I own a Houseplant Café, where you can sip coffee while you shop for houseplants and small handmade items, think jewelry, pottery, candles etc. We’ve been open six months and things are going not as well as we’d hoped. Demographic: millennial women, brunch crowd (I can break this down further) Area: 12k cars pass us a day, we do have road signage and a flag Returning customers: 17% of our clients visit more than once a month Offerings: locally roasted coffee, lattes, smoothies, sandwiches, fresh pastries
I have a marketing background, but I’ve been out of the game a bit and so I feel like I’m not living up to the needs of the business. We do post daily on social media. Have a following of over 5k between insta and FB, starting on Tiktok next week. We need to nearly double our daily numbers to get to the profits we estimated before we opened. We do theme days that are very popular but then the rest of the week is under $500 days. I have a small marketing budget of about $1000 a month which I’m not sure where to utilize. Help? I’m getting desperate for my space to succeed.
Figure out how to operate given the constraints of what you have right now.
Assume no growth at all.
What can you do to become sustainable, if not profitable? Can you work more hours yourself and thus cut on staff costs. Can you close the shop for hours when you have the least traffic? Can you cut down expenses on items that don’t sell well, and start selling more things that have higher margins? Can you ask your landlord/bank to defer/reduce payments?
You are in a brick and mortar business and while you will probably find a way to grow 10% here and there, you are very unlikely to double your customer base fast; it’s just what it is.
You might consider focusing on your best customers and up-selling them, but even then, you would need to sell $10 worth to 50 customers, $50 to 10 customers every day, or a $500 item to 1 customer, every single day (revenue, not profit). This just sounds very unlikely. Maybe some seasonal offers, like Xmas stuffed toys for kids, or maybe cruise tickets to Bahamas, but again, unlikely.
No one tells you this when you start a small business (we’ve been there too), but you need a good amount of savings to survive the first 3+ years while you figure things out, and even then, it might not work out.
Sorry I don’t have a better advice, just being honest with you here.