Small business plan after high school?

21. Oct, 2010 0 Comments

Question by Casey Thompson: Small business plan after high school?
Im 18 years old now in 11th grade. If you read my other question, my family i live with have hard time with money. My brother never finished 10th grade and he makes roughly 16-17k a year. My mom a little under 18k a year.
Iv never been good in school, Ds and Cs. So i know a good college which impresses people is out of the question haha. But i loveeee computers. I love building it, playing with it, taking it apart, figuring out new things. It just comes natural to me and i was thinking of going to community college to learn more about parts and technical pieces and what not. And my plan was to do a small home business . Buy low end computer, broken, or build, and probably sell it on sites like ebay. Now, I know id have to save to invest in parts or the computers, cause its basically repairing mostly im guessing. But my question is, how well do computers sell now a days? I know computers is a big thing now, but how do i know who needs computers or not? Cause i would only sell maybe 1-3 at a time cause id be a small thing and hopefully grow. Cause id have a job on the side while still living at home with mother. Basically fix the computer and resale to make 50-100+ profit and my saves would slowly build to where i can start selling more computers at a time. (laptops as well) Its not the best plan cause im still researching on how ebay fees work and whats the best way to go about the selling process or what why my plan is. Maybe mainly build computers from scratch.

Tell me your input, criticism, or ideas. I welcome all
If Desktops, itd only be the Cpu

Best answer:

Answer by A Dad
I’m not an expert on the subject of computer repairs and the selling of second-hand parts but I’d be really surprised if there was a big market for your business. Between shipping charges and people being afraid of dealing with you instead of a big, established company that they have more trust in and the relatively low cost of computers and parts, I just don’t feel that there is going to be a lot of profit in your endeavor. And the fees at eBay keep getting more and more expensive all the time. I think Craigslist would be better but that site seems to be a hotbed of scammers from what I keep hearing, so you may have trouble getting people to trust you on there.

I could be wrong, of course. You may have more inside knowledge than I could ever expect to have. Maybe you know one or more others who are doing well in this type of business?

Maybe you’d do better marketing your services and expertise to established computer businesses who the public trusts better than you individually (nothing personal, of course), and then you wouldn’t have to deal with those killer shipping costs unless you deal with faraway businesses. But then I suspect you’d be dealing more in bulk shipments than one at a time which means less shipping cost per item.

I suggest you talk to a bunch of businesses who would be your competition if you went into this business and see how their business is doing and if they’d be interested in using your services when they get swamped so you do the repairing and they get the customers and you both share in the profit. If you have a lot of trouble finding companies that do the same thing as you want to do or who would be competing with you in a slightly different way, or who are getting more business than they can handle, I think that would be a bad sign for the success of your business.

Just seems to me that I find that I can fix something around my house myself, break something in the process, replace the part I broke, and get the fix done and still come out waaaaay cheaper than hiring someone to do the work for me correctly the first time. I just think that you are going to have trouble finding the volume of business you need to make decent money.

Maybe there’s another angle to this idea that might make you better money? Maybe talking to a lot of computer users in addition to other businesses might stir up a better idea or wrinkle in this possibility to make money?

Question asked 4 days ago. 1 hour left for answers.
Reply posted 9-10-2010, 11:41 A.M.

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