What does it cost to run your shop?

[Chadhardy]

I currently have an office in my small town (not a storefront) and I'm toying around with the idea of getting a storefront location for better visibility. My landlord has a beautiful space and is offering me a special deal on it. I'm at the point of making sure the extra expense would be worth it.

My current office is about 200 sq. ft. and costs $175/mo
Electric is $50 per month
It's on a side street and down some steps which my older customers have a problem with.

The other potential space is about 1080 sq. ft. and has a gradual rent fee of $400/mo for 3 months, $500/mo for 3 months and $600/mo for 6 months.
Electric will be approximately $250 per month based on the previous tenant's bills.
It's on a main street with street level parking.

So I would be going from $225/mo to $650/mo immediately with it steadily increasing.

With the larger space I have the idea of offering more services such as cell/tablet repairs (where currently I only do computers) and computer training (software, online marketing, etc.) I can't effectively do either of those in my current location.

I hate to pass up a great opportunity, but if it doesn't make financial sense there's no sense in doing it.

What other services could I offer to justify the new space? I don't want to carry products for sale as there is already another local shop doing that and they're very close to the location I'm looking at.

 

[wickedmojoit]

My rent is 600 a month, that includes all utilities but phone. I pay 50 or 60 for the phone. The space is about 700sq feet. We are located in Derry NH. Our town population is about 34k. All our surrounding towns are smaller so a lot of people come into Derry for shopping. My shop is located on a busy road, the main road through town to get to grocery stores, Walmart, the highway and such. Last I checked traffic counts where around 10k a day, although that came from a Realtor and possibly inflated.
Our shop is on the second floor but we have a great sign out front (street level) that has a built in reader board. We get the sign 9 months out of the year. The accountant down stairs takes it during tax season.
For us, the return is well worth the rent. A large majority of residential customers know about us because they see our sign when driving by.
We are a 2 person company, its my husband and my self. He services both residential and small business clients.
I am at the shop all day working on sales and marketing, office stuff, answering phones and taking in drop offs. With a store front you are locked in to be their during posted hours, that part is hard. With their being 2 of us it makes it a little easier. When I was still working at my last job and my husband was alone doing shop and road, it was a lot for 1 person.

We tried some of the extra services. The phone tablet thing didn't work for us for a few reasons. 1- this area is filled with cheap solutions 2 - my husband was having a harder and harder time seeing all those itty bitty parts. 3 - People didn't want to wait for him to be back to the shop to fix their phones, they wanted it done on the spot. We were not making enough off of phone repair to hire a kid to be in shop to work on it and we didn't love doing it so we stopped. I know a few techs in bigger areas that added this service in and it took off and was well worth it... they also charged slightly higher than the prices in their area. It attracted a better quality client that would rather a professional than a young kid at a mall cart.

For other services, depending on your area, used electronics. We sell used desktops and laptops. We do not have enough space for a retail set up. We keep a few desktops and laptops on hand and sell a few a week, we don't advertise it or promote it much. This business is finding me. If we had the space for a proper set up I would defiantly try and grow this part of my business.

We have a store a few blocks away from us that is street level retail. He only does Apple repairs and offers a good selection of used apple products. Despite some questionable business practices and lots of bad reviews he seems to do good reselling in a small nitch market. Between my reselling and his business it leads me to believe this is an under served market.