Can we get a business owner's thread? What's going on with your business user's?

Can we get a business owner's thread? What's going on with your business user's?

I have a tile company. Lay tiles in kitchens and baths. Been posting on Veeky Forums for about 2 years now. Made about $60k last year, which I was pretty happy with because I only worked 3 or 4 days a week.

Shooting for $70k this year.

Business is in a bit of a slump right now. I'm hoping it's just because kids just went back to school. But next week I need to get some reviews set up on HomeAdvisor and Angie's List. Also I'm gonna put some flyers on people's mailboxes.

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>e-commerce seller, mainly amazon
>sell one product in 2016
>sell one product in 2017
>lazy as fuck
>only make $10k last year
>this year, project to make $100k off of womens products.

What kind of women's products?

Any tips for being successful as an Amazon seller?

>sell stuff on eBay
>$2200 in sales this month

it's pretty piddly, but combine that with my cryptogains, I'll clear 150k on the year.

...

etsy shop
-150% already this month.

What do you sell?

Consumables like soap, lotion and weight loss pills.
Basically need to find markets where the competition isn't as high as well as specializing your products.
Selling generic wont cut it. You need to sell something 1-10% of people who buy lotion will know about.
You need upfront capital to purchase items from overseas.
I suggest using Fulfillment by Amazon, instead of shipping each order. This will guarantee buy box eligibility, and people who use prime will get their shipping free.

So you just buy these products from oversea websites and sell higher for profit on ebay?

Buy low and sell as high as you can.
Source lotion from china for $2.00
Slap a nice sticker on it, mention natural and organic and sell it for $9.99

ecom as well. i use shopify

have suppliers in china. found them through alibaba. used them to make fully custom private label clothing

major problem with china suppliers is the communication and quality. they're not very detail oriented and if you nitpick certain details you will be able to find some defects. the language barrier is an issue too. i'll most likely will be switching to turkey/bangaladesh/or hungary suppliers soon. quality is better but they are also slower

garment manufacturer in los angeles. on a great year can make 1 nmillion before taxes ( i hope trump fixes the tax code for S corps to be @ 15 that would be awesome). currently have about 80 employees running 12 hour shifts im hella tired. i am 30 my father started the company and i work my balls off to maintain it. currently have 200k in receivables my dumbass accountant is taking forever to collect looking like a good year and take home about 600 after tax. not sure how much longer i want to work as this takes alot of energy out of me. already had an R8, Porsche, Lambo.. etc wanna just live comfy, hope to retire in two years fuck bitches and do coke in mexico

Nice sticker? I'm a graphic designer, should I just make my own custom labels? And then what, get em printed? Doesn't the cost of all that outweigh the profit?

t. brainlet

But what about the time it takes to create and manage the listings. And the time and money to package products and ship them?

Is it worth it?

That's awesome.

I can't imagine how hard it would be to start a garment manufacturing company.

Yes, create your own custom labels and register a brand on Amazon. It costs about $0.20/label on printrunner.com (where I buy because of the free shipping) and cheaper in bulk.
Here's an example analysis pertaining to amazon as well:

Purchase 1000 ($2.00 ea)
Shipping from China to USA $1,000 ($1.00 ea)
$3.00 + $0.20 (label with UPC) = $3.20 after China.
Shipping to Amazon costs less than $0.20 each piece.
$3.20 + $0.20 = $3.40 after COGS
Expenses: 15% of revenue because of FBA fees, $1.00 for amazon to pack and ship my items (pick and pack fee)
$3.00 Expenses
Revenue per product is $9.99
COGS is $3.40
Expenses are $3.00
Profit $3.59 per product, or $3590 after selling my total inventory of 1,000.

I pay a highschool kid $50 for a few hours on the weekend to do it for me and UPS comes and picks it up the next day after we package it all.

forgot to include $0.50 in the Expenses for anything else that may occur like pickup fees. Hence $3.00 expenses

Not the owner but ops director for a tile startup. Two years we're making 2 mill a year now. AMA

Btw this time of year things go down a tad because of back to school you're right. Be wary of December/January too

What's the most effective way your firm obtains clients?

what type of garments?

got a website? might be interested in doing business with you

I buy/sell used Cisco gear. Basically you go to a small office, you sell them Routers, Access points, firewalls, phone system and so on. You configure it and hook them up with a support company, that takes care of problems in the future. It's a ~3mil/year operation and I have 5 employees.

did you create a brand? And you are essentially outsourcing your creation process to china, and receive the complete clothing?

yes that's correct

Referrals. Do a good job for your customers and make certain they love you. They'll refer you to everyone they know.

Don't waste your time with amazon op

A tile startup? I've never heard the word startup used in describing a contract business.

As in the company was brand new 2 years ago.

Why not use Amazon?

I develop a crypto coin

Going well

For a contractor it's garbage. The network takes too high a cut.

It is going OK. I manufacture and engineer products in China for American consumers. I'm an electrical engineer by trade so I offer PCB, plastic injection, assembly. Basically just offering a service for people looking to make their own products and sell on Amazon. Also do product sourcing for people looking to buy shit from China and sell to Amazon FBA.

sounds like my friend. jewish Persian, dad left him the garment business.

Nice, I have a retail store. Hit plenty of the shops in the district, going back on Monday.

Do about $700k/yr, clear $150k after everything. 12 employees total

>setup a crypto related business
>facilitate micropayments for 100s of coins
>realize how retarded crypto users are

For real though. You have no idea how unaware a lot of cryptocurrency users are.

>wrong address
>address for wrong coin
>leave off a letter or two at the end
>have no idea some coins are indivisible, they only exist as whole numbers
>they format it with weird dashes and spaces (site fixes this now but in the beginning it was unexpected)
>they complain about coin transaction fees as if we control it but want to make a ton of tiny transactions instead of just a big one

Honestly some of the most entitled clueless customers Ive ever dealt with in my entire life.

I only put up with it since im approaching 10k/mo. Otherwise Id probably shoot myself rather than to have to hold hands and educate people on what they are even doing while they disrespect my customer service staff and talk down to us.

Thats mostly the vocal minority and most people just use the service just fine and its a pleasure helping people but the loud minority, I have no clue how they even function day to day, like no one could realistically put up with people like this in RL.

Do you guys sell tile or do the installs?

Sounds like you're probably getting some commercial work.

In 3 years I have booked 1 commercial job (a country club bathroom). I don't fucking know why I can't get commercial jobs. Maybe because I'm small and big companies seek out big companies?

Ugh. It's driving me nuts. 2 months ago I was swamped. Now I have a whole week with no bookings....

Wish I had the computer knowledge to get into this kind of thing.

I get 70% of my customers from NextDoor. Shit is gold for contractors.

How do you get your customers though?

What do you earn per year?

We do installs. Not a ton of commercial work. Currently running 3 dedicated tile crews. Two 2-man shows and 1 individual guy.

And of course all the subs.

Noice.

I don't know how you do it.

I start guys at $15/hr and can work them all the way up to $20/hr.

And I've had trouble finding anyone who will do good work for that.

Oil and gas service company. B2B is frustrating B2P I would genocide

Retail store, home decor and shit. Close to 300k already this year. I am also purchasing my building. I have 3 other businesses that pay rent to me. We also built a condo in the back part of the building so I do not have a house payment either. We have a few part time employees that do the grunt work and I fuck off on the internet shitposting and buying btc. AMA.

Sub contract, my friend.

They say brick and mortar is dying. Your thoughts?

Tile company sounds so comfy. If I'm not mistaken you spent about 3 months with a tile company and learned everything you needed to know? You learned how to estimate as well?

I tried doing this, but nobody was taking on guys. I got in pest control instead, and after 6 more months I can start my own business. Going to be really comfy profits with similar hours to yours (3 days a week if not less).

We carry a pretty unique assortment of items which you can't get any where else in town. We're located in a thriving downtown with plenty of foot traffic and tourism. I won't lie and say it's always sunshine and roses but we're closing in on 4 years of being open and I have some good data to draw from. For us, brick & mortar is holding steady.

ME here. Quit my VERY comfy office job making good money, and with great benefits after 4 years. It was draining, so I went into building with my father, and now I'm doing pest control. I'll start my own pest control business in 6 months and go back to building while growing the PC business.

Your job is a bit more intense with the almost dying once a summer, but you may or may not be fulfilled in the 9 to 5. The best breed of men I believe take risk.

Could you do a sort of "sub lease" on your permit and take a percentage? That way you can get the cushy office gig and save your body. I did a ton of construction early in life (not the same as fishing) and quickly realized that is not for me. What about option to run your boat for the fishing season and freelance your chemistry? Just spitballing here. Either way, good luck.

Selling digital goods in online games
Having a slump now because of the study year start
Feeling pretty comfy for my shitty country

Engineering Physics here. Couldn't find a decent job after I graduated, because I'm a mediocre engineer and a worthless physicist.
I design, build, repair and modify hydraulic/pneumatic/robotic/human/plc systems for industry. Just now starting my second year, after all expenses were covered I made off with close to $100k. However, that was at about $30 per hour worked + no pay for time spent traveling. My lower back has also started to hurt.

I personally would do the fishing job, and take the money to pay down my student loan.

Yep. that's exactly what I did.

Yeah pest control is great. Once you really get going and start building up those clients, that's easy fucking cash flow.

I'd say the only thing that worries me is that in a down market, lots of home contracting things suddenly become luxury's for most people and the work cuts down dramatically overnight.

IDK how people made it from 2008 to 2010.

FUCKING THIS. Get about three-five people to shill your company in the neighborhoods around town (one talking about their company, and the rest saying how they love it) and people will definitely call. My mom and all of her friends use Nextdoor and it is very active in my medium sized city

Prostitution ring where I kidnap girls and train them into prostitutes with my dick,

>currently have about 80 employees running 12 hour shifts im hella tired.
Wow!
good post.
What do you do about marketing? SEO? Do you buy on ads on Facebook? Are you good at gaming Amazon's searches?

This is a smart approach

A common mistake I see with newbies is that they are not working 6 days a week at least. I'm mostly a custom cabinet manufacturer (no installation/design for 80% of our projects -- designers handle that), and I can tell you that the guys that stick around on Saturday are the ones who didn't go out of business during the recession.

When building your business (since it is heavily network & referral based), you can just follow this simple strategy. Charge a below market price to make more money. I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but if you can perform better work than your competitors, at a lower price, you will drive them out of the market (this is especially important in a recession-like period). A lot of the people in the industry right now are complete noobs making decent money, but eventually the market will catch up and either the industry will get too saturated or a credit crunch will force competitors out. You need to position yourself well for this type of scenario. Remember, when your schedule/prospective client list is packed, then you can raise prices.

Good luck and I hope you position your company for growth instead of pissing your money away like most others in the industry. I know people who lost millions in the '08 recession because they got way too ahead of themselves.

So you're lying? Or are they actually organic?

good to hear,
I just started my side gig, also in LA - we do mostly custom garments embroidered fashion shit
d3vur.com
would love to collab or learn from your mistakes and/or get guidance in any way. I've yet to meet investors so it's LLC for me, will eventually look into S or C corp since I'm fuking burning out to be one-man everything in this biz shit...

Cisco will boom next 5 years, great move.
Whats your company legal structure ? LLC with sub contracts ? what type of insurance and regulations ?

Transportation, spot rather than contract based

>Huge companies have contracts with transportation companies
>Very often these transportation companies are not able to deliver, (ie 40 trucks from A to B)
>Transportation company contacts me
>I make a few calls to owners of truck fleets to see if they have a truck in the area
>I pay the truck fleet owner the regular industry fees, while I charge the transportation company +25% of regular fees

Why do I charge them an extra 25%? Because those big transportation companies with contracts worth tens of millions of dollars annually want to avoid the embarrassment of telling their client that they are unable to deliver, or at worst receive fines because they are unable to deliver. So they are willing to operate at a loss for that one truck.

It's mainly international, and one full load goes for anywhere between €2600-3800.

It's easily 20 trucks per week since every major transportation company knows that I have the contacts when they are running out of options.

Profit is anywhere between €650-950 per truck. You do the math.

Also, the only reason I'm telling you the specifics is because I'm retiring after New Years. At the ripe young age of 28.

Been doing this since I was 21. Back then the profit margins were even greater. Might as well hand the torch to some Veeky Forumsfags.

How do you find your suppliers in turkey/bangladesh? Why not india, English is second language there

How did you get started in something like this? What's your story? Where are you from? I assume you're living in/around a more industrious region or nation in the world. Sounds like building the web of contacts in such a market would require first-hand intervention and couldn't be done, say, via the web.

I live in an eastern European transit country, so I'm not sure if the volume of goods is adequate to facilitate this sort of business. Feels like you need truly big truck fleets hauling truly large loads of goods across half the globe or something...

>How did you get started in something like this?
>What's your story? Where are you from?
Started working for one of those major transportation companies and quickly realized the profitability in picking up the crumbs. I'm from Scandinavia, but that hardly matters. I work from home, and offices anywhere from Germany to Spain will give me a call and request transportation from anywhere in Europe to anywhere else in Europe.

Polaks are notorious for doing what I'm doing. Again, you don't need to be in the countries that that transportation takes place. All you need is a phone and the phone numbers of people who own trucks and ship them around contintental Europe.

So the only thing you need is to make some contacts in the transportation industry and deliver on your promises. After a while, you'll be their go-to guy.

As for how you go about making contacts; Start small. Befriend one owner of a truck fleet. Use Google to find them. When the truck owner has an available truck, you start making calls to every office of every large transportation company you can find. Introduce yourself and say that you have an available truck in X country. There's a 99,9% they will all turn you down because they have no fucking idea who you are. But some of them will keep your number lying around, and when they get desperate, they will call you.

That's brilliant user. Damn, wish I could figure out a niche like that.

>Befriend one owner of a truck fleet. Use Google to find them. When the truck owner has an available truck, you start making calls to every office of every large transportation company you can find. Introduce yourself and say that you have an available truck in X country. There's a 99,9% they will all turn you down because they have no fucking idea who you are. But some of them will keep your number lying around, and when they get desperate, they will call you.
Interesting.

> started a martial arts training group out of a park in 2008
> have been teaching 3 classes a week, about 1.5 hours each
> no overheads, no rent, no insurance - no expenses
> cleared between 20 to 30k a year - all cash

I have about 10 students a class, but this year I decided to go big. Got a lease and fitted out a building, got insurance, mats, weapons and so on. Going to cost me 60k for the year.

I calculated that I can bring in about 100k with 50 students, 200k with 100 (which is about average for established martial arts schools). 30% tax and I'll be clearing about 100k in profit and tax returns.

Going to lease other parts of the building and lease some advertising space as well. Hopefully that will bring in another 30 to 40k.

It's not an amazing profit margin, but its a pretty good lifestyle.

Pic related.

I wonder if this would work in Australia. Hauling is huge over here.

any pics or are you larping
which game? In high school I used to make okay money selling runescape gold (ran about 10 bots to farm for me)
>cisco will boom next 5 years
how come?

Did you post a little while ago about buying a gym, it's a ninjitsu school right? Wish you the best user.

You aren't a business owner until you can go on vacation and continue to make money.

Currently you are self employed.

What's the best way to market for an ecommerce store, is finding a niche the best thing todo

Yeah, that was me.

I've dropped the ninjutsu marketing angle, too many frauds have ruined the brand. I just have "Jujutsu, Taijutsu, Ninjutsu" as a sub-script. The style is better described as Budo, but most people don't know what that means, so its useless putting it on the website or flyers.

Pic related is the dojo fitout I'm going for. Green mats, rock feature walls and weapons on the walls.

looks comfy desu

Cool. Dont forget to add an environment death trap. An acid river would be sweet

If you need a bjj instructor, let me know haha

BJJ/MMA market is saturated. There are three BJJ/MMA gyms within 600 metres of my dojo.

i have a clothing(social/casual)shoe store with my father, last year we made 30k. Im thinking of make a ecommerce store, im from Brazil and dont know where to begin

I run a luxury/premium accessory business but I'm struggling to get customers to my e-commerce shop in a country with huge unemployment but a ripe growing upper/middle class of nouvea-riche who like to show off with fancy things. Please any tips on social media and building a brand would go a long way. Thanks user

I'm a plumber in Canada. Last week I charged a 90 year old woman $300,000 to fix a leaky faucet.

We have this exactly in America it's called Freight Quote and they do what you're talking about but on a huge scale. I'm willing to bet the guy that owns it is just hauling money around. Keep up the good fight user.

Find out who your clients want to be, and get that person to endorse your product. Advertise where they live and play instead of just posting on YT or FB.

Not just celebs--find local trendsetters and let them pick their favorite thing from your inventory.

I run a screenprinting wholesale business, I sell 4000-5000 tshirts a month to resellers/merchants, earn about 6-7 times the average wage, with 4-5 times less work hours

also every month my revenue is a bit higher than the last one, everything's going up currently, I might upgrade my wholesale supply to other items as well

I'm a useless NEET and reading this thread gave me a panic attack

One thing I'd like to know from small business owners is--how did you get your starting capital?

Did you start out working out of a friend's garage and grow slowly? Bank loan with a detailed business plan? Small loan of daddy's money? Were you the whole company for a while, or did you hire staff right away?

Also curious--how did you handle financial management at first? If you had a bookkeeper or accountant, how do you work with them so you can focus on operations?

A mentor of mine spent years scraping together jobs and skating by with the bare minimum, and it's only in the last few years that he's had enough liquid to make big capitol improvements (building out an office, buying brand new top tier equipment with the best ROI).

You can put a store inside the same building you use to teach. Sell to your students the material to practice martial arts. Also, you can sell drinks and snack for an after class snack. This will help you to up the profit margins

You have your own brand or you are a reseller of luxury brands like LV,Hermés etc?

*I supose you have your own brand, so will be easy to introduce your products on the market:
> Start making network with that nouvea-riche people. Observe the events, partys and clubs they attend and make strategic partnerships with those locations. You can sponsor some events with medium to low spent. They just need to vizualise your shop to start buying. These people always want to get new things that others dont have, so dont bother with the price,they will pay. Focus on quality and design.
If you want to use social media, i would recomend Instagram, because these is the most superficial app.
You can create guerilla marketing campaings to attract these people attention, using exotics costumes and eletronic music.
Also, to help you best, i need to know wich country you are.

Thanks mate I try to have a balance of low cost jobs (to keep the reputation strong) and high cost jobs to occasionally dip into some deep pockets.

Thanks for the semantics lesson!

Pay a minor celeb for an endorsement. If you can offer someone a couple grand for a few photos on social media endorsing your product, it could be worth the investment.....

This is from an Ameristar casino room bathroom

I started my business with $3k.

$2,000 tools and materials
$500 website
$500 for flyers and business cards, and 5 t-shirts

Then I just hit social media hard, put out flyers, hell I even knocked on doors.

In the beginning I did jobs for dirt cheap. Because those first few jobs weren't even about the money. They were about getting influential people to tell everyone that I was the best tile layer they had ever seen. Charm is half the battle in business.

Anyway, lots of very lucrative businesses can be started with not much money. I know a lady that started a home cleaning business who makes $200 to $300 per day. Not much stuff you need to clean houses. Some cleaner, mop, vaccuum, etc....

How can you be sure your not bying/ selling toxic waste to your customers? How do you handle complaints? AAAHHHH!!! So many questions !!!

Thanks user. That's encouraging. I'm in video and I feel like I'm at the bottom of a long ladder from guys with decades of experience and 100k's of camera equipment. But so much of their work sucks...

He gives 0 fucks to regulations, thats why he makes so much. Try to sell anything food related, it isn't easy because of all the health controls. Even a fucking toothbrush has these problems too

Damn it. I'm from Germany and everything you sell here needs to fulfill a lot of useless standards and has a ton of certificates. If you don't lable the ingredients correctly - let's assume you don't write the alternative name in brackets too on the list - you can and will get sued. Importing stuff from outside the EU is a hassle too. Guess I'll die as minimum wage cuck.

Do drone stuff.

I think you can get a decent DJI drone and some lenses for under $2k.

If your demo reel is good and you get a website going you should be able to pull $1k in a day.

My brother was also in video. He started an aerial photography thing. In 2015 he made $150k.

Good luck. Video can pay a lot if you get one of the right jobs.

if youre printing your own labels then how are you selling a product people know about? its generic shit then isnt it?

literally the worst idea ever. FAA is going to regulate the shit out of the drone business. The entrance ffee jsut for buying a business class drone will be above 20-30k minimum, not including licenses and all the other shit + you compete with tons of others that already have equipment and licenses on hand.

Working in the hollywood industry on top grossing feature films - even the guys doing top notc drone work and industrial shit struggle.

I groom dogs and make $200-$300 a day. I get tips in cash and my my employer pays the taxes. I used to groom on my own but they tax me so high when I'm self employed that it is not worth it for me to bother. I mean once I account for making all my own appointments and keeping stocked with supplies I make about the same when I take 60% commission as an employee....of course employers have cought on and are trying to make groomers 1099 contractors.....which sucks. Thank god I'm in America and can literally appeal anything though. If you gets hours set by someone file an ss-8 form with the irs and dispute being a 1099 employee so they end up oweing payroll taxes instead of your owing self employment tax.

Ok........

Well currently it's just a little form you fill out and a small fee.

My brother literally does this for a living and is doing more than okay. It has a lot more applications than just TV and Movies. Advertisements, Real Estate, Industrial surveying, etc.

But hey believe what you want.

Oh and those FAA threats have been around for almost 4 years.