Adventures with Corndog: Corndog's Fish Store

Yeah the goal is to carry the common mbuna species that are colorful and special order other things. Having most of the tang cichlids sitting in stock won't get walk in sales. Rarely will someone walk in and be, oh that brown of silver cichlid is worth $25 each and I'll take 5. Instead I can carry 5 different collection points of the same fish and the african cichlid guy will always be looking for the location that isn't in stock.

Trying a new idea out. Holding an auction on facebook for fish. Starting the group of fish at $1. Currently the fish are at $20. I'd normally retail them for $69.99. The goal isn't to really sell fish. I'm thinking it should work as passive advertising. As people bid, they have to leave a comment. Which will show the post to all their friends. It's only been 2 hours but the post is performing much better than a normal post on facebook. This may be cheaper than advertising with facebook by boosting a post etc. I'll report back on how it works out.

Facebook Auction seems to be working. I don't know if it's transitioning to more people in the store buying but it is getting more facebook likes.

Weather is still ridiculous. Yesterday it was like 72 degrees and today is 74 degrees. It's October, Normally we'd be at like a high of 60, with infinite rain this month. I'm still waiting for summer to end.

I'll write some long winded post tomorrow when I open up the shop. Need to head to bed so I can get up early and pick up fish from the airport.

Forgot about this till now.

So catching up, sales improved a lot at the end of October and November. It started raining, what a shocker! Sometimes I think I need to overlay the weather with sales ,but it'll just show me what I know, rain = rain money.

December starts off slow, like omg I'm gonna go out of business slow then picks up in the last 10 days of the month. The dry spell was so brutal on the industry that 4 stores are/have already closed in the state. Which is probably like 4 out of 25-30 or so. So maybe 10%? The drought is still plaguing me as California is being water rationed, which I need to buy black worms from so they are still at 20% production compared to a couple years ago.

I've been importing more fish to bypass the wholesalers lately. It just makes financial sense on anything I sell in quantity. Plus I'm building out a holding facility at home to help bring stuff in /breed as well.

It looks like I'm gonna have worse sales than last year. Not by much. It's disappointing as I want to grow, and yet the weather was so uncooperative that stores went out of business. Looks like I'll round out the year at the 280-300k sales range for the year. More profit this year than last for sure as there have just been less expenditures.

As of October the business became debt free, meaning all building costs/any loan etc all paid in full. All inventory in store is outright owned and everything purchased is paid for in cash - well credit card, then paid off at the end of every week.

I feel like every year I'm in business I'll just make more money due to the fact of setting up infrastructure to be more efficient. I couldn't say that a few years ago, working for someone else you're limited by what they are willing to invest in their business. I find the more money I spend on research and development the more money I make. You'd think how much can there be to learn? Turns out lots cause most fish stores are stuck in their old ways not using technology to automate and makes processes better. So if I spend 1000 dollars finding a better way to do something. Typically I'll realize that money within a year and it just puts me further ahead of my competition.

I developed a store brand plant fertilizer that just constantly has been selling out. Made it simple to use and people are experiencing great growth. Made it an all in one which according to the internet is impossible. But in practice real people with real aquariums are seeing growth like never before. Which leads me to trying to do more store brand items. I want to add some foods to my offerings that are very high quality instead of bulk being cheap.

Customers in the store so thats all i've got for now.

When I started it I had 0. I used an angel investor, which is why I have a silent business partner. Terms were such that if I failed I owed nothing. If I was successful he owns 25% of the company. Without a deal like that I would have never started just knowing the odds of businesses failing. Had people who believed in me and saw me run another fish store. So one guy put up 50k cash, hes the partner, Another friend built the place through a loan. It took me roughly 100K worth of cash/loan to start it up. The loan on the build out worked the same way, if I failed I owed nothing.

Now the store pays my salary, and 1 full time employee at $15 an hour and 1 part time employee at $13 an hour. And it cutting checks every month in profits. At any point there is somewhere between 10-20k in cash sitting in the bank depending on season. Inventory worth is 20-30k. So at this point we're free and clear barring running the business into the ground with a string of bad decisions. I'll be the first one to end this business when it doesn't make sense instead of running it down into massive debt.

I don't forsee that happening but thats what everyone says. I think the great thing about a business like this, is no matter how bad it gets, it could go down to just a 1 guy operation. Kind of like a lawn mowing business or something. You expand the crew as sales are good, and if it was really bad, it's just 1 guy and his lawn mower making money. I feel like my business is top of the pile so to speak, so for my business to fail it would take something major, and lesser businesses should be failing first, which is what is happening now. But with each competitor that goes out, it diverts some more traffic to the stores that are left.

I think the biggest danger to my store is burn out. Working with the general public every day is hard work. I now take 2 days off a week and it has helped a lot. I think that is my competitors biggest problems is burn out. They've been in business a long time and aren't working 110% to improve their business. A lot of these businesses have thrived on sheer volume of customers to get them through their inefficiencies. I try to look at all the processes in my business and improve on them no matter how good or bad business is. I'm still the only store in the state that has automatic water change system in the store. And now I have it at my facility at home as well. Other stores pay people 40 hour work weeks to do the water changes, or if they can't afford that the tanks just look worse for it and lose more fish. Even the wholesalers in the state don't have this feature. To me it's infrastructure that pays itself off very quickly and gives much better results. That being said, it takes a lot of work and setup to build it. I'm shocked when I watched stores move and and a wholesaler move and they still didn't set it up. It's like they like wasting $400 every week on water change labor..

Enough ranting for me. I need to get back into my fish room facility at home and keep building.

For those of you who own businesses. Do you find that your sales go up each year? I'm just sitting here feeling like a failure. I've got some friends who own a women's clothing store/air plant store and they have just been crushing me in sales this month. They've got essentially the same square feet. But like today did $3100 and closed early to go out to dinner with family. And I've got 2 hours to go but have only done $1600. Now they've been in business for 20 years at this point. They also pay 4k a month in rent to be in a high traffic neighborhood in Seattle. My rent is is only 1k. I won't know if I've done more in sales till the end of his month. But I've got two Decembers worth of data. First year was 19k in December. Last year was 25k. This year. I'm at 17.6k so far this month. I feel like I'm behind. Yet my friends in a different industry are doing better than last year etc.

I know my industry is hurting, but I've always said bah, it's the other guys who aren't working hard enough. I'm confidant I'm doing better than my competitors in sales. But I feel like I should be competing against myself. Overall on the year. I'll be down compared to last year. There is nothing I can think of to combat the insanely good weather we had this summer. I know I could look at profit margin and that has gotten higher for sure this year. Perhaps I need to factor that in, by increasing profit margin it's bound to make overall sales go down. But I still feel like I could push the over all sales number higher... I feel like myself, my knowledge of the industry, and my store are continually improving and as such should increase overall revenue as well.

We'll have to see how it goes post Christmas, some huge amounts of money can be spent the following days as everyone has gift cards and extra money in their pocket. Probably not as much for a pizza business.

What are you guys' thoughts on using someone's name? I went and picked up mexican food, and not only the cashier but another person knew my name from the pickup order. I can't deny that it felt good to hear my name as I left the door and they thanked me using my name.

That being said, a grocery store used to always do it with your last name. So if I was Corndog Stick. They'd say thanks for shopping with us today Mr. Stick. It was so obviously fake that it wasn't a good thing. I'm wondering if I use their first name at check out/as they are leaving. I wonder if it's the fact that I know the grocery store person could give a shit and is a big entity, and a local place I feel like they might actually appreciate the business. My barber knows everyone's name the minute they walk in his door. It's really impressive and I think everyone can't help but feel like he genuinely knows you. I feel like if I was to start always using someone first name at check out, I'd start learning them and be able to greet them by name etc.

Something else I'm thinking about is rewards/discounts etc. So right now I have a couple of programs in place. If you a local aquarium society member you save 10% off everything. Another program I have implemented is Square's "stamp" program. I have it set to spend $50, get a stamp, 5 stamps gets your $10 gift card/off your purchase. Because of the limited control of square. Currently both these promos stack. I'd like to do a different program that was better for me. So instead of a discount where I just straight up lose money. I was thinking perhaps a "fish bucks" system. Where like I give you $1 towards live fish for every 10 bucks you spend. Everyone would get this and other programs would end. This would make you more likely to come back and spend. And the business gets all the money. So for instance when you spend $100, right now I'd give you 10% off if you were a member, and I'd collect $90. With this I'd get $100 and you'd get 10 fish bucks requiring you to come back to get your discount.

I'm also thinking we could have some promos where certain types of slow moving merchandise or fish earn double fish dollars etc.

Sludig_sl said:

Can look it up online, but a succesfull reef store here "ELite Reef" in Colorado does coral cash that works similiar to your fish bucks. They also usually were good about putting up youtube video's of new fish each week and some corals. Granted with salt you get a lot more I think interesting and varied fish that are a lot more distinct than fresh are from each other.

I'm kinda interested in doing a nice planted tank like you see on the internet everywhere these days. Just not sure I want to spend a 100 hours researching it like I did with salt. That and it'd be in addition to once I get my floor reinforced just to be safe, want to start a 300 Deep dimension.

Since not shipped to your store, probably not. But any chance you could sell me a delivered deep dimension tank 300+ gallons reef ready like the Marineland DD? (Looking for 24-28 tall, At least 6 foot long, ideally minimum 30-40 inches deep.) Of course those values give sizes all over the place, but I'm not sold on a specific size other than wanting something with the shallower bigger footprint. (Had a standard 210 before, for a reef shallower is easier for coral lighting and the foot print is much more valuable for a lot of species that hang around floor/rocks than open swim space.)

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Yeah I can't drop ship you a 300 DD. You'd have to go through a local store to get it. They do go on sale about once a year.

All I can say is I didn't use one. I don't think one would know what I was looking for in a building though anyways.