Opening A Fish Store
- Thread starter calcofish
- Start date
redpaulhus
New member
I posted the link above because it focuses ALOT on the importance of the business plan, etc etc etc.
If you haven't done so yet, read Birdsill's columns - he's been there and done that, and has alot of great insight. It makes a great "LFS for Dummies" (or at least the first chapter).
Plan on a fair amount of overhead in drygoods - For example, even if you specialize in SW/reef, you'll want to carry a line (or more) of "classical" hang-on filters (for FW customers, or Fish-only customers, etc) --- Whisper, Aquaclear, Penguin, etc. You're going to want to have 4-6 of each model on hand, along with cartridges, refills, medications, airpumps (etc), nets, food (lots of foods to choose from now), lighting, etc.
If you add in good quality skimmers (euroreefs etc, not seaclowns) , high end lighting (MH ? PC? T5 ?), sumps, calcium reactors, etc - you just easily tripled your dry goods inventory cost, maybe more.
Then there's the livestock systems - are you prepared to design and build a system yourself ? Or are you going to be using "off the shelf" units like the Marineland MARS units ? Or simple individual tanks with UG filters
? Theres a cost associated with each, and that cost is a blend of initial time (pre-open), install time, purchase $, operating $, and maint time. Some will cost you more in one area, some will cost you more in others.
15 years ago the store I worked for dropped over $40,000 on a 48ft unit of livestock tanks (3 level rack, plumbed into huge wet/drys with UV etc, all acrylic) - I don't know what a comparable system would cost today.
What clientele are you looking for ? Is this a fairly affluent area or more blue-collar ?
(I just saw a good local store go under after about a year, and I'm convinced they didn't take their location and customer base into consideration -- they decorated the fishroom in teal with brass, very high-class look, but pricey. They were charging about 1.5-2 times what the chain stores were charging (for everything) - and they were in a fairly low income area. There just wasn't a demand for $8 odessa barbs and $100 bigeye squirrelfish
I think if they had focused on lower cost fish and spent less on decor they could have found a niche and then brought in the higher end items once they had a stable customer base paying the lease )
I was a store mgr for a LFS for years (fish dept mgr before that) -
generally we barely broke even on livestock (but we didn't mark up very highly) - mostly the livestock got people in and out the door, and they had to walk past the rest of the store to get to the fish (lots of impulse buys on high margin items).
That was before the internet (early 90's) took off, and before walmart became the number one seller of tropical fish in the usa. Now the margin on supplies is pretty meager (at least around here) so its a balancing act.
If I hit the lottery tommorow I wouldn't open a LFS. I might start breeding FW fish and culturing corals semi-commercially, and maybe selling drygoods online. If I could build those up enough, I might setup a small boutique-y shop in a high-income area.
If you haven't done so yet, read Birdsill's columns - he's been there and done that, and has alot of great insight. It makes a great "LFS for Dummies" (or at least the first chapter).
Plan on a fair amount of overhead in drygoods - For example, even if you specialize in SW/reef, you'll want to carry a line (or more) of "classical" hang-on filters (for FW customers, or Fish-only customers, etc) --- Whisper, Aquaclear, Penguin, etc. You're going to want to have 4-6 of each model on hand, along with cartridges, refills, medications, airpumps (etc), nets, food (lots of foods to choose from now), lighting, etc.
If you add in good quality skimmers (euroreefs etc, not seaclowns) , high end lighting (MH ? PC? T5 ?), sumps, calcium reactors, etc - you just easily tripled your dry goods inventory cost, maybe more.
Then there's the livestock systems - are you prepared to design and build a system yourself ? Or are you going to be using "off the shelf" units like the Marineland MARS units ? Or simple individual tanks with UG filters
? Theres a cost associated with each, and that cost is a blend of initial time (pre-open), install time, purchase $, operating $, and maint time. Some will cost you more in one area, some will cost you more in others.15 years ago the store I worked for dropped over $40,000 on a 48ft unit of livestock tanks (3 level rack, plumbed into huge wet/drys with UV etc, all acrylic) - I don't know what a comparable system would cost today.
What clientele are you looking for ? Is this a fairly affluent area or more blue-collar ?
(I just saw a good local store go under after about a year, and I'm convinced they didn't take their location and customer base into consideration -- they decorated the fishroom in teal with brass, very high-class look, but pricey. They were charging about 1.5-2 times what the chain stores were charging (for everything) - and they were in a fairly low income area. There just wasn't a demand for $8 odessa barbs and $100 bigeye squirrelfish
I think if they had focused on lower cost fish and spent less on decor they could have found a niche and then brought in the higher end items once they had a stable customer base paying the lease )
I was a store mgr for a LFS for years (fish dept mgr before that) -
generally we barely broke even on livestock (but we didn't mark up very highly) - mostly the livestock got people in and out the door, and they had to walk past the rest of the store to get to the fish (lots of impulse buys on high margin items).
That was before the internet (early 90's) took off, and before walmart became the number one seller of tropical fish in the usa. Now the margin on supplies is pretty meager (at least around here) so its a balancing act.
If I hit the lottery tommorow I wouldn't open a LFS. I might start breeding FW fish and culturing corals semi-commercially, and maybe selling drygoods online. If I could build those up enough, I might setup a small boutique-y shop in a high-income area.
toastman
New member
OK, my two cents on this, I owned a full line petshop, that was around 3000 squarefeet, we had somewhere around (20)20highs, (10)29s,(4)55s, (2)75, all for saltwater, two central systems one for the fish, one for the inverts, and had about 4 times that for freshwater, various show tanks etc...like I said we were full line, dogs/cats/small animals/ grooming/ fish/inverts/salt/reptiles/birds/and large birds. We grossed around 500,000.00 a year in sales, and owned our own building after a move 3 years after openning, that was when we started to make a decent profit, after we bought our building. Store was open 7 years from 91-98, so its been closed for a while, and the internet has come on full steam. I closed the store after trying to sell it, and not getting any decent offers after 1.5 years, we carried about 85k in wholesale stock, so we liquified and made a good chunk of money.
Now my input, if your spouse has another form of income or you do, than by all means jump in and give it heck, there are not enough little guys out there. Now if you need to make money at it right away, have no nestegg etc....dont do it, its a tough tough tough business.... long hours..... for little money. You could safely run the store yourself working 9am-10pm every day, Monday through Saturday, and take an easy day on Sunday say 12-6pm, remember it will take you at least 1/2hr to open and close, so add up the hours and you work 84 hours a week. I took around 40k a year total out of the business for my family and myself that was it. So what I am saying is, dont go into business thinking you are going to get rich, its a labor of love, but you can live on what you make, but if you worked 84 hrs a week at say Mcdonalds you would make much more than what you would in your own Petshop, and you would have free acne to boot!
I closed up my shop, gave the grooming shop to the groomer, and rented the building to the groomer and a toy shop, now I make more on rent than I did running the store! I still miss it, and I took me 6 years before I ever stepped foot back into a pet shop. Its an awesome business to be in, but its scary as hell, I ate alot of Ramen Noodle Soup, and Peanut butter and Jelly sammiches, but always liked what I did. Anyway thats my two cents, btw the name of my shop was Amazon Pets, just imagine if I had registered it on the net back when I openned up, I bet I would have been able to sell that name for a chunk to Amazon....oh well..... good luck...
P.S. 390 a month? Does it come with a building? My rent was about 2,800.00 amonth....fyi
Now my input, if your spouse has another form of income or you do, than by all means jump in and give it heck, there are not enough little guys out there. Now if you need to make money at it right away, have no nestegg etc....dont do it, its a tough tough tough business.... long hours..... for little money. You could safely run the store yourself working 9am-10pm every day, Monday through Saturday, and take an easy day on Sunday say 12-6pm, remember it will take you at least 1/2hr to open and close, so add up the hours and you work 84 hours a week. I took around 40k a year total out of the business for my family and myself that was it. So what I am saying is, dont go into business thinking you are going to get rich, its a labor of love, but you can live on what you make, but if you worked 84 hrs a week at say Mcdonalds you would make much more than what you would in your own Petshop, and you would have free acne to boot!
I closed up my shop, gave the grooming shop to the groomer, and rented the building to the groomer and a toy shop, now I make more on rent than I did running the store! I still miss it, and I took me 6 years before I ever stepped foot back into a pet shop. Its an awesome business to be in, but its scary as hell, I ate alot of Ramen Noodle Soup, and Peanut butter and Jelly sammiches, but always liked what I did. Anyway thats my two cents, btw the name of my shop was Amazon Pets, just imagine if I had registered it on the net back when I openned up, I bet I would have been able to sell that name for a chunk to Amazon....oh well..... good luck...
P.S. 390 a month? Does it come with a building? My rent was about 2,800.00 amonth....fyi
hyperfocal
New member
Like most hobbyists, I've often thought about opening my own store. It doesn't matter what hobby you have and love, it seems that eventually you'll start to fantasize about getting out from underneath The Man's (tm) thumb and making a go on your own 
I've just recently returned to the aquarium hobby after a very long absence. When I was active back in the 1980s, the best local fish stores had a fantastic selection of hardware, dry goods and livestock. You'd see the full line of Hagen, Marineland, Eheim, Magnum, etc on the shelves. If you saw it in TFH, you could run down to the store and buy it that same afternoon.
The same thing was true with dry goods -- all the different vendor's flake, pellet and frozen foods were stocked. There were multiple versions of the regular test kits available, and racks of lighting.
Of course, there was livestock too -- though not as varied or as healthy as what I see now. The advances in reefkeeping in particular are amazing.
That all being the case, you can imagine my amazement as I started visiting local fish stores last autumn. I'd visit store after store after store, and while each one was different there was one startling similarity -- none of them had a decent selection of hardware and dry goods. Sure, some were better than others but none were even close to a lightly stocked store from the old days. Internet retailers are gutting the LFS like, well, a fish.
I just ordered an Eheim 1250 from Marine Depot for about $60. Locally, I can't find it or the equivalent Mag pump at all... the crappy Rio that pumps the same volume cost *more* locally. I certainly understand the business realities that force LFS prices to exceed online/mail-order, my point is that I don't even have the *opportunity* to buy the higher margin goods I want locally.
LFS carry less hardware and dry goods because people are buying them at a significant savings online. Fine for the customer, but very bad news for the LFS since the bulk of their profit came from these high margin items.
Looking to the future, I think the outlook for the LFS is even more grim. I suspect that fewer and fewer fish are going to be available from the wild. The world's reefs are in trouble, and fish harvesting *will* continue to dwindle over time. This fact, combined with the increased success with online livestock orders, will put an unbearable squeeze on the friendly neighborhood fish store. Even now, an increasing number of hobbyists are getting their livestock online. It'll just get worse as the online retailers tap into livestock farms that will provide us with the bulk of our animals.
So, low sales of high margin goods + reduced sales of livestock + increased competition from lower overhead online retailers = Ouch.
Sorry this is so negative, it just seems to me that getting into the LFS business right now is a terrible idea. Those suggestions about backyard coral farming and aquarium maintenance look like much better ideas.
I've just recently returned to the aquarium hobby after a very long absence. When I was active back in the 1980s, the best local fish stores had a fantastic selection of hardware, dry goods and livestock. You'd see the full line of Hagen, Marineland, Eheim, Magnum, etc on the shelves. If you saw it in TFH, you could run down to the store and buy it that same afternoon.
The same thing was true with dry goods -- all the different vendor's flake, pellet and frozen foods were stocked. There were multiple versions of the regular test kits available, and racks of lighting.
Of course, there was livestock too -- though not as varied or as healthy as what I see now. The advances in reefkeeping in particular are amazing.
That all being the case, you can imagine my amazement as I started visiting local fish stores last autumn. I'd visit store after store after store, and while each one was different there was one startling similarity -- none of them had a decent selection of hardware and dry goods. Sure, some were better than others but none were even close to a lightly stocked store from the old days. Internet retailers are gutting the LFS like, well, a fish.
I just ordered an Eheim 1250 from Marine Depot for about $60. Locally, I can't find it or the equivalent Mag pump at all... the crappy Rio that pumps the same volume cost *more* locally. I certainly understand the business realities that force LFS prices to exceed online/mail-order, my point is that I don't even have the *opportunity* to buy the higher margin goods I want locally.
LFS carry less hardware and dry goods because people are buying them at a significant savings online. Fine for the customer, but very bad news for the LFS since the bulk of their profit came from these high margin items.
Looking to the future, I think the outlook for the LFS is even more grim. I suspect that fewer and fewer fish are going to be available from the wild. The world's reefs are in trouble, and fish harvesting *will* continue to dwindle over time. This fact, combined with the increased success with online livestock orders, will put an unbearable squeeze on the friendly neighborhood fish store. Even now, an increasing number of hobbyists are getting their livestock online. It'll just get worse as the online retailers tap into livestock farms that will provide us with the bulk of our animals.
So, low sales of high margin goods + reduced sales of livestock + increased competition from lower overhead online retailers = Ouch.
Sorry this is so negative, it just seems to me that getting into the LFS business right now is a terrible idea. Those suggestions about backyard coral farming and aquarium maintenance look like much better ideas.
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