THE IDEA:
It all started with my mom and her telling me that she was sick and tired of running her ebay business out of our house and having it full of crap all the time. she mentioned thinking of buying a place in agency (tiny little town that we live next to) to put her store in, they wanted too much and that never went anywhere.
fastforward ~6 months, we are still sick of the above and i come up with the idea of finding a place in downtown ottumwa (the big town that is slightly further away than agency and actually a decent sized city of 25k or so) because the downtown area is pretty empty and there are buildings that might be available. then she mentioned the idea of me having a shop area in her store, this got the ball rolling so to speak.
PLANNING
I instantly fell in love with the idea of owning and operating my own store, a friend of mine owns a store downtown and does relativly well at it so i made it my first priority to go talk to him about various ideas i had and to find out more about possibly available buildings.
From what i learned a building was going to run us somewhere around 30 thousand dollars possibly as low as 25 or less if we play our cards right, it sounds like a lot but most houses cost a good deal more than this! and here is the OTHER reason i fell in love with the idea so readily. nearly all of the buildings downtown have at least one or more apartments above them, some as many as 4! we fix up the building and finish the apartments, i live in one and we rent out the others, BOOM alternative income! that keeps operating costs down. plus i have dozens of other ideas that i can and will impliment as time goes on
THE STORE
My store will be primarily videogame sales and trade-ins. i will stock everything from the classics (snes nes genesis etc) to the brand spanking new stuff (pswii60 so to speak). will of course also sell accessories and guides and things like that and possibly things like R4 DS m3 simply, modchips etc. you might say, "hey triton how ever are you going to afford all that stuff!" i have no idea!
YET, probably a loan for the initial stock, and i have numerous sources to get newer games and systems for a fraction of retail price (think sub 50% retail price or less) but require large up front payments for lots of items (in the hundred to thousands of dollars range) so i am still working out how to pay for the stuff to put in the store. another thing i am thinking about stocking and selling are CDs and LPs and computer games hardware etc and POSSIBLY offering a custom PC building service and minor PC repair (data recovery, virus removal and crap) at some point in the futureim going to cut it short(lol) here. this is only a small sample of what i have goin on in my head about this at present. any ideas and suggestions are MORE than welcome, i need all the help i can get to make this a gods honest reality!
I will do my best to answer any and all questions about this as well!
,seriously though get a good supplier and make sure they can keep you supplied, lots of businesses fall over and die because of lack of stock. a good accountant will help you in the long run as well.
