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What keeps you from scaling that upwards in the long run? Is it simply not having enough inventory / potential sales / something similar, or is it something you could fix with enough of a time commitment? 25K a year isn't much but it's very hard to beat the $/hour you're claiming. You're in a pretty good position to try something like this, so it's a matter of looking at the long term weakness you're talking about and (without lying to yourself) figuring out how much of a weakness it really is.
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Jul 2, 2017 21:53
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 07:47 |
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Ron Don Volante posted:It doesn't have great long-term prospects as the market is shrinking. As you can probably guess, the demographic skews older. And as we're moving to a cashless society, fewer young collectors are getting into the hobby. The influx of new collectors doesn't seem to be keeping pace with the loss of older collectors, and the hobby has been in a downturn over the past couple of years. I think it's going to get even worse once the Baby Boomers pass on. The U.S. Mint and a few private companies are also doing a lot of damage to the hobby, just as the USPS helped cripple the stamp collecting market. Given all of that, I'm more interested in using it to keep me afloat while I develop a different, long-term sustainable business. I believe I can still grow it to net high five figures within the next year though. I wouldn't worry about super long term planning until you know whether you can get this off the ground and hit your targets, but high five figures for a business that you can run part time is a very big deal. If you can keep scaling it past that point it doesn't really matter what the 20+ year outlook is; you can always transition out with a lot more money than you put in, and the broader category of collectible items is big enough that there will always be room for people to make a living. Don't take this to be too bullish because there are always tons of unexpected and/or creative ways to fail, but if you can do what you say you can it's relatively promising. You might want to spend a few hours and come up with some concrete ways to get to that number. Right now I assume you're using a spreadsheet or some basic bookkeeping software to track buys/sales, so sit down with it and look at overall volume/day. Are you getting your coins from Ebay and reselling higher? That means you have relatively unlimited stock to churn through but will probably have to put in a lot more time for cheap coin #100 than you do for coin #1, which will cut into your $/hour a lot at some point. Are you going out to garage sales and flea markets, then Ebaying? In that case you'll probably scale easier since it's just a matter of using more money to buy (effectively) bulk lots, but will need to list and ship a lot more - without automated auction software you'll also lose a lot of hourly rate on this. Learning how to make better auction descriptions, using SEO to set up a decent virtual storefront with a Google presence or maybe even buying an existing domain/online store etc. could all help here. Are there possibilities to make bulk deals with the grading agencies or some of the more honest "1000 uncleaned coin lot" dealers (do those actually exist?) to lower costs further? As someone who used to collect coins as a kid and quit like everybody else under 40 you're talking about, it'd be pretty fascinating to read about somebody running a coin shop, so I hope you keep posting.
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Jul 3, 2017 18:32
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