell too much of one item (market supply says ~15k iirc), it will hit market cap and you will earn much less money from selling more until the market saturation has went down again.