Its a bit early for this but....

A friend of my father-in-law works for a company that sells flavors and equipment for Hawaiian Shave Ice. The two of them were talking and Dad thought of Amy and me as potential distributors. I've been working for the last three days on developing a business plan for a single sales location that would service between 150 to 200 customers per day with these yummy frozen confectionaries.

Developing business plans is a wonderful experience. It is amazing what you learn as you ask questions about how to make a business work. For example, in order to do the proforma financials, I had to ask myself what a reasonable customer volume would be. According to Dad's friend, we should expect about 200 customers per day; if we get only 100 were doing something wrong; and if we get 300 we'd be hopping. Using those numbers, I ran projections on costs and revenues. At 100 customers, we'd end up losing about $5000/year. At 200, we'd make about $5000, and at 300 we'd make about $17,000.

So the next question I had to ask was "How do we ensure we get at least 200 customers/day?" Opens up a whole series of questions about marketing and location.

What about the 300 customers per day? Well, that works out to one customer every 2 minutes. Is is possible to serve more customers than that with a single employee in a 5 x 8 portable building?

I will be going back to the drawing board tomorrow and running numbers on a different plan. we'll see how it all works out.