Quote:
Originally Posted by Izulde
How likely would it be that you'd be able to increase the sales to the level you need at each location?
Furthermore, which location do you think has the highest upside for your particular target customer base?
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I believe I'd be able to increase sales in 45-60 days at the first place to cover the first and probably 180-210 days at the other place.
For upside, if I was needing 100% store driven sales, it would be the one with the higher lease. I'm targeting a 50%/50% split within 1 year though starting at 100% internet/0% retail location at day 1.
The area I'm looking at, there really is no anchor store that would drive traffic. The main store is a hardware store and my client base would be 180 degrees from that target base. The town doesn't have any malls or super large strip malls (most are clusters of 4-5 spread out).
There was a similar business next door to where I'm looking at downtown that went out of business. However, I don't think that is a good gauge because I believe it was poorly run. The person started with $80K in inventory/debt, bought a bunch of stuff, sold it and never replaced it. I don't care what business you do, if you don't get in new stuff and sell the original inventory to pay bills and your debt, you are dead in the water anyways. There always seemed to be 10-12 people in the store when I was in there though. (Now, how many were spending, I don't know).
I know location is important, but assuming that just because I'm in X location, I'm going to get all this drive by traffic to come in is just as bad think that if I'm in Y location, I'm going to get no traffic.
My friend said that if cost was a concern, should wait a year. For me, if the other place makes more sense financially, I could go there, build up the internet base more and see what happens on the retail side. Waiting a year seems like lost time and right now, I'm almost capped out at what I can do without going to the retail side.
I could probably ask 10 business owners and would probably get 10 different answers unfortunately.