Just found out I have a huge opportunity to start a company. There's a graphic design company in my city that my girlfriend is essentially inheriting. They do all kinds of things, most notably vinyl wraps for business vehicles. My plan is to take that service, and change the context to suit car culture and start doing pearl/satin/matte/chrome wraps on cars. Wraps are, for the most part, pretty expensive. So my idea is to start small, reach a good quality level at a fair price and then when a decent amount of business picks up and reputation is good, just go full blown and open a shop with it. Only problem is I have no experience with wrapping, and I know next to nothing about it. I'm currently an auto tech working 40 hour work weeks and I've always wanted to be my own boss and have a busines. Anyone on here own a wrap business or experienced in that field? What are some things I should avoid and some things I won't be able to go without? Thanks for any help.
Just found out I have a huge opportunity to start a company...
Just to clarify, your girlfriend is inheriting an operating business with a built up customer base, and your plan, even though you know nothing about the business, is to change the business into something else that you also don't know anything about, and your first thought is to ask Veeky Forums
from what i understand its not that hard with the right tools
its taking the shit apart and putting it back together uniformly where shits gets real, really quick
practice on hoods and move up from there
Same here. It doesn't look that complicated, but I can't figure out why the cost is so high if labor isn't super intensive. From what I've seen on the commercial vehicles, you stretch a giant sticker over it and then go over the gaps with a razor blade and fold the excess. Then boom, you have a wrap.
The way I see it, every man I meet is in some way my superior and there's bound to be someone on the auto board who knows more about this than I do. I waste plenty of time on here anyway, figured it was worth a shot.
First, keep the business the way it is, assuming it's profitable.
Make this special-finish wrap project a side project. Throwing away a rather steady customer base for one as fickle as ricer fags and douchebag bros is a good way to end up broke.
One of my best friends owns a wrap shop.
If you have any specific question I don't mind asking him.
That was my initial plan. Expand the customer base, not eliminate the old one. I should have been more clear I guess.
>car culture
>people irl
It's like inviting 90% shitposter into your real life and deal with them
You want the truck wrap business. I just had quotes done on our five large diesel truck ans it was obscene how much they charged.
If you pursue the truck wrap business, think about this. You could start hitting up local cities to put ads on their busses. If you really wanted a stretch goal- what about finding businesses that want to sell ads, and also find customers who want to put wraps on thier buses, etc. You could be the middleman and manufacture the adspace..
Just a few basic questions. What didn't he expect from the wrap business? What's something no wrap business is successful without? What was his lowest point and how did he overcome? What's the best way to advertise premium wraps and what market is the best?
That's actually a fantastic idea! I'll definitely have to see if anything can happen in that department, especially being the middleman.
You should itasha your car and use it to advertise the shop. Preferably use a loli.
Solid stuff, I like the outside the box thinking.
Really I wanted to start small, wrapping hoods and fenders and trunks for Honda fags. My girlfriend goes to SCAD which is a pretty prestigious design school from what I gather. Meaning, if she can design it we can put it on a vinyl. I was thinking small time jobs like carbon fibre or sticker bomb patterns to gain experience before moving to full body wraps. Or practice on my own car, my business partner who I plan to bring in on this idea drives a 350z and I drive a G35 coupe, so I thought we could start by wrapping our cars and using the company logo to be a mobile advertisement.
First learn what materials there are for car wraps. At my workplace there's a catalog with about 10 pages of different materials for wrapping vehicles. From high-end "permanent" stuff that lasts for a couple years to garbage-tier stuff you charge them pennies for and it bleaches in the sunlight in a few days.
Personally I say don't focus completely on vehicle wraps. Do commercial wraps, Including window clings, the machine you'd buy for graphic wraps just needs a material roll swap and you're doing someone's front window display and charging them the same amount with a fraction of the labor cost. Just remember to charge them on the footage, because that's what the materials cost. Good luck figuring out the hourly cost you'll charge and be prepared to trim your profit margins if there's ANYONE nearby that can or already does these sort of things.
Tl:dr - Figure out what types of vinyl there is and what price you wanna pay, expand outside of cars for extra income.
Don't put your company's info on a car if you drive like an asshole.
>There's a graphic design company in my city that my girlfriend is essentially inheriting. They do all kinds of things, most notably vinyl wraps for business vehicles.
More like the GF has to keep the businesses coming to use her company's services. Or else the employees will talk to each other, walk out, and create a new company and poach the business clients. This has happened more than once in the history of the USA where the heir to a company tries to change focus or rape the company for short term profits or listens to a bad advisor (in this case YOU).
Your first concern if you loved this girl and cared about the company as an entity that supported people with jobs AND benefits and subsidized medical care, is that you should keep it going to be bigger than ever in its chosen field.
Once you do that, you can take over the next door building, knock a hole in the wall, and then share the tools on a favorable lease plan with the GF's company. Lease the tools at 10% of the normal rate. That will let you get another semi-related business started AS AN EXPANSION and not a focus change. This new company starts off with tinting of business vehicles using bulletproof (anti carjack) UV tint coatings of 5%. It also does the bigger wraps for semi-trucks if you dare expand into that. Many of them may want wrap repair too.
Don't ditch the original user base. Expand, don't change.
You have to heat-shrink it on. I've seen it done where I work; they just showed up one day and re-wrapped the back and sides of whatever vans were parked in the right place, just sticking it on over the old one, dirt and holes and everything, just to update the advertising.
What could possibly go wrong....
>What could possibly go wrong....
OP said he is bringing in friends as business partners. That is a mistake. OP sounds like he wants to buy coolness with "friends" by making them business partners in his GF's business.
Are you selling her out? She is not even your wife yet. And you are acting like it is all your business already when you did nothing to earn it or build up knowledge to perform the actions of business management, wrapping technical work, managing existing business relationships, and obtaining new business,
You're like the uneducated greedy kid in the candy store.
Those new partners are going to sue you and either kill the business requiring a greenmail buyout, or they will deliberately wreck the business so that they can make a new one and take over the clients once they learn how from your GF, her existing presumably loyal staff, and you. Stop trying to bring your other friends aboard as partners in your GF's business.
>What could possibly go wrong....
OP is taking the continued existence of the company for granted with his "daydreams". That is what is wrong. It's not even his company but his girlfriend's.
OP is acting as if he comes up to one of us and tells us how we are to run out company with him as a partner. Furthermore, he tells us that he will add his friends partners to our company.
So many things are wrong with that kind of approach. Obviously, the business was going fine before OP came along. It only needs the GF to come up to speed as the real true full owner.
She can then find a genuine rich boyfriend and they can then work together to co-invest in a separate company that leverages the expertise of the cisting company but into new fields as mentioned by others in this thread. This keeps the original company solvent in case of failure of the new company.
But OP wants to put the original company at risk with strange expansion ideas.
alright my dude, this is a terrible idea to rush into for many reasons.
my experience comes from a large scale detailing business that also sells cars, does wraps/dips/clearbras, and repairs.
I'm literally watching it fall apart around me. thankfully im not tied up in it financially.
I don't even know where to start except DONT HIRE YOUR FRIENDS
the last thing a growing business needs is a bunch of dumbasses on the pay roll that dont do shit and take money from you
learn from us.
they start out and its fine, but it never works out
not to mention people definitely change. Your drinking buddy in highschool doesn't sound like a good candidate for a business partner
plus if its your girlfriend's inheritance, I'd leave it the fuck alone unless you got a ring on it. the last thing you should be doing is revamping it to fit what you want and risk many loyal, hardworking employees careers
This.
Why do you need business partners for an already working and presumedly profitable company?
Seems like you're making quite a few assumptions.
If the GF is smart at all, she'll just put the business up for sale, instead of having it run into the ground by a bunch of amateurs.
Never take on partners unless they're willing to put skin in the game. And putting in 5% of the company's value, isn't skin, it needs to be enough to hurt if things go wrong.
You don't even know what state the books of the business are in anyway. It could have the equivalent of a rusted out frame under the body and unless you get in under it and look, it'll look OK until it falls apart without warning.
What YOU want to do may not be the most profitable or the most in demand of what the graphic design company already sells.
If I were her BF, I'd just stay out of it and keep working my job unless I knew the domain of expertise well. If she asked me for help, I'd help her, but the first thing I'd look at is what sells the most and what has the highest profit margins and go from there.
What I wanted to do wouldn't even come into it AT ALL, I'd look at what the most people were paying the most for - and expand that.
Maybe that's signage. Maybe that's ad flyers and promo posters. Maybe it's wrapping busses with ads as a previous poster pointed out. Maybe it's web page work. Do you even know the books of the company? You want to run a business and you have no idea how to do it.
You want your own business? You're an auto tech already? Just open up a fucking garage already and hang your shingle out.
had a mate who used to work at a wrapping place, most customers will be wanting wraps for fleet vehicles, "car enthusiasts " make up a small portion of the customer base , and they often don't have the same cash to pay for said services as small business do.
I've dealt with a few different wrap people through my work. From what I've seen there's two kinds of shops-
For the auto enthusiast type shop to stay afloat you need to do clear wrap, high quality color wraps, and detail. Most of the one shops business is dealership/repair shop referral clear wraps.
On the other side is a place that as you said does mostly commercial advertising wraps. They need to be competent with design as well as the physical wrapping. Nobody goes to this shop to just get their car wrapped in a different color.
I don't really see there being much crossover between the two types of shops, sounds like OP's girlfriends shop is the latter but he wants to do the former.
>but he wants to do the former.
He also wants to impress his friends by bringing in the friend as a partner in the GF's business along with himself.
I think he is greedily counting his chickens before they have hatched. If OP was a girl, and the GF with the business was a guy, all of us would say this is a "gold digger" situation.