Small business, B&M retail is just about the worst business to be in right now. People talk about restaurants being worse; I disagree. B&M retail you’re competing literally globally. Food, you’re competing with people within 10 miles, often less.
At this point unless you have a real advantage; I wouldn’t recommend to anyone to open a B&M retail store.
Businesses fail often. People say it all the time but very few people listen.
The question you have to genuinely ask yourself is: How hard are you working at your business everyday? Are you putting in 4-6 hours a day to make it work? Or did you put in 4 hours one day and expect stuff to just magically happen? My typical work day is me working consistently 7 hours a day. Some days it’s more. Some days it’s less. Most days I work 7 hours consistently. 7 hours is not a lot for many business owners. Some are grinding 10-12 hours a day between various things.
So if you’re not grinding at your business, consistently putting in 4-6 hours a day, then maybe you have to consider the reason things aren’t working as you expected is simply because you had unrealistic expectations going into things.
There’s nothing wrong with that either. I did that with an adjacent business I tried. It happens. But it doesn’t mean you’re a failure either. Just means you’re unwilling to invest the time necessary to make the business successful. That’s a choice, not a failure.
People are dumb. They’re asking for terms. When they ask for “invoice”. You just respond “We invoice all orders. But we do require payment to proceed with an order. You can either pay via credit card or via bank transfer. We like to have this noted on your file because otherwise we have to ask every time you place an order.”
A lot of people are just dumb OR they’re so used to dealing with vendors they have long relationships with that they forget or are unaware that steps were done when that account was open.
Tell her to go ahead and sue you.
Return and rebuy is a normal thing. Unless you have a clause against this, you should honor it.
With that said, you should change your return policy to state customers are not allow to rebuy the same item unless it’s returned in brand new, unopened condition.
I’m not going to lie. I have a b&m retail/service store and I hate b&m for these sorts of reasons.
With that said, their target audience potentially is not you. It’s people who are available to visit them during the day. People that need their services and are willing to carve out time to visit them.
We used to be open on Saturdays to make people’s lives a bit easier. Frankly, I don’t miss it one bit. All it did was accommodate my worst customers. My good customers always picked up during the week during business hours. So we stopped and while I’m sure I could squeeze some money out of those days, it’s blood money.
I’m not going to lie. I have a b&m retail/service store and I hate b&m for these sorts of reasons.
With that said, their target audience potentially is not you. It’s people who are available to visit them during the day. People that need their services and are willing to carve out time to visit them.
We used to be open on Saturdays to make people’s lives a bit easier. Frankly, I don’t miss it one bit. All it did was accommodate my worst customers. My good customers always picked up during the week during business hours. So we stopped and while I’m sure I could squeeze some money out of those days, it’s blood money.
You can either do it or say “Sorry, we don’t provide itemized invoices.”
Itemized invoices is a way for people to nickle and dime you. They see you’re charging $200 for a part that’s on Amazon for $75 and then try to negotiate a lower price or tell you they’ll order the part and have it waiting for you.
Big picture it’s all about how you want to run your business.
I was using QB Payroll for a long time. I switched to Gusto because I thought I’d save money and it would make my life easier. I made a mistake with filing something during Covid so it triggered me to make a change It hasn’t. Gusto actually cost me some money because I filed some last minute payroll in 2022 which should have counted in 2022 but they applied to 2023 which trigger a mess for me to fix and cost me money. They offered bad support and in general was shit.
I use an “old” version of QB Payroll so I can’t go back, but I don’t think Gusto is anything special at all. If I could go back to QB Desktop, I would.
That Death water company. I don’t get it.
Your business has no real value most likely. It’s less than a year old.
I always recommend to reach out to competitors. They’ll sometimes buy companies. You could also reach out to other vendors who you see at the farmers markets who might want to expand.
Run the numbers on how it all works. Then run the numbers again, but cut your income by 20% and increase your expenses by 20%. Now decide if it’s a good choice.
Short term answer is almost always to cut expenses and raise prices.
Long term, you need to find ways to get more customers and improve margins.
Big picture you entered a really tough business. You have to figure out some way to get customers to consider buying from you vs online. It’s not an easy sell.
There might be more to it than you know. They might be quietly putting the cash in their pockets and the IRS is completely unaware of their actual income. It’s not an insignificant amount of money, if they do that.
You’re likely being unrealistic about the hours.
Also, does the budget include repairs or if gas goes up $1/gal like it does sometimes? What about money for a replacement truck?
As others have said, you’re buying a job. You decide if that’s what you want to do. I wouldn’t do it without talking to other drivers.
Not a lawyer but here’s what I would do.
Immediately counter sue for the max small claims court allows.
Then send a settlement agreement to them via certified mail and state that if they sign an attached agreement you’ll stop your suit.
You need an accountant but generally speaking it would be to increase expenses.
That could mean buying stuff for your business or even potentially contributing to things that lower MAGI like IRA’s and 401k’s.
The other option is simply to turn away work to keep your income down.
Youtube is a crap shoot. To actually make a viable living, long term, is questionable. You’d need to make a big hit now so that could carry you for the rest of your life because there’s no telling what the media world will look like in 10 years.
If you don’t want to work at your parents business, don’t. But you should figure out something. Big picture, it sounds pretty clear that you need a job that allows you free time to try and make your Youtube channel work. That sounds like engineering to me.
Engineers get paid solid to good wages and generally speaking, work a steady 40 hour week. Their weeks, again generally speaking, aren’t too hard and leave time after work and on weekends to explore hobbies. So I’d say go get an engineering job somewhere and make it work.
I get you’re not ready to 100% adult. It sounds like you don’t like working too much. There are a lot of people out there like that. Big picture, you need to get a 9-5, clock in, do what’s required, and clock out. There are lots of jobs like that out there. But you need to just suck it up and do it.
He’s at the casino washing cash.