A Shiny New 
Business
I caught up with a friend recently. The first thing out of his mouth after ‘Hi Zac’ was
“Guess What?”
“What.” (At this point I was feeling smug because I had guessed ‘What’ correctly. Good thing I was wrong, otherwise this would have been a really short article).
“I’m going to buy the tattoo shop I am working at and live above it.”
“Cool.” I didn’t know what else to say. And “Why on earth would you want to do that?” didn’t seem the right response.
My mate is a pretty clever guy. He’s self confident and outgoing. But this kind of made me wonder.
“What equity is there in the business I asked?” Thinking “Are you going to be able to build that up and sell it?”
Does it have a marketing system?
What are the advantages of owning the tattoo shop over just working in it?
Normally I don’t do consulting work for free and I generally don’t give advice for free because free advice is pretty worthless, but this was fascinating.
As far as I could tell, owning a tattoo shop means that instead of paying someone for the use of their shop you avoided that. In tattooing, owning a shop means you collect enough fees from others leasing space in your shop to cover costs.
So You End Up Tattooing in order to pay yourself- YOU OWN YOUR OWN JOB.
Considering this business was valued at five figures there is not a whole lot of equity and not much value inherent in any shop. So in the end you have additional pain and suffering of owning a small business and no big pay off in the future. There is no equity to sell; there is no autonomy to be gained – if you aren’t there tattooing you make no payola.
The way these businesses are traditionally structured, at some point you will have to do another tattoo in order to be able to eat.
This defeats the purpose of being in business. This is closer to self-employment. Far too many businesses end up like this. The sad case is when the owner doesn’t want this but ends up with it anyway.
My question out of is that “what do you want from your business”? “or do you want more?” You are at least looking at what is involved in having more if you have read this far. Once you see the underlying form of business you can more easily envisage what next. In my friend’s case what can he sell to the same people after he has finished tattooing them? The real estate on their skin is finite; he needs other ways to further monetise his customers (The shop is pretty busy as it stands).
You’ll be faced with the same challenge: Do you expand the boundaries of what you do in order to make more money or do you stick with tradition in your industry – living and dying by their rules?