I'm confused whether this venture is called Southern Appliance, YourStore, ApplianceStore, RecycledMoney or what-have-you
Here's some visualisation of the first 1/2 month of operations.
Some thoughts:
- It's still early days, but parts revenue is almost negligible, and there is no discernable upward trend
- nowhere close to $20k / month in eBay revenue (assuming that eBay revenue = parts sales), which was expected to be executed in the near-immediate time frame
- what are typical profit margins for appliance and parts sales?
- when is the monthly profit distribution expected? I assumed it should have been on May 31st.
- I'd second DebitMe's call for a public spreadsheet (google spreadsheet preferred) to track everything - shareholder list, daily tracking, etc. You are probably keying in the data anyway, so I assume it would incur minimal effort. Improves transparency and easier for us to analyse.
There is definitely no upward trend on parts, nothing further (exept for the first couple of days) has been listed so the income you see there is based on parts that have been online for long periods of time. We've organized quite a bit in the two weeks since starting this but also lost a labor hand in between which has caused me personally to deal with a lot of time consuming things while searching for a replacement. It is difficult to find a trend based on a couple of weeks because the entire business is cyclic and this is true for daily / weekly / monthly revenue.
I do not have profit margins nailed down for a couple of reasons. We process so many appliances now and have grown so quickly over the last few years that this has changed dramatically over that time. Sure, you could break down the per piece profit with enough effort but we process things so fast and have so many variables to consider that it would actually cost profit to figure out. As things expand and additional staff is added I can focus on these things.
To give you a general idea, of the appliances we fix we almost always handle this from parts off of another unit. With a raw cost of around $25 and an average selling price of $160 (last time I checked and based on a full year) the margin before labor and all other expenses is high.
On parts, similar story. The actual margin has fluctuated constantly as we added new part types to those that are sold and because each part type has it's own margin there has never been a steady percent to expect. I will be breaking down some of the more detailed information as time allows and it will give a much clearer picture but it varies by age, brand, style, appliance type, shipping costs and more. Again, you could crunch these numbers and find specifics but while we are focused on explosive growth it would be a detrimental effort.
These numbers will become more and more important as things are streamlined. At this minute larger increases in profit can be had by focusing elsewhere.
I will start posting much more information on specific things so that the numbers can be crunched but please bare with me.
A public spreadsheet is doable but I would have to clean the one I currently use and add another update to the daily reports. I'll look into the best way to do that and see how much ongoing effort will be required.
Thanks