Business Owner General

If you are interested in checking out the latest equipment, business models, attractions, etc. I recommend going to an IAPPA convention.

Nice.

Yeah doing brick would probably have been a better money maker for me, but it's heavier labor and you have to consider the weather.

Good living though. Especially if you can get some Mexicans to so the work.

I'm an anxiety prone person so IDK if the stress of expansion is worth the $$$

>10 people
>$250k gross sales

yikes is it even worth the trouble?

bumping for interest, kudos on all you guys

>Anyone have any experience hiring an employee from a temp agency before?

I have and its a double edged sword. You get to try people out before actually hiring them, and if they dont work out you just call the agency and say "dont send them back, get me someone new tomorrow" and the agency takes care of the rest. Also nice you dont have to worry about payroll for them.

The downside is the fees the agency charges if you end up hiring the person. Its usually 15-30% of their first years salary which isnt cheap depending on how much they will make. (My last hire from an agency was for a very experienced Network Engineer and the fee to bring him on from the agency was a shade under 20k)

My best friend from high school owns his own general contractor business. He scalps all his employees from other companies he has worked with. I personally find that a little distasteful, but at the same time, its a whole hell of a lot cheaper

(Coin operated machines.) Low to medium traveled state highway. Bear a rock quarry. Would a well lit gravel lot and a few vendibg machibes make any money? Are they hard to work on? Will people tare up my shit???

Thanks, I have done quite a bit of historic restoration in the past but for my own business, the majority of my work has been on buildings built within the last 30 years. Most of the larger historic work is up for public bid and the jobs are just out of my league in terms of cost and man-power.

It can be pretty labor intensive. Fortunately I do A LOT of sealant repair and replacement (pic related). That is my bread and butter with seriously good margins. And it is not nearly as hard on my back. It is all still seasonal though and I can't tell anyone with indoor work to wait until it rains or until the winter months....

That's exactly what I've been debating. I like the idea that if someone doesn't work out I can replace them immediately and I don't have to worry about payroll or withholding taxes or workman's comp. And I figure, most people who are working for a temp agency are actively looking to work and won't flake out. Ideally, I could keep the same employee from the temp agency for a year or whatever the agency's minimum period is without a hiring fee. Then, scoop up the employee and worry about the paperwork then.

bump. I'd much rather have this up than meme coins.

>Ideally, I could keep the same employee from the temp agency for a year or whatever the agency's minimum period is without a hiring fee. Then, scoop up the employee and worry about the paperwork then.
Thats pretty much exactly how it is in Australia, or at least my experience of it.
Your agreement is with the recruitment agency - if you don't like the person you are fully able to fuck them off as soon as you want.
However, the persons hourly rate will be higher than if you just hired him yourself since the agency takes a cut.

How do I start a business? I would love to run a business, even a tiny one but I have no idea where to start...

Holy shit.
Idk what your margin is, but you must be paying everyone less than minimum wage.

From tropical MBA:

Year 1: Learn a skill
Year 2: Sell the skill
Year 3: Scale

Instead of freelancing, aim to turn your service into a product and sell that. Here are some examples: google.co.uk/amp/s/richardpatey.com/productized-services-script/amp/

This is the easiest way to start a business, I've found, because each step is so achievable. It really goes back to what the guy earlier was saying about hiring/scaling.

My question is..

How do i not be so lazy?

So I've started designing websites for people. I'm doing my first one (for free) and it's taken me nearly 2 months for an html + CSS + jquery + php webpage. There have been a lot of alterations and hurdles to traverse because I'm so new, and the client is older and isn't web-savvy. But it's still slow.

I'm 23 and finding that not having someone to look over my shoulder is surprisingly tough in terms of productivity.

Can someone lend some advice?

Bump.

Shitcoiners kys

> I could keep the same employee from the temp agency for a year or whatever the agency's minimum period is without a hiring fee.

Just so you know, at least for us, there was no time period for the fee to be waved. The only time period in the contract was that we were not allowed to hire him for 1 year after he stopped working for our agency. (Basically, he cant quit the agency on Friday, and start on Monday.) Technically I guess no one would know if you did it that way, but you could get into some shit if the agency finds out somehow

mobile dev here. what type of business should I open? LLC?

this

>I'm doing my first one (for free)
>and it's taken me nearly 2 months
>for free
>2 months

shit senpai what are you doing? you should have at least asked for $1000, never do this kind of work for free.
Also, get out of your comfort zone and stick to a schedule. Go to a uni library or somewhere quiet where there are no distractions, and work from there. When you are tired, learn some new technologies or build your own website.

Opened a burger bar in January. Averaging 30k per week with 25% net. AMA

Wtf mate. Explain yourself.

Also shitcoiner kys

I'm looking to make rings on a pair of manual lathes but I'm not sure how to go about getting them into jewelry stores. Any advice?

Uni libraries are for students only here, but i get your point.

I said id do it for free to get my foot in the door cos I've only been learning this stuff for 5-6 months. I definitely could've done it quicker though.

>you must be paying everyone less than minimum wage.
well he said 10 people, not 10 FTE's. So it's likely not all 10 are working full time.

I employ 14-16 people to do about 8 FTE's. I could conceivably just employ 8 people but then I have far less flexibility in scheduling and taking on new work. If I suddenly get more work it doesn't cost me anything to give part-timers a few more hours. Paying overtime or hiring more full time employees would be expensive, especially for a job that will run out eventually.

I also see he said he works "with" a company, which doesn't necessarily imply he owns that company.

Just like any other 9-5 job, you need to enforce a schedule for yourself and hold yourself accountable. Set an end date for this guys website and be done with it. That's what he gets for free. If he wants more alterations, then offer him to pay for your services. That might motivate you to work harder and faster.

Having a coach or mentor might be a good idea. Someone who can help you out from an outsiders perspective. Perhaps look into setting up an appointment at a SBDC (Small Business Development Center). These are in the US so not sure if applicable, but the people that volunteer here are mostly retired business professionals that help people with whatever is giving them trouble, whether it be patents, loans, importing, marketing, etc.

I'd start with an Etsy store or if you can develop some good pictures and marketing material, a kickstarter campaign. That might give you enough capitol to make a bunch to get the ball rolling. You definitely need to have booths at local fairs and craft shows.

Get into a sales mentality and put together some type of presentation material. It doesn't have to be fancy but something showing a store the margins they can expect to make, a catalog of your pieces, minimum order quantities, msrp, etc. Have those with you at every fair and show you go to. You never know who might walk through your booth and be interested in your pieces. You can also use marketing material at local businesses. Research stores in your area that your jewelry might fit in well at. Stop by in person and ask to talk to the owner or manager. Give them your pitch and ask for an opportunity to sell some of your product in their store. You might consider for your first few to provide them the jewelry for free and when it sells, they pay you your cut. Whatever it takes to get your foot in the door.

Freight Broker here. Taking over the biz my grandpa started 60 years ago. Dad took it to $890,000 annual net income. No employees, just gramps, dad, and me. But I'm soon to be taking over. FYI I'm only 20. Gramps is retiring. Dad is taking vacation for a year. Customers like dealing with me so no prob keeping them. I'm thinking I will be doing okay for having graduated high school in 2015 and never went to college

Automotive merchandise seller here.

I started late February, on track to do almost $1k next month, hoping to scale to a few $k/month by end of this year.

www.projecthoon.com

Happy to answer any questions!

What sealant do you use? I swear to you I have the GOAT outdoor sealant. It's a siloxane product. I did a stone on my dads back patio 2 years ago and its still glossy and the water still beads. It's called CEX100.

Also if you had used an epoxy grout filler that filled crack would have looked better and lasted longer. ; )

As long as a guy is not doing 5 days a week you can 1099 them for a few weeks and get away with it.

LLC 99% of the time. The others are for special situations

Over $4k per day in sales? And you're netting 25 percent?

Get fucking real.

Dropshipper?

I left Veeky Forums for maybe a year and it's gotten bad, real bad, nothing but coin shilling now

No. I design the stickers, buy them in bulk, then resell them individually basically.

Each sticker costs with shipping anywhere from $1.50-$3.00 with shipping, I take delivery, package all the orders, and send them out.

>pic related

...

Not trying to be a dick, but how do you even find a market for this? It sounds like you're doing ok, aren't these just stickers for your cars?

Market is huge, every car enthusiast is a potential client, people love putting stickers on their cars, it's another form of expression, like custom wraps, or paint jobs.

Check out cardrugs.com, the guy makes thousands in one night when he releases, he sells out in minutes, and that's sort of what I'm trying to mimic.

Nice. Believe it or not there was a point where I was considering niche bumper stickers, even had the site and identity finished, but I didn't think the margins were there.

Well, there are definitely niches to fill, but they get crowded quickly, you have to find a style that is different, or appears different than any others. People don't mind buying similar things, in this space, it's all about getting to clients first, and building a relationship.

I send reminder messages for when to check your mailbox, obviously I can't do that once I grow, but for now I can totally swing it.

I'm trying to get more $ to build up a large inventory, of like 25 of each design at all times so I can keep up with demand.

The toughest thing about this was getting the name out there to people, I sold at low losses or very minute profit so in the beginning, and then increased the pricing as more and more people received the stickers.

Once people started sharing the stickers to their followers, the sales started to become more organic.

Once people receive my next batch in about 2 weeks I'm expecting another surge in orders, because thousands of people will be seeing them.

I also selected a few accounts and provided them free stickers in exchange for cool pictures which I used to market.

I started this business with $100 USD, invested $150 more, and so far I've made it all back, and used it to supplement my next batch, which will bring nearly $1k on its own.

Once I have more designs available, it'll lead to larger order quantities, and right now my average order quantity is $15 or 2-3 stickers.

Do you just do stickers? I found bumper stickers ridiculously pricey for the initial risk I would've had to take. Basically I considered what you did, buy wholesale quantities, but I didn't want to be stuck with the inventory or risk without the customer base.

I started with stickers yes, but I'm going to expand into air fresheners, then fabric embroidered key tags, and eventually clothing.

I only started with 2 designs, for $75 USD, pretty much all the money I had lying in PayPal, I thought fuck it and just went for it.

I went in prepared to lose it, but I knew I only had to make maybe 15 sales of $5 (where I started) to make it back, I thought I could do even 5 sales and I'd consider it an accomplishment.

I began without the base as well, just check my Instagram and look at the progress, then check the tagged photos of me and see people that bought them and shared them.

It's all about getting the brand into as many people's hands as possible, the design doesn't even have to be good if you're curious, just has to be okay, and people will love it because they paid for it and because they saw people having it.

Then they'll share it, and you'll get an order or two from their followers who will then in turn share it.

It just takes a few weeks when you begin, but what I've learned is showing me that once you have a few people sharing pics of it, it'll just lead to more orders.

There are people that do minimum quantities for stickers as well, my guy does 25 minimum, but others do 6 minimum (at bulk order pricing).

I use a few different types of sealant depending on the situation. Silicone, I prefer DOW. Urethane, I prefer Sika. CEX1000 is a SEALER, not a SEALANT. It is applied by spray or rolled/painted on. I replaced the sealant (caulking). The building moves and breathes in relation to the weather and humidity and needs a material that flexes with the building walls. They purposely put in expansion joints (the joint I caulked) to prevent cracking throughout the brick when the building expands and contracts. An epoxy grout is too strong of a material to use in that particular situation. It should be used to anchor pieces together. I appreciate you offering advice though.

When it comes to a professional business, I prefer to play by the rules. I'll be working my employees 5 days a week and can afford to treat them as employees and not independent contractors.

I've had quite the hiatus myself. Reddit has a better business section imo and has none of the shill threads.

>When it comes to a professional business, I prefer to play by the rules.
lol

and that's how you spot a future millionaire.

you can work subs legally, and it can benefit both you and them. Just make sure if you choose that route everyone agrees it's fair.

I personally like not taking workman's comp out of their pay because they subbed and signed the waiver. Doesn't cost me a dime and saves them a fortune.

also liability insurance since my ins will cover them at my cost. Saves them a ton of money as contractors and it doesn't cost me much because I have to have insurance anyways.

How do I start? Design skills are good, I just dont know how many to buy initially or from where. Hold my hand ;-;

You need to start thinking in terms of setting up your own templates so that when 'that problem' comes around again you have a shortcut. This is the bread and butter of design companies. Once you have shortcuts built and ready to go - you charge the same amount, or undercut your competition a little if you can handle it. Then you have a list of clients that are happy - rinse and repeat. Take the extra time you save to R&D new shit.

>2 months for an html + CSS + jquery + php webpage.

>Can someone lend some advice?

Sell Wordpress websites using pre-made themes instead of custom built html sites. You can set them up in a day and sell them for $500+ a pop.

Send me an email using the contact page on the site

projecthoon.com/contact

It's 5AM so I'll reply when I'm awake

Ok i will look in to this, thank you. I'm in the UK so while we're not quite as pro-business as the US, there still might be something

Ok, this makes a lot more sense. In part i was trying to do the whole thing from scratch so my skills improved also.

Noted. There's a guy on reddit/fastlaneforum making $10k a month doing just this.

>1976287
How do you advertise your biz though? How do people know about it?

When we first opened we were doing over 50k a week - now 3months they hype has died down and now we average 30k and see net returns between 20-25%

Found a niche, went oldschool american burgers in a city that had nothing to compare to. Plus we sell alcohol too. Only open for lunch close up for 3hrs and reopen for dinner. Only open 6 days too.

$1,000 just selling stickers? Anything else? My bro runs all over middle north america to car shows. He may be a seller for some of your shit for a oercentage or hand out cards?

No shit. Im leaving too if my filters keep sucking

Nice work user. Grats.

Run a pharma company in a third world shithole pulling in ~5 million a year.

Instagram, I follow people who follow other stickershops, then selectively like their pictures at random times.

I keep track of when people are most active and post designs at that time.

My packaging also reminds people to shout me out so I can get the brand out there.

Just stickers, I'm on track, haven't done it yet, so far I've done $500 over mid march to mid April. All on pre orders too lol, but yeah.

Once I'm larger I do want to send to people to sell for me but I cant afford the inventory for that yet, it'll take a couple months to even have a few thousand in profits because I'll likely put that $1k back into the business for more stickers.

Are you a child molester?

Your shop looks very fresh and crisp, no bullshit. Good focus on your lineup.
If I might drop you a tip it'd be to set out a FAQ or "About us" page when you have some free tinker time. I assume most of your buyers would know you through instagram but as a random visitor I'm pretty clueless who the heck I'd be dealing with. If you're smart in your sprinkling of keywords it'll even double as good SEO work. Contact forms are cool and all when you need to solve snail mail type issues - but who really uses those things for Q&A these days.

Thanks for the kindred words, I had a page like that but I found myself adding to it constantly so I decided to remove it and just wait until I have some type of idea of what "we are" to share with people, but yeah it's in the works most definitely.

Went out and got a bunch of labels today, which will make my life easier individually packaging everything

Same as the other user, I really like your shop and the niche you found.
Also you seem to be dedicated and to have a very clear vision of your grow path. I have no doubts that you'll make your way.

What I really like about the other shop (cardugs) is their segmentation into "series". This gives a feeling of "Ok, they put out new stuff regularly and I can easily find what is the latest stuff." Though the claim "series" might be a bit worn off now.

Another thing is, they have ALL their portfolio there incl what is available and what is not. This gives a feeling of "This sticker is sold out? Other people must really love this." Maybe it is an option to just put some "sold out" variants in your shop. Withou ever having printed them. Some designs that you have in the drawer.

source: someone who also likes stickers

Bump taking a shower, will be back soon

First, if any of you like the stickers and want to get one just use the code " BIZ " for a special discount!

Once I move to Shopify I'm going to split my drops in "Waves" as well, I didn't do it now because I started with BigCartel and design in here is tricky, you don't have "full control" over the CSS and HTML on every page.

Also, another deterrent was that I only started with 2 designs, one of which was lost in the mail, and just selling 1 thing as part of a wave was not exactly something I felt would give people the right impression at the time, so I put the product front and centre since I didn't want to waste people's time.

Now with my third wave coming up at the end of next month, I'll be releasing 5 new designs this time, I'm planning to release 5 at a time every month until I grow enough to warrant spending double the $ for 10. I'm thinking this will only take like 3 months, but then the fall season starts and I'm guessing sales will decline because people will start putting their cars away and won't want to buy stickers that they can't stick until next spring.

The idea about the sold out designs is a nice suggestion, I'll implement it tonight!

I'm looking for a way to show some "sold out" banners over the products that are sold out, or on sale, since my theme on BigCartel right now doesn't support that, so I may have to learn how to do it in their CSS, the easy way is just to add some text to the images themselves in the corners in as an a e s t h e t i c way as possible.

ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

I'm having a hard time believing you.

But anyway, how much $ does the average customer spend?

I made x5 my networth from holding pivx and ltc. Gave some money to parents and told my mommy and daddy I trade stocks. Reality is I trade shitcoins and hold them. I have no idea what im soing apart from buying at the bottom of a trendline and when the macd has bottomed out kek. Parents and friends think im a high iq stock trade but im just an autistic neet who buys shitcoins shilled on Veeky Forums.

Hello friend, you seem to have missed all the shitcoin threads and ended up in the business owner thread. Fear not, you can still change your ways, either by brainstorming and commenting on related topics with us or by clicking your way back into a shitcoin thread. Much love and prosperity.