30 Locksmithing: Should my business be a shop or a mobile unit (truck)?
Description
This article is from the Locksmithing FAQ, by Joe "Spike" Ilacqua spike@indra.com and Henry Schaffer hes@ncsu.edu, major data collection effort by Scott Anguish sanguish@digifix.com with numerous contributions by others.
30 Locksmithing: Should my business be a shop or a mobile unit (truck)?
When you reach the point of opening your own locksmith business (after you
have the locksmithing skills and business skills) this is an important decision.
There are some kinds of merchandise - safes, high-end
architectural locksets, and so on - where a customer really wants to
come in and "kick the tires" for a while. There are others which are
"impulse sale" items - stuff you wouldn't carry on a service call but
which they'd be interested in if they saw it on a display rack - or
which are just too big to haul around. And there are some items, and
accounts, where the customer really wants to know that you have a _Fixed
Address_, for various reasons; like it or not, a mobile shop is often
thought of as a transient rather than a Trustworthy Member of The Local
Business Community.
If you open a shop and just sell the same products and services you
would out of your trunk, it probably won't pay. If you can use it to
make a substantial amout of sales you wouldn't otherwise get, it
probably will.
Think about your local market, think about your possible shop locations,
think about whether you can get that leverage and whether you're willing
to make the investment in time, stock and personnel to make it pay off.
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