small business advice thread [nsfw]

I'm taking over a friends computer repair shop for a year while he's travelling around the world with his fiancée. If I know these people at all they'll sit down on a couch in march and get up from said couch late february next year but this is not important.
I'm not very familiar with the books yet, but it's 'bout a 100k p.a. turnover with 50k in expenses. Customers come ~50% through website, the rest referral and location. He has a bookmaker who does the absolute basics and a freelance mechatronics guy who does chip replacement and the like. Business seems surprisingly stable at 8k turnover a month with little variation.
I would not be taking this up as a job. I'd have to ritually suicide myself somewhere around mid summer if I did. I want to treat this like a game. (This is not what I told him).
Obvious growth potential: get more customers, outsource more work to freelance IT people who can hold a soldering iron. 300ft² store space in a decent shopping area, largely unused. Website: pretty good, maybe SEO, which is still a thing I'm told. Reading recommendations, online resources etc very much appreciated.

Here's someone with boobs:

http://i.imgur.com/He7hkck.jpg

Good luck with the biz. You will make a lot of mistakes, learn from them. Consistency is one of the most important factors in business and pretty much anything. I've been self employed for 10 years now and it's a pain in the ass sometimes, but I like the freedom.

Keep the boobs coming.

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Originally Posted by givememyleg

Good luck with the biz. You will make a lot of mistakes, learn from them. Consistency is one of the most important factors in business and pretty much anything. I've been self employed for 10 years now and it's a pain in the ass sometimes, but I like the freedom.

Keep the boobs coming.

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+1

Key early issue is to understand and model your cash flow. To do so, you'll need to fully understand the timing of yoursales and costs, plus who your key suppliers are, what their payment terms are, and how you can maintain/enhance the relationships. So many small and profitable businesses fuck up because they don't get these basics right. It sounds like a steady business, so should be straightforward.

You'll also need to get started with keeping good financial records. A few spreadsheets will do this if they don't already exist, and it will save you some money with the bookkeeper if you don't want to do this yourself. Don't be that guy that just throws a bunch of invoices at their bookkeeper, who then charges $100+ per hour for data entry.

Finally, never sit back and relax. There's always some bastard looking to steal your customers and offer more/better for cheaper if there are no real barriers to enter your industry.

I say the following with all due respect (which isn't any since I don't know the guy): Your friend is a dumbass.

Hey man let's just hand over this business to this friend of mine for a year. Yeah that's a wonderful idea.

In exchange for berating this dumbass, I'll offer you some actionable advice: Build a social media presence.

[fluff]OH, he's definitely a dumbass, but he also doesn't really care. His father owns a couple of dollar stores and the like and talked him into this. He probably won't find someone outside extended family and friends who would do this and not fuck him over since the nature of the business is that it's really easy to fuck him over. Going on an extended vacation when your business is its infancy is a really fucking dumb idea, but then when you have no passion for it and you are generally really confused about life - he's a practicing jew, it's kind of understandable.
[/fluff]

Web presence is pretty good - first google hit for computer or laptop repair for the city, plus multiple other front page hits. Facebook exists, but nobody seems to care. It's definitely very high priority to stay at the top of google search results. Youtube might be a decent idea... Do videos on reballing or screen replacement... stuff that looks scary. We do get some people who tried to fix laptops themselves and got stuck at some point. Get more people stuck -> more profit?

I've spent the last two weeks fixing the customer database and getting the workflow sorted out. we're running a shitty contract management software on xampp. I'll either have to put that on a remote server or set up http so our freelance guys can edit work orders from home and see new contracts instantly. Maybe even switch to something like servicemax, though this is probably not necessary.

How suppliers work confuses the fuck out of me. I'll move that up the list.

http://i.imgur.com/eeacWts.jpg

Can I have a job?

Yes!

http://i.imgur.com/WHgZCju.png

Disgusting.

You're crazy.

Oskar - this will be a fun game, I see business as a game as well. I'm surprised that a computer repair shop can generate profits like that, that's pretty cool, I would think the price of computers are so low that most people would just go buy a new one. So are the customers just individuals that live locally or are there corporate customers?

If 50% of biz comes from the website, are all the searches coming from the local area?

(And yeah, SEO is still very important - as long as people use Google, websites need SEO).

We only get about one device a week through mail. Usually macbooks for chip repair. Most customers are local.
Windows 8.1 update is a huge cashcow atm. It breaks drivers in a way that most people can't fix. Lots of people still get really nasty boot viruses and browser hijackers that shut down everything and require quite a bit of work to remove. Nobody does backups, so data recovery from drives with broken file allocation and partition tables is a thing. Most data is really easy to extract even with just basic gnu utils and we do that for a fraction of the price everyone else charges.

We get about 5 customers a day who ask for phone and tablet related stuff, so we decided to just put that on the web page and we'll start accepting those and we'll just hand them over to someone who has experience for now and see how it goes.
We can wall off the extra 270ft² of store space that we don't use and put a separate retail business in there. We're not sure for what. e-cigarettes can be sold at a hefty profit margin, but they require a license for the liquids that contain nicotine. We're looking into that.

The website I found out is constantly maintained and optimized and it costs us $300 a month. Given the excellent results I'd just let them get on with it. If we could get top search results for iphone and tablet repair as well, that could be massive.

http://stargayzing.com/wp-content/up...-the-couch.png

Ok I see, very cool! e-cig business sounds really interesting. I'd love to get into the legal pot business.

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Originally Posted by oskar

http://i.imgur.com/WHgZCju.png

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man somebody quick feed this girl a sandwich.

wow, you guys are haters.

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Originally Posted by oskar

wow, you guys are haters.

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I hate bones yes and she has a lot of them, but she has great nips.She is definitely better to look at than a lot of those round women you see waling around now.

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Originally Posted by jyms

I hate bones yes and she has a lot of them, but she has great nips.She is definitely better to look at than a lot of those round women you see waling around now.

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+1

ya the nips are ok

jesus

i just don't like it when there's just too much chance of hitting raw, unpadded pelvic bones during intercourse.

I thought it would be a good idea to read business related things. I started with The E Myth, which is shit, but I finished it anyway since I managed to speed read through half of it on a train and thought: this is going to be easy. From reading Twist of the Wrist 2 I had already thrown out all preconceptions on instruction manuals written for the lowest common denominator since that one actually had some really good information despite the painfully simplistic way said information was presented. Also years ago someone told me that even the worst books have at least one paragraph to redeem them.
Half way through the E-Myth it turns into a weird coming of age novel then goes back to small business for dummies, and if you stick it out to the end you'll find a page that, when you lick it, tastes like hope. Then I want on to Self Reliace, which strangely gets positive reviews. It's not a book, just a pamphlet. I stopped reading when the author made a Matrix movie reference. How to make friends and influence people: a classic apparently. It opens on how everyone wants to get better at dealing with people and how this book can help. I don't care much for people, so I canned that one as well and went back to Chuck Palahniuk, who doesn't know anything about business, but at least he knows how to write. I'm confident there's a Professional No Limit Hold'Em for businesses out there somewhere, and I'd be stoked to find it.

http://www.blackfilm.com/read/wp-con...e-as-Becky.jpg

That picture is hilarious. I would totally be down for seeing a comparable white chick getting it in both ends.

Just edited for better picture of Gabourey Sidibe. Doesn't put spoon's post out of context.
Again...
the hate...

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Originally Posted by oskar

Just edited for better picture of Gabourey Sidibe. Doesn't put spoon's post out of context.
Again...
the hate...

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I prefer the previous picture.

The correct way to address a female customer who comes in to complain about a product is Miss or Mrs, and not 'dumb cunt'. Even if, and that's the tricky part, even if the customer in question is indeed a dumb cunt. They don't teach you that in school.
People in general seem to be much too hung up on forced politeness. Instead of complaining about the tone of my voice, you should consider thanking me for not punching you in the mouth instead. You are lucky to be standing opposite someone as collected as myself. I am the epitome of civilized discourse. I am the blase apex of fucking zen. You can tell by yourself still enjoying all your teeth you dumb cunt.

you didn't get on then ?

I used to be like that.

How to Win Friends and Influence People is probably the best book on the subject.

Believe it or not, I'm outstanding at dealing with dumb cunt customers. Well, I was when I worked with dumb cunt customers. I have an ability to make the general public feel that they are not dumb cunts, to make them feel valued and listened to, even though I think they are nearly all dumb cunts who should just shut the fuck up.