Convenience Store Business – A hidden money maker

Introduction

This is really an interesting business if you look closely. I didn’t quite realize it until one day the man that runs the small kiosk near my house gave me my bill. Well I had been taking stuff from him on credit for over a month and he then billed me.  The bill didn’t come as a surprise to me but what did was the amount on the bill – N5,500! How did only me consume that much in a month on just little things? I couldn’t believe it until he showed me his record and then I realized something, this guy was making money! How many other people staying around me consume that much?

What you need

Starting this type of business is very easy. You only need to find a space in your neighborhood that you can use as a shop. In choosing your shop or kiosk, make sure there not more than two shops on the street.

Getting Customers

You don’t need even to do any type of advertising, just open your shop and display your products!

Product Selection

You need to be very careful here. Take a walk around your area and sample other shops – see the range of products they are selling. Don’t focus on selling the best products, focus on selling convenient products even if other people are selling it. Your selling point is your location; the people who live closest to you will buy from you since your products are as good as the next seller’s.

 Another thing here, keep to the cheap products and keep your total cost to under N5,000.

Staff

Actually, if you’ve got a lot of free time, you could do it yourself but it takes a lot of time and attention to keep up with the supplies for each product and attending to customers – it’s a fulltime job!.  I suggest you find someone who would do it for you. A relative would be ideal but whoever it is, just make sure you put in certain controls to check his activities. For example, you could have a written price list and a record of the quantities of all your products. Then you could count your products regularly like weekly or monthly – the official word for it is “stock taking”.

Conclusion

It’s true that the profit from this could be slow but with dedication and discipline, you can actually grow this business into something big in a matter of months. This is another great business you can do with little start-up, just find a little space or construct and place a small lock-up kiosk or even one on wheels; then stock it up and you are in business!