A change from the quotes
April 29th 2011 03:29
As a change from the quotes we've been featuring on this blog for some while, I'm reverting to a post that relates to work - work in the sense of something that I used to do a few weeks ago, and now no longer do because I'm retired. [That might be true if I'd actually stopped working at anything but in fact since I retired I seem to be just as busy as ever - except I'm doing it from home.]
Throughout my working life I've been involved on more than one occasion with selling goods - I'd buy them at a certain price, and my customers would buy them at a higher price and the difference was my profit. When there was some profit. The problem with buying and selling is that you have to be able to do two things well:
1/ get the items cheaply enough in the first place to be able to make some decent money.
2/ sell them at a reasonable enough price - without overcharging or finding that your expenses don't chew up the profit.
I wasn't always successful at this...perhaps I should add that there's a third criteria: sell things people actually want to buy.
Expenses are something that many retailers don't take into consideration when they're starting out, I suspect. There was a secondhand bookshop just along the road from where I worked most recently, and it's gone out of business in the last month. I felt that their prices were always on the high side for secondhand books, and consequently they turned off potential customers. You have to have some books that attract people in terms of price.
My guess is that they've gone out of business not just because of the recession, but because they didn't turn over enough books to pay their way: rental on a main street, wages, power, internet and all the other expenses.
The shop has now been taken over by someone who's selling homemade soaps and other similar products. How can they possibly sell enough of these sorts of items to fund their business? (There was once a hat shop in this location: it vanished after only a few months. Even though the hats were great, nobody was wearing hats at the point in time...)
Rather than starting out on the main street, paying high rental, I'd suggest that people begin with a company like SMC. They provide goods that people want to buy at very reasonable wholesale rates, and they have good backup and support. They're a
specialty merchandise corporation bbb - the 'bbb' stands for 'better business bureau' apparently - and they're well experienced at providing the right goods to the right sellers. The company was founded over 60 years ago, so it's survived more than one recession and seems to be doing well in the midst of the current one.
By the looks of it, you can work with SMC bbb from home (always a plus: no rentals) and do a lot of your selling by direct marketing. Of course, with the advent of eBay (or Trade Me in New Zealand) it's actually very easy to sell good quality items. I know one young lady - she was a very good friend of one of my daughter's when they were growing up - who started out selling dresses on Trade Me, saw her business boom, brought in more dresses from overseas (she was able to afford to fly to the countries where the dresses were being made, in fact) and has now opened a shop.
That seems to me to be a better approach than the one where you start out in an expensive location and see all your profits eaten up before you've had time to get off the ground.
Throughout my working life I've been involved on more than one occasion with selling goods - I'd buy them at a certain price, and my customers would buy them at a higher price and the difference was my profit. When there was some profit. The problem with buying and selling is that you have to be able to do two things well:
1/ get the items cheaply enough in the first place to be able to make some decent money.
2/ sell them at a reasonable enough price - without overcharging or finding that your expenses don't chew up the profit.
I wasn't always successful at this...perhaps I should add that there's a third criteria: sell things people actually want to buy.
Expenses are something that many retailers don't take into consideration when they're starting out, I suspect. There was a secondhand bookshop just along the road from where I worked most recently, and it's gone out of business in the last month. I felt that their prices were always on the high side for secondhand books, and consequently they turned off potential customers. You have to have some books that attract people in terms of price.
My guess is that they've gone out of business not just because of the recession, but because they didn't turn over enough books to pay their way: rental on a main street, wages, power, internet and all the other expenses.
The shop has now been taken over by someone who's selling homemade soaps and other similar products. How can they possibly sell enough of these sorts of items to fund their business? (There was once a hat shop in this location: it vanished after only a few months. Even though the hats were great, nobody was wearing hats at the point in time...)
Rather than starting out on the main street, paying high rental, I'd suggest that people begin with a company like SMC. They provide goods that people want to buy at very reasonable wholesale rates, and they have good backup and support. They're a
specialty merchandise corporation bbb - the 'bbb' stands for 'better business bureau' apparently - and they're well experienced at providing the right goods to the right sellers. The company was founded over 60 years ago, so it's survived more than one recession and seems to be doing well in the midst of the current one.
By the looks of it, you can work with SMC bbb from home (always a plus: no rentals) and do a lot of your selling by direct marketing. Of course, with the advent of eBay (or Trade Me in New Zealand) it's actually very easy to sell good quality items. I know one young lady - she was a very good friend of one of my daughter's when they were growing up - who started out selling dresses on Trade Me, saw her business boom, brought in more dresses from overseas (she was able to afford to fly to the countries where the dresses were being made, in fact) and has now opened a shop.
That seems to me to be a better approach than the one where you start out in an expensive location and see all your profits eaten up before you've had time to get off the ground.
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