Ok, that's a great atitude, conducive to making money. Here are steps you need to do to get to your first sale.
In this post I'll cover the things you need to do to be a great entrepreneur. It's a
prescriptive list rather than a descriptive list. You need to do these things. There are no shortcuts. Likewise, for this thread to work in your favour, you need to continue asking questions. Try to enumerate the questions to make my job easier in answering them. Finally, in line with my previous post, there will be important thinsg that I will NOT cover in this post, all of which you also need to be aware of.
The Good News: You are not the first person to want to build a business, and you are not the last. There have been thousands of people who've done it before and there is a whole academic body of knowledge (called entrepreneurship) which is there to help you do your job.
What is your job: In wanting to start a company, you are applying for being an
entrepreneur. This is a word used to collectively describe four job roles you need to do; an investor, a founder, a CEO and a company director. I will cover the first two of these roles.
Overall, the
best practice for entrepreneurial endeavour means best practice in
thinking, because if you think right, you will
do right.
Be a good investor: To get your venture off the ground, you need to create an exciting investment opportunity, both for your self and others. If you don't do that, it will be hard for you to build a business. Investment opportunities come in two flavours: arbitrage and creating new demand.
You have arbitrage (i.e. you can buy at auction and sell at retail for a higher price). Let's assume you have a good arbitrage opportunity. This is only only an assumption, in reality, because arbitrage opportunities are temporary in nature and don't have defensible qualities - the venture you are proposing may be a bad idea. To do your job well as an investor, I advise to ask the question: "Is this venture a good idea?".
Be a good founder. To get your venture off the ground, you need to be a good founder. Being a good founder means doing a good job at completing the
Silver equation:
V=P*S*E
V=value, P=problem, S=solution, e=resources
In other words, you need to create value, by elegantly solving a large problem using resources currently outside of your control. To complete this equation, you need to follow these practical steps:
Step 1: Problem formulation. Organise to interview at least 100 people regarding their transportation needs. Is there a segment in the community who want cars, but are not able to afford them? Is there any other pressing problem, like the cost of petrol? Maybe, there is some bigger problem that needs solving? For example; people buy cars to express their personality, yet, it's very difficult to customise cars to fit your personality. Therefore, you can help people get more value out of their cars by customising them, or some other service/product that prevents vehicles from depreciating so quickly. Rapid depreciation is a problem. A range of products to customise vehicles may be a solution.
Do you see how the thought process works?
At any rate, do the surveys. This will give you information used for steps 2 and 3.
Step 2: Elegant solution. An elegant solution is one where you have lower customer acquisition costs than your competitors, either by way of being remarkable/viral or because of your business model. With your existing approach of buying cars to sell them with a small markup, you might not have enough of a contribution margin to meet your fixed, variable expense and hurdle rate of profitability. For a wining business, you need a net profit margin of at least 15%. With your value proposition (cheap cars), you will have problems achieving that.
At any rate, have a careful think about how you solve the problem for your customers. If it's a solution similarly employed by a larger company, it's probably not a good solution for you because they have the volume to make their business model sustainable and you don't. I.e. Just because someone else is doing it, doesn't mean it's good.
Step 3: Gathering resources. You need to take results from steps 1 and 2, condense them into a report and use this report to recruit people. In steps 1 and 2 you would have identified people who want to buy from you, so when you've completed step 3, you can use the resources to close your first sale.
Finally: This post has not covered a lot of things. To build a great business, you need a certain way of
thinking because it leads to a certain way of
doing. I have not covered this yet. What I have covered are the four main roles you need to execute in your capacity as an entrepreneur. One of these roles is that of an investor. The jury is still out on whether your idea is a good investment opportunity. I can certainly tell you that I don't know too many people who would consider your venture a better opportunity than other opportunities. I have not covered why that it.
Secondly, I covered the Silver equation and what you need to do to be a good founder. There are three steps. If you execute these steps you will create value.
Do give me some feedback and ask questions for how I can assist you further. It takes a lot of thought for me to write advice. Often, I don't have the time to think through and hammer out everything that's relevant to your situation. In this case, do give me feedback and I will try to cover everything I've left out in the next post.
unless they want to set it up them selves its more $ in my pocket.,I can see the business growing like a thunder storm and its gonna start raining money! to go online and order a pre-made high performance import car, it's a cool thought and it's in my plans to later on make it happen, as well as have a garage to set up a home base with a front desk ya know nice looking,sorry when I think about it I get very exited and I cant wait to start Im like a 1000hp drag car waiting for the green light! hahaha let me find my pills hold on...............