Hello I am currently thinking about starting a "tech" store if you would.
I have around 6 years retail/sales experience, I had worked for one of the cellular service providers in my area.
Most of the the major cell phone stores have been told by "corporate" that they are no long doing the simple customer service things like transferring content from old to new phones.

The town I live in has no technology store other then the cell phone stores. So the majority of the population is required to drive 40 minutes either way to make it to anything like a Best Buy.

I have been thinking for a couple years now that I should rent a retail storefront and start offering services to help people with issues with there phones, computers or other electronics. Also would find accessories to put into the store so they would have product to buy to get same day at prices compared to the internet.

So reason I am here is because I cannot convince my self it would be a good business move financially and would love to get recommendations on essentially everything. Also if anyone else has done this and had any luck.
I also have zero experience with owning my own business and do not even know where to start to get licensing for it. I also need to figure out where I would be able to get accessories at a wholesale price. I am unsure of what all "Services" to offer clients and what would be a fair cost for said services.

If anyone can give any advice I would greatly appreciate it, I am looking to get a little guidance in the right direction.

just steal the operations from a competitor that runs a similar business

either get a job there and gather intel yourself or poach one of their employees

you can do "market research" first:
find comparable companies either in your town, or a random town that is similar in demographics
you can interview them for ideas, pricing, etc.
i recall seeing a lot of these at mall kiosks and booths in vape/tobacco stores in my area personally

fundamentally it doesn't sound like a great model, you certainly know a ton more than me but red flags:
big companies have substantially more scale and do not find it profitable/useful to offer, also they could start doing it again if it was and you'd be done?
i also know nothing of technology but isn't it all done via google/other cloud services?
pretty sure the only part about cellphones that have good margins are screen protectors/cases/chargers?

This post was edited by Thursdayisgod on Dec 27 2021 09:44pm

You are right the majority of transferring information is done through the cloud service. Just from my experience though people do not understand that and are ignorant to change.

So they would beg in store for us to transfer all of their stuff since they did not want to learn. Some people decided not to get a new phone or return their purchase if we would not transfer.

I even use to joke with customers that it cost 20 bucks for me just to put on their screen protectors and about 65% would try to hand me the money.

My belief is the big companies will not offer go back to anything that used to be complimentary since they are trying to go to a majority online business.

When I first started working for the cell phone company we had around 13 sales reps and 3 techs that worked in the store. When I left we were down to a total of 5 sales reps and were being forced to recommend our customers buy online.

Yes the majority of profit does come from those accessories, I would like to try to find a place to buy them at a wholesale price so I could sell them in store.

This post was edited by SirGivret on Dec 28 2021 08:29am

why not just let the boomers slip you the cash and do it for them while keeping your w2 job in tact?

alternatively, you could offer the service via fb and meet them in neutral locations. guessing your target demo are boomers and they love fb.

renting commercial property is a huge overhead, should try to avoid doing that unless absolutely necessary.

this guy is right

start by offering your services as a part-time gig while keeping your job

once you build up enough income / customer base then u can decide on if u want to spend the money on a storefront

make the money first

This post was edited by badasses on Dec 28 2021 10:18am

So I actually quit working for the cell phone company and now am selling cars. We were switched from a individual commission structure to a team based so I took a 25K pay cut.

My new job is just sitting around all day and lurking the Jsp forums unless I get a customer in. The pay is solid I am making 6 figures a year, though I am incredibly bored all day.

So I am unable to let the boomers slip me the cash since I am no longer in the store. Also the age range is quite a mixed bag, just as many 23-35 as there are 50-80 wanting all the help in the world.

The younger generation is just lazy to do anything and the older generation does not know how.

So I quit using all "personal" social media about 12 years ago and do not use facebook, twitter, instagram. I cannot convince myself to go on there and advertise anything it feels awkward.

honestly, it sounds like things are going really well and you're just bored

getting 100k+/yr while lurking jsp is kinda the dream right?

i'm 33 and would def pay $25 to have someone transfer stuff between phones for me, i could figure it out but definitely see it as a service that has non-zero demand, i don't have any formal "business" training so very open to being corrected on any of this but problems I see:
1. you need to find me at the time i demand it, it's not on-going, very small window of time i need it done
2. there's a huge cost in finding me in that moment due to time sensitivity and how actively i'm looking for someone to do it
3. i'm very willing to pay $25 but that price drops off really fast, it's a pretty "elastic" service, around $40 i'd figure it out myself personally
4. how many people per day/month are actually flipping phones in your serviceable market? i personally switch phones like every 5ish years, so all your 25-35 year olds/5 * capture rate * (price - acquisition cost) = potential market, not sure how much zoomers & boomers flip phones but same idea
guessing that potential market is pretty comparable to your w2 job now, except you'd have to work your ass off then

Thankfully yes I am doing very well now. Born on a dairy farm and worked 70-80 hours a week easily most of my life (Just turned 28).

Now I have a great job that I do nothing and make a lot of money only working 46 hours a week.

I think the struggle financially gave me something to work towards and the hours I worked kept me super busy and made life easy.

So my cell phone store would probably push out at least 12 new phone upgrades a day and still had the other 3 main carriers around us.

The store fronts I have been looking at is essentially right beside all the major carrier's stores. I agree completely and feel my only chance to make money off services is to be right there when they walk out with their new phone.

I had never considered more then 20 for the transferring content so it wasn't so much you would want to teach yourself.

Though my biggest question would be "what other services" what else do you think someone would be willing to pay for other then screen repairs?

The only other one I can really think of is a password recovery type of thing. Getting basically an excel sheet printed out with all the categories like facebook, gmail, instagram, twitter etc etc and putting their username and password on it after I recover/change them for them.

Pretty much every customer I had always thought we kept a list of their accounts and passwords in the back. They would get super upset when we told them we did not know what their passwords were and they had to reset them.

heard car sale business is extremely scary at the moment and that is what has you actively looking at something else?

if there's anyway to avoid full commitment to the phone thing do that, what about just having the store 2-3 days a week and other days you still selling cars? Having the w2 income alleviant financial stress is really nice, it's non-competing business so they probably don't care if you do both right?

I work in banking and started a casino party company, did the casino parties as hobby income for 3 years just on weekends, it was doing extremely well so i quit bank job and did it full time. a month into it i hated it, it also didn't scale well, my first 10-20 hrs per week were extremely profitable but after 20 and 40 hrs my efforts had severe drop off in profitability so i went back to w2 work and scaled the side business back to ~20 hrs/week.

My barber is extremely talented at cutting hair, but absolutely awful at dealing with office politics of a big chain barbershop and he's terrible at marketing/entrepreneurial stuff for running his own thing. he changes oil 3-4 days a week to pay his bills comfortably and has a salon chair appointment only the rest of the other days until word of mouth picks up more, maybe it never will but that's ok for him financially.

but to your exact question:
accessories are your best margin
if you can double up with a coffee shop or similar to cross sell each other would also be good
alternatively to coffee shop are you into magic the gathering at all? you could co-habitat with one of those shops if it's big in your area, they tend to be very dead during the day but need to stay open and have someone present to keep an eye on inventory, boomers think of both industries as "nerd" stuff anyway?

edit:
can those major carriers actively refer clients to you as well? double check on that, if they can give your business card or something, they may have stipulations about what you can cross-sell to not be a competing business then though too

This post was edited by Thursdayisgod on Dec 28 2021 12:03pm