What age do use plan to retire ?

That's awesome!
That's the way I'm looking at things nowand into "retirement" playing with businesses and finding/taking advantage of opportunities add they come.
My wife also has skills that she can turn into her owns business or consultancy doing what she enjoys, with people she wants to work with , plus take advantage of a service that is wanted and needed

 

Starting anything from scratch is hard, I did 2 businesses from scratch and purchased 1 in my early days, the one I bought was by far the easiest, just changed how things were done, priced and purchased and was almost instantly making money instead of losing or breaking even.....

 

Totally agree. We started a pizza business from scratch. On the first day, we sold one small pizza for $8.

That didn't even pay the wages (and I wasn't drawing a wage); forget about the rent, power, materials, ...

 

Yipes! What happened? Did it come good?

 

We operated the business 7 days/week. My wife worked in it every day; I had a day job in IT and only worked in the pizza business on Friday nights and weekends.

By doing continuous letterbox drops, sales did improve (couldn't have gotten much worse) and profits did turn positive in time. I don't remember the actual numbers as this was 18 years ago. I do remember that it was an OK business (definitely not a great business).

We found it tough going as we had a 4 year old and a 2 year old (my wife's mother looked after kids when we were both at the pizza shop). The kids were demanding more and more of our time. After 18 months, we sold the business to a person with a marketing degree. The sale price was more than the plant, equipment and stock but the capital gain was nothing to write home about.

The new owner phoned us 6 weeks after he took over and asked us if we wanted to buy the business back. He changed everything and I mean everything. He basically destroyed the business in 6 weeks.

So much for not fixing it if it ain't broke!! Obviously he didn't learn enough with that degree .

 

@kierank Respect!

 

This was our 2nd business. Our first business (an existng business we bought) wasn't a great success either.

It was our 3rd and 4th businesses where, we not only made good profits (for investment cashflow purposes), we are able to capitalise these good profits when we sold.

Could we have had the successes with businesses #3 and #4 without going through the learning curves of businesses #1 and #2? I firmly we couldn't/wouldn't.

Bit like buying multiple properties. The more you buy, the better you get at it.

 

Common theme.

 

You can say that again.

The guys who bought our 3rd and 4th businesses (they were being merged) ended up putting the business into liquidation in 30 months. Last I heard, they owed $12M and that is after losing their houses, ...

 

What business is the 3rd and 4th? If you don't mind sharing.

 

Computer software, training and consulting.

 

Persistence paid you off. Well done @kierank

 

Looking forward to hear your next journey.

 

18 years ago, you priced a small pizza at $8?
Wow!

 

Yeah, and large pizzas were $15.

The amazing thing was the cost of production was, from memory, around $2 to $3. I love businesses with large gross profit/gross margin products and services. That is one reason why we went into pizza.

Then the big firms got into pizza home delivery (Pizza Hut, Eagle Boys, Domino's, etc) and drove prices down to $5 per pizza. These buggers spoilt it for everyone .

In a way, I am still in the pizza business. We own a nice parcel of Domino's shares. They have done really well over the years. I don't like their product (in fact, I think it is ****) but I like what has happened to their share price.

 

Now Domino's have jacked up the price to $13 again. I didn't know that and I was shocked when I saw the price. I haven't ordered one for years. I am buying handmade pizzas from my local IGA and baking them myself for $8. The leavened hand stretched sour dough pizza base is the best I have had. Makes Domino's taste like cardboard!

 

I still pay $15-$20 for a large pizza but the quality and taste is far greater than 4x$5 pizzas.

No conveyor belt just the traditional pizza oven, after all how can a margarita pizza take the same time to cook as a supreme.

Further the pizzas are made by hand not and each one is unique not like dominos of 8 slices of pepperoni per pizza (1 per slice), all of a sudden you actually get a difference in each mouthful not just oh I know what this bite is going to be.

 

You are kinder than me unless you think cardboard is worse than **** .

 

Menulog and similar systems are doing wonders for the little guys, if they can deliver and the product is good, the business will come to them after just a handful of glowing reviews .

I would love to run a food place, I love cooking and I am good at it, especially for large numbers but at this point in my life I am trying to mitigate risk, not take it on .

Maybe when I am retired from my white collar job and the investment project comes to a fruitful close we can consider something like a food truck, who knows .

 

You mean it's not? I had one yersterday for the first time in about 10 years and I had to check I wasn't eating the box.