They are valuing your business at $250,000. No. In USA, you’d be asking for at least $1.5 million. You have no reason to sell until you get an offer you can’t refuse. Your growth is accelerating, enjoy the ride. :)

Badcock furniture. To make it worse, that used to be some Englishman’s last name.

You will have fixed costs, inventory acquisition cost, and variable sales. I hope your sales will exceed your costs. List your items online and offer them for local sale to increase your sales.

I wouldn’t open such a high cost store as a first business. Consider multiple uses for your storefront.

Whatever customers you get, figure out how to create recurring sales. Don’t give them a reason to write negative reviews. The cost of mitigating those is higher than smoothing a transaction even it it results in no profit.

A dedicated virtual assistant is probably the only way to make it work at your budget. Better VAs tend to be based in Philippines, at least in my experience interacting with many large call centers. You’d want someone you can train for inside sales, which is the role you’re trying to fill.

You can empower your VA to add appointments to your calendar. If the prospects require 20-30 minutes of handholding, that’s a sales role. Give the VA explicit instructions how to funnel prospects.

The answering service’s role is to forward you their number and say you will call back. They are doing more than they should but aren’t trained for it.

I would salvage it, automate it to the highest extent, and get away from that store.

Figure out how to turn this around. Set them up as absentee owners. You can’t rely on them actually operating the cafe and in fact they are forcing you to operate it. Something is selling. What’s most profitable? What is essential? Drop the rest. You can always expand a successful menu.

One of my business partners asked me to help him run a business. It is a kind of a medical office and he’s a good doctor in that niche. It’s not my core area of expertise since I am not a doctor, but the business relies on a lot of technology and that is my area of expertise. It got to the point where I wrote him a training document because some of the concepts are just too challenging to grasp.

So, that’s what I will do for him. Fly over, spend a week actively hands-on mentoring how their high tech equipment operates, and write extremely detailed materials you answer their questions. That’s basically what you must do to overcome their apprehensions of the POS.

You know what works for a cafe? Bagels. :)

Bounce houses are a fun and proven concept. Rental businesses are really financial arbitrage. You don’t have to own the asset outright. There’s an easy way to expand the business. If you don’t have good credit now, get started with some used equipment and make enough money to clear it up. There are auctions for bankrupt bounce house companies that were spread too thin. Once you do have good credit, open a 0% business credit card and obtain additional units. Then you can scale it to the point of market saturation.