How to start a store with no money

hi I’m Emma Carmichael and welcome to
another edition of ask Evan in today’s
video I’m going to answer question from
one my reader Santosh who was asking
about how to start a book store without
any money
and one of my advice so he wrote in
asking dear M and I want to start my own
book shop but I don’t have any capital
how should I approach and generate the
amount please guide me Santosh so
Santosh you can potentially go and get
investors for this I think it’s going to
be really challenging for a bookshop you
know if you have really good personal
line of credit you can’t talk to the
banks otherwise it’s not going to be an
opportunity they would look at and for
angel investors you might find the right
person to invest but usually angels are
looking for opportunities where they can
earn a much higher return on their
capital than a bookshop they want to see
higher growth type of companies and it’s
a lot harder because you don’t have
anything set up right it’s just an idea
at this point so where a lot of
entrepreneurs make a mistake especially
not getting into retail operations that
they’re setting up stores or cafes or
restaurants you burn through a lot of
money and setting up that operation and
a lot of times it doesn’t work out and
you’ve maybe eliminated your life
savings you’ve upset your investors and
so what I always encourage entrepreneurs
to do is you can think big but start
small and try not to start spending too
much money until you’re earning money
coming in so it’s a couple ways to do it
for your idea and hopefully these can
help you guide that business forward so
the first thing I would do is instead of
launching your own book store to start
partner up with other retailers and see
if you could have a little book rack
within their business and what that does
is helps them drive new people into the
store you give them a little bit of the
profit and you can also see what type of
books sell and what types of books don’t
sell right so instead of setting up your
own book store buying the wrong books
and spending all this money you can
quickly test with pretty low cost way
and it’s a plus for the retailer because
they can get new people coming into
their store it works better when it’s a
smaller retailer small output that
you’re working with
and hopefully you can set up these types
of profit or relationships to test your
concept the second thing I would do is
try to partner up with other
organizations that may not be retail
operations but also serve your same
target market so if you’re selling
religious books partner up with
different churches if you’re selling
books about coffee partner up with
different cafes and again offered to
sell books within their establishment
give them a little bit of the profit and
you’re going to help drive people to
learn more about their organization I
get how lets you test to see if the
model works or not and you not you’re
not out a lot of money to set up that
type of business the last thing I would
do is with retail operations it’s really
important to get the location right
right you can spend a lot of money
sitting up your bookstore but it’s in
the wrong location even if you have the
right books you’re not going to be able
to turn a profit so it’s really good to
be able to test different locations to
see which one works before you commit a
lot of money to set up your bookstore so
what I would try to do is set up
partnerships with different retailers
and different locations to see what
works and what doesn’t work you can also
have book sale days and set up you know
outside different stores just for one
time and see if it works see if you’re
able to draw people see if it’s the
right type of demographic that you want
to target or not and it’s a quick way
again the test to see if you’re
attracting the right people are not
before you go out and invest all that
money into creating the bookstore but by
doing all these little things I partner
with different organizations you’re able
to test see what works what books people
like what location works start building
up a list of customers people who like
you know you want to buy more from you
and you have money that starts to come
in which then you can use to go on
actually create your book store and if
you do decide to go and try to get
investment at this point you have some
traction you have some momentum you have
something behind you more than just an
idea and it’ll be a lot easier to go
upgrades that happily looking for so I
hope that helps Santosh if you guys
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up below and I’d also love to hear your
thoughts and feedback if you want to
leave a comment under the video and stay
tuned for the next episode
you