This post welcomes and is dedicated to:

  • Your business successes
  • Small business anecdotes
  • Lessons learned
  • Unfortunate events
  • Unofficial AMAs
  • Links to outstanding educational materials (with explanations and/or an extract of the content)

In this post, share your small business experience, successes, failures, AMAs, and lessons learned. Week of December 9, 2019 /r/smallbusiness is one of a very few subs where people can ask questions about operating their small business. To let that happen the main sub is dedicated to answering questions about subscriber’s own small businesses.

Many people also want to talk about things which are not specific questions about their own business. We don’t want to disappoint those subscribers and provide this post as a place to share that content without overwhelming specific and often less popular simple questions.

This isn’t a license to spam the thread. Business promotion and free giveaways are welcome only in the Promote Your Business thread. Thinly-veiled website or video promoting posts will be removed as blogspam.

Discussion of this policy and the purpose of the sub is welcome at https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/ana6hg/psa_welcome_to_rsmallbusiness_we_are_dedicated_to/

  • anonymous-mominous@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    My small (so far) success story. In my ealy 20s I went to college for business management but never got to finish my degree due to financial aid issues. I’m now 40 and have been a stay at home mom for 7 years. My husband was laid off from his job earlier this year and it has been difficult finding a job making as much money as he was making.

    I somewhat jokingly and somewhat seriously suggested I should start my own business. He told me to do my market research and make a business plan to see if it would be successful. So I did.

    I presented him with my research and he said it looked pretty good. I needed about 18k in startup funding though, and we didn’t have that kind of money lying around. We paid off our home a few years ago and we didn’t want to take out a mortgage. We knew odds of getting an unsecured personal will extremely slim with no income, but we laughed and said “what is the worse thing that can happen? We get denied?” So we applied in the middle of May of this year.

    To our delight (and terror) we were approved. We took a week to REALLY think about things. We’re getting older and can’t afford to gamble as much now as we did when we were younger. But we decided to pull the trigger. Things fell into place rather quickly after we had the funds in our hands.

    We signed a 1 year lease for a small retail store front starting in July, and our landlord let us in the first week of June to start renovations. We ordered our inventory, got everything set up, and opened up shop the first week of July.

    Our grand opening weekend was a success! We were very happy, but also very cautious and realistic about the expectations of our business. In July, we made just enough income to pay our loan, rent, and other operating expenses. We weren’t making profit, but we broke even.

    Considering most businesses are in the red in their first year or two of business, we were happy with these numbers.

    It’s now almost the end of November and our small shop is still going strong. We can’t quite live off of our income yet, however we make enough to cover all of our business expenses, set aside 15% of the business income into a savings account(for tax purposes), and pay ourselves a couple hundred bucks a month.

    If our sales continue on the growth they have shown over the past 5 months. The business is on track to gross about 60k in 12 months. We will probably only net about 15k of that. But it’s a start and with the exception of the original loan, the business doesn’t carry any other debt.

    So that is my success story in progress.