So you’re a budding entrepreneur, eh? I’ve certainly met quite a few of you before. You’re looking to start a business, something more tangible than a software startup or an online store. You seem to find yourself leaning towards starting a new brick-and-mortar store. Maybe that doesn’t seem like the most modern, high-tech way to make your money these days. But what does that matter as long as you can still get customers in the door, right?
New retail businesses are still popping up all over the place. Not all have been successful, of course. But the severe decline in “real” stores that a lot of people keep saying is going to happen? Well, it’s not quite happened yet. There’s still plenty of gold to be found with this venture!
But before you start plunging yourself into this world, you need to ask yourself some tricky questions.
Is there a marketplace desire for what you want to sell?
A lot of people start retail businesses because they want to sell a particular item, or type of item. They’re not just blindly going into this just because they want some money. They have a particular idea about what this store is going to be. Maybe you want to sell music CDs. Maybe you want to sell video games. Maybe you want to sell vegan cakes. Whatever it is, you can’t just trust that the market is going to be as passionate about a given product as you are. You need to do some market testing.
Do you know how you’re going to get the money for this?
Hey, breaking news: starting a business isn’t cheap! You know this, of course. Everyone does. But a lot of people don’t quite understand the intricacies of getting their hands on the capital they need. An alarming amount of people think they can just go to Kickstarter with their idea and get all the money they need. But you need to sit down and research this heavily. Whatever funding route you want to take, it’s going to be more complicated than you think. Not that this is always a bad thing, of course. Let’s take business loans, for example. It’s not quite as easy as “getting a business loan”. There are lots of different types of loans. But this may work out in your favor because there are specific loans for funding retail!
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Are you ready for the demands of retail?
Don’t think that you can immediately hire a bunch of employees and not get into the nitty-gritty work yourself. When you first set up your store, you’re going to be doing a lot of work on the front line. If you’ve worked in retail before, then that will be a big advantage. (There are skills from other disciplines that can come in handy, of course.) You need to think about the sorts of problems that a retail worker will likely face. Working late hours and throughout the Christmas season? Yep. Having to deal with shoplifters? Aye. Having to interact with lots and lots of, y’know, actual people? Oh, yes. You need to be prepared for it all!
This article was provided by ellie jo