Opening up a small boutique HiFi shop in retirement?

[Pareto Pragmatic]

Back to the drawing board to think of other retirement careers.

Working at an existing business would give you a lot of what you were looking to get. Is that a possibility?

 

[Purité Audio]

The house is five stories so, although my wife is quite keen to have the house ‘back’.
Also covid was difficult for us , if you base your business on actual face to face and the epidemic seems to have radically changed the way people buy, I set the business up expressly to converse ,to advise now it appears customers want the least possible human contact, just place the order expect it the next day send it back within the trial period.
Keith

 

[BDWoody]

Thank you all. Sometimes, even grown men have romantic dreams. But with your help, I quickly woke up.

Back to the drawing board to think of other retirement careers.

It's not just audio...

A while back I hired a man in his 50s to work for my company who had retired from his job as a cop, to buy a restaurant.

2 years later, he was broke, out of business and working nights with my crews.

Be very careful. Self employment is not for everyone.

The only way I would consider something like you describe, is if I could buy an existing profitable business that had an operating model I could fully understand and support.

I've owned several businesses since leaving the corporate finance/consulting world a few decades ago, and what you describe doing certainly isn't impossible, but you may be buying more of a hassle than a fun retirement gig.

 

[beeface]

A while back I hired a man in his 50s to work for my company who had retired from his job as a cop, to buy a restaurant.

2 years later, he was broke, out of business and working nights with my crews.

IIRC Bourdain dedicated roughly an entire chapter of “Kitchen Confidential” to explaining why opening a restaurant is a bad idea

Owning a small business - especially a restaurant - is often romanticised. And to some extent I get it. Follow your dreams, be your own boss, etc etc

Although I’m impressed by those who own successful businesses, I’m more than happy with the stability of a salary

 

[mhardy6647]

Three pages in, I probably cannot offer much, but I'll offer one point (maybe two).
There's a fellow who was on the Polk forums as an amateur who was a math teacher. I don't know the back story, but he, for whatever reason, left his day job and started a hifi business some years ago. By all accounts, he's been pretty successful. Might (???) be worth reaching out to him @CleanSound and see if you can pick his brain.
I don't think I betray any confidences by sharing his business link. Trigger alert: it is not an ASR kinda shop.

AudioThesis

AudioThesis is a US distributor of fine audio products. Our current portfolio includes Rosso Fiorentino, Norma Audio, and WAY Cables.

www.audiothesis.com

Oh, that other point. I found @amirm's comments interesting, because I would think a priori that the best route to some profitability in such a venture is to add some value by services rendered, not just selling boxes. Designing and installing integrated systems was my knee-jerk assessment of a good way (the best way?) to do it. I think Audio Thesis' approach, as his splash page implies, is to work very closely with potential customers to figure out what they want before selling stuff to them.

Bottom line (from my perspective only, of course)? I think it would be very much an uphill scramble, especially nowadays (when audio is a commodity for most of the population). One runs the risk of permanently souring oneself on the "hobby" by turning it into a job.

EDIT: Looks like I should've read more before posting! I'll leave these comments up, though, FWIW.
I guess I'll also add that I "leveraged" (I vehemently dislike this use of that word, by the way) my professional expertise post-retirement to maintain a more or less successful one-person shop as a consultant for the past decade. It's been sporadically very profitable. I am pretty lazy, but also pretty good at what I do/did for a living. I will say that almost (!) all of my gigs have been very rewarding (in terms of 'job satisfaction', that is), so, net-net it's been a good thing to do. I am fortunate to live in a state where establishing and maintaining a one-person LLC is easy and inexpensive. On the other hand, having the business (modest though it be) "required" us to start using a CPA for taxes, so there's some reasonable but nontrivial expense associated with that! I consider using a CPA to be a high-value investment, though.

 

[DanielT]

Ok, first off, I am far from retirement age. But I am day dreaming of what I will do in retirement should I be fortunate enough to be able to retire given the ridiculous cost of living.

One of the things that comes to mind is maybe I can open a small boutique HiFi shop. I would use this shop to (1) make new friends who shares the same interest in the hobby, generally a way to shoot the breeze and enjoy passing time (2) use the opportunity to educate others the technical how's of how audio equipment works, perhaps explain spinaroma, how speaker measurements correlates to listening experience; understanding I can only go so deep as I'm no expert in th field. But it gives me an opportunity to save a poor soul from the snake oil vultures, (3) make some extra money to subsidized retirement.

But starting any business is obviously not easy and there are of course risks.

For those who owns a shop, please share your experience, would you have chose the same path if you could do it all over again? What is the hardest part of owning and running a HiFi shop? What challenges and headwinds you foresee in the coming 10, 15, 20 years in the HiFi industry? What is the competitive landscape looks like? And how hard is it to keep your shop open and make a decent living?

If we are talking about sales at a physical location and not internet sales.

Fix up a cheap little basement space, or something similar. By/rent that space cheap, I really mean as cheap as possible. Fix and paint, put in some flea market furniture and carpets in the space. Invite for coffee and buns, have a small listening corner. What you then sell are mainly used record players. Thus, the shop must be close to where young people are. For example, near a university. So you can cover up that ongoing craze for vinyl.

Opening hours when you feel like it. Maybe only on weekends? All so that it does not become a "real" or too burdensome.Where you may not pull in the big bucks, at best, it's financially sane. But on the other hand, you might not spend all your free time on that activity. Then you do it because it's fun.

Throw some used amplifiers and speakers into the mix as well. The youngsters must have something to use the record player with.

One requirement is that you have the ability to service, or go through, the used stuff you buy in/selling. In Sweden, those who sell used HiFi on a professional basis offer at least a 2 month warranty, if I remember correctly.

What kind of legal rules apply in USA, to sell in the way I described above, you have to check. Home-built electrical gadgets, DIY, for example tube amps without CE marking, for example, cannot be sold on a commercial basis in Sweden in any case. That much I know.

CE marking - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Edit:
The housing association where I live rents hobby spaces, very cheap for us residents. Below you see two examples where these are used to sell various used nick nacks. Something like that I thought about with what I wrote above.

 

[Astoneroad]

I've never seen such uniformity of opinion amongest the ASR enclave. Disregard such sage advice at your bankroll's peril.

 

[SIY]

Just my personal take (I've started and run several businesses though not in audio): Hifi as such is dying. Go to any of the audio shows and note the demographics. Brick and mortar for most things (excluding restaurants or similar) is dying. This is a perfect storm.

I'd recommend a close read of Schumpeter.

 

[CleanSound]

I guess I'll also add that I "leveraged" (I vehemently dislike this use of that word, by the way) my professional expertise post-retirement to maintain a more or less successful one-person shop as a consultant for the past decade. It's been sporadically very profitable.

Sounds like you own a one-person hifi shop?

 

[CleanSound]

Just my personal take (I've started and run several businesses though not in audio): Hifi as such is dying. Go to any of the audio shows and note the demographics. Brick and mortar for most things (excluding restaurants or similar) is dying. This is a perfect storm.

Interestingly that is something that have come to mind, if I can be honest, I kind of figure a venture like that is an uphill battle, but sometimes a romantic dream clouds the obvious. Thank you for removing the cloud.

 

[mhardy6647]

Sounds like you own a one-person hifi shop?

umm, no.
I'm a biochemist specializing in analytical development in biotechnology. A small overlap on the Venn diagram with ASR.

EDIT: Sorry, I can't stop "talking" some of the time (most of the time)!
The other interesting overlap is this: Biomolecules tend to be very complicated in the sense of heterogeneity, so that "classical" biotech products (recombinant proteins) are almost invariably a Gemisch of myriad small populations of molecules manifesting more or less subtle structural differences. Some of those differences are biological (or more to the point clinical) noise, some are profoundly important. The contribution of any given subspecies ("isoform", generically speaking) can have a profoundly nonlinear impact biologically/clinically. In other words, a minor species may have a major biological effect.

The analytical tools available to us are very sensitive and very selective in their ability to detect, characterize, and quantify the species that make up a "product". The relative levels of those species can vary from batch to batch of the product even when the manufacturing process is well controlled.

The question is: what's signal, and what's noise? It is fun, challenging, and often nontrivial to figure that out.

OK, I'll stop now.

 

[restorer-john]

I am retired now. 9 years home audio AV gear sales, 5years of straight commission no base salary home audio equipment sales and then I studied electronics and then worked as a bench tech for ~15 years and then I went into electromechanical oil and gas industry heavy equipment manufacturing and the into oil and gas drilling technology downhole electronics tools technology.

But, you've never signed a 5-7 year lease on a retail tenancy, signed your life away as a guarantor/company director, paid wages, superannuation, payroll taxes, designed and built a concept store from the frame stage up, liasing with shopfitters, architects and tradespeople, right through to grand opening, 5 years of operation and paid for the entire thing yourself from concept through to stripping it out at the end of that lease and returning it to a raw state have you?

Retailing is easy for the people with no actual skin in the game.

 

[steve59]

I think it's common to want to find a way to subsidize our passion be it hifi or motorcycles by angling to make it profitable. After reading Doodski and being of the age when the B&M stores were in every strip mall to just a few independently owned shops without competition for 30-50 miles in a major market. If you were local and started a hifi lovers meetup group I'd join.

 

[JohnnyAudio]

Ok, first off, I am far from retirement age. But I am day dreaming of what I will do in retirement should I be fortunate enough to be able to retire given the ridiculous cost of living.

One of the things that comes to mind is maybe I can open a small boutique HiFi shop. I would use this shop to (1) make new friends who shares the same interest in the hobby, generally a way to shoot the breeze and enjoy passing time (2) use the opportunity to educate others the technical how's of how audio equipment works, perhaps explain spinaroma, how speaker measurements correlates to listening experience; understanding I can only go so deep as I'm no expert in th field. But it gives me an opportunity to save a poor soul from the snake oil vultures, (3) make some extra money to subsidized retirement.

But starting any business is obviously not easy and there are of course risks.

For those who owns a shop, please share your experience, would you have chose the same path if you could do it all over again? What is the hardest part of owning and running a HiFi shop? What challenges and headwinds you foresee in the coming 10, 15, 20 years in the HiFi industry? What is the competitive landscape looks like? And how hard is it to keep your shop open and make a decent living?

You will need an awesome repair person for vintage.

 

[DanielT]

You will need an awesome repair person for vintage.

I would even guess that there are people who are professional repairmen who see an opportunity to expand the business by also selling vintage HiFi.

 

[Doodski]

liasing with shopfitters

That @restorer-john is some of the funniest terminology I have ever heard...LoL.. Liasing with shoplifters... You made my asthma flare up from giggling deeply. The method of liasing with shoplifters was firstly a electronic security system and secondly we had a very fast running guy in the store that chased them as far as required and apprehended them and dragged them back to the store to face the RCMP as a shoplifter... LoL. @Liasing...

But, you've never signed a 5-7 year lease on a retail tenancy, signed your life away as a guarantor/company director, paid wages, superannuation, payroll taxes, designed and built a concept store from the frame stage up, liasing with shopfitters, architects and tradespeople, right through to grand opening, 5 years of operation and paid for the entire thing yourself from concept through to stripping it out at the end of that lease and returning it to a raw state have you?

I have as a 100% straight commission sales person in a brand new but pretty large old building with bare walls and bare floors building/startup store accepted a ton of responsibility in the operation's success and accepted responsibility in the earnings made due to not having any previous store customers/traffic flow to depend on and we suffered with each other including the owner for a year and a half to 2 years while the traffic built up and then slowly we started making pretty good good coin (Up to CDN $100K/year for the top sales peeps @ my store in the early 90s.). I fully acknowledge the burdens that I had that normally a waged/salaried employee never has to endure and that the owner had the various high level legal forms of responsibility that you described. I think that I accepted more than enough of the risks, pains and resulting gains as a commissioned sales expert and as that sweet old German man that owned the store said as he verbally guaranteed to us that we would make very good coin if we stuck with it and we did simply because we trusted him. He was very loyal to us and us to him and he deserved all of it while he more than generously shared the winnings with us and we made him rich and successful with his special kind of leadership of course.

Have you done all those things that you mentioned? I think from your past commentary that you have in assorted types of business operations that you where into. With today's competing mass merchandisers, competing chain stores, big brick and mortar and the high cost of real estate and leases and whatever else you can introduce into the equations to start up a store do you think you can make the required earnings to compensate for the added stress of competing with them? Does today's staff bitch and complain about wages when they accept no responsibility and income level risk? These are very important things and me being a guy that appreciates capitalism's benefits for those that accept more responsibility I won't ever pay a salaried employee what I would pay a commission employee that creates cash flow and creates a job from thin air where there was nothing before and that statement also goes for any employer that creates the same success from thin air. They have my respect!

 

[Doodski]

I think it's common to want to find a way to subsidize our passion be it hifi or motorcycles by angling to make it profitable. After reading Doodski and being of the age when the B&M stores were in every strip mall to just a few independently owned shops without competition for 30-50 miles in a major market. If you were local and started a hifi lovers meetup group I'd join.

That's so nice to read... I just love that sort of stuff...

 

[Doodski]

There's a fellow who was on the Polk forums as an amateur who was a math teacher. I don't know the back story, but he, for whatever reason, left his day job and started a hifi business some years ago. By all accounts, he's been pretty successful. Might (???) be worth reaching out to him @CleanSound and see if you can pick his brain.
I don't think I betray any confidences by sharing his business link. Trigger alert: it is not an ASR kinda shop.

AudioThesis

AudioThesis is a US distributor of fine audio products. Our current portfolio includes Rosso Fiorentino, Norma Audio, and WAY Cables.

www.audiothesis.com

Having business idols and reading success stories is vital to any seriously competitive salespersons' mental health and long term ability to keep keeping on and succeeding. I used my most excellent managers and they in turn used me which I thought to be the greatest compliment I could ever receive and that works for some. So to cold call a expert with the success to prove it is a compliment if the call is done properly and any business person with half a brain is going to identify that the caller is doing a cold call for all the right reasons.

Oh, that other point. I found @amirm's comments interesting

@amirm's advice is pure fact based opinion from experience. It's great to have that beacon of reliable sanity and solid ideas to draw from for all of us. He is the reason I came here and then I found all you peeps to be very cool too so here I am...

 

[Doodski]

Opening hours when you feel like it. Maybe only on weekends? All so that it does not become a "real" or too burdensome.Where you may not pull in the big bucks, at best, it's financially sane. But on the other hand, you might not spend all your free time on that activity. Then you do it because it's fun.

Oooooo... That's the thing that does not occur..LoL... Things can get out of control and pretty soon you have a ton of new and used gear laying about, needing shelving and slat wall merchandising structure and all sorts of stuff starts happening and it can't be controlled so one needs to accommodate it and it creates more work etc. It's a big circle of opportunity that is difficult to refuse. But I totally appreciate a small mom and pop operation or boutique as you stated.

 

[Short38]

Set up a spreadsheet. Outline a years worth of applicable expense: rent, utilities, connectivity, licenses, fees, insurance, furniture, inventory, plus?

Assume 0 income during the first year.

Can you survive and continue?

What is your “value proposition”? Only dealer I respected did the following:

1. No sale final until customer is fully satisfied

2. Loaner if an item purchased needs service.

3. Service what is sold.

Remained in business over 30 years.