Cooter has a furniture resale shop, hit him up.
Cooter has a furniture resale shop, hit him up.
In reply to SV reX :
Sent you a PM about CDs. Scalability is about making some money in a hobby and thinking that it could be a career if done in bigger volumes. Sometimes it works sometimes not. Giving someone money to expand a business is dangerous, BTDT. You should either get everything in writing in the event it goes badly or be prepared to lose everything , will this kill the friendship? Again BTDT. Hate to be so negative but money can complicate relationships.
dyintorace said:Sounds like a cool opportunity for you! Does she have a website you could share? I'm interested in checking out what she has offered to date.
Sounds like a cool opportunity for you! Does she have a website you could share? I'm interested in checking out what she has offered to date.
When I see you referring to investing time and money that translates to you want to take the time and money you could do any number of things with and turn it into more time and/or money. Which is probably what's driving the advice to "win", although calling that "male-centric" is a bit weird - that's just how investing works and I'm not sure how sex barges its way into the math, there. Bitcoin mining isn't the best analogy - that's a function of how much the power costs and equipment costs are versus what the expected return is going to be. That's why after The Merge a whole bunch of Etherium miners shut down their operations and sold off their gear.
Most the advice has been to ask if, given the available inputs, the return will be greater than if you used those same inputs in another way. But it sounds like you're not really trying to invest, in the traditional sense, you're trying to buy a job. Nothing wrong with that at all, but that is an entirely different question. You're approaching this as an opportunity to work with a friend, do something fun, learn a new skill, keep yourself busy, and hopefully make a little bit of money along the way. The non-monetary goals are what you are expecting in terms of your return on investment, not the highest percentage return on the cash that you'd tie up. On a scale from 1 to 8 where 1 is "hobby" and 8 is "corporate raider", this sounds like a 3. To be clear, that isn't criticism at all; this nation has been built on folks that have no desire or intention to be the countries #1 whatever-they-are and just want to provide a service to the community and a lifestyle for themselves and their families.
All that said, my dad spent most of my life owning a small kitchen cabinet business, so very furniture-adjacent. He found that having a small number of suppliers made things a lot easier. His most successful years were when he had a main supplier that he'd lead with that was very boutique and high-end and a second supplier that made quality products, but was a little more mass-market. It was almost like selling Bentleys and BMWs from the same store front. Having the premium option meant that he never had to say "no" to a customer's hare-brained ideas of what they wanted their kitchen to be since the top-tier company could put a price tag on pretty much anything you could dream up. But if you didn't want to spend $65,000 on your cabinetry, he had the "value" line that didn't do custom orders but was much higher quality than what the Home Despot would have available. He focused on the relationship with the high-end outfit and was their largest dealer in the region at one point, so they gave him plenty of attention and marketing money to pay for advertising and home shows. But he also had the other vendor to sort of keep them honest as well. He tried a third and fourth supplier at one time, and it was just a little too much hassle to maintain the relationships, too many samples to keep around, and customers just got a bit overwhelmed. He was always careful, though, to make sure that whatever his "value" line was, it wasn't just garbage. He didn't want the customers that had favorable opinions about cabinets from a home improvement store. If you're looking to be a little more mass-market and make it up in quantity, as it were, then having a couple suppliers that are more like the Long John Silvers and the Chick-fil-A of the furniture world probably makes sense. Just don't try to cover both ends of the spectrum because then neither customer feels like they've walked in to the right store.
In reply to wae :
That's a great perspective.
Yes, your rating of "3" is an accurate description.
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