Starting Your Own Business

So this is mainly targeted towards those with brick & mortar type establishments. I live in an area with a population sizable enough to be defined as a city, support multiple colleges, and have a nearby international airport. Despite all this, the main access to exotic pets is Petsmart. The one local business has a tiny selection behind their fish tanks that is riddled with mites. We have a Repticon every six months, but it is not one of the big shows by a long shot.

My main question here is, is it possible to really have an exotic pet store as a profitable business? What are your most profitable areas? Would you advise trying to take on an industry giant wholesale store like Petsmart? Have internet sales become a necessity in business survival?

Any encouragement/discouragement from the idea is welcome.

My local exotics shop thrives for several reasons:

- They raise and sell mice, rats, and ASF as feeders and they're looking at expanding to rabbits. They started strictly as selling both live and frozen bulk feeders, the exotic critters and dry goods came later. I'd say more than half of their space is dedicated to feeder production and I'd bet this is still the most profitable part of their business.

- They stock healthy, mite-free, decent quality but not super-expensive high-end critters housed in clean, appropriate enclosures. You won't find a species like a BRB that needs high humidity stuck in a dry screen-top tank suffering from stuck shed and multiple eyecaps.

- They do quarantine new arrivals and make sure they are healthy and feeding before they get moved to the public sale area.

- They do have an online presence and ship.

- For dry goods stick with high-turnover consumables like substrate, or equipment where when it breaks the customer wants a new one immediately, like a decent quality thermostat.

- If you have the space you can consign used equipment like racks.

Finally, since you have to care for live animals, expect to work every day for several years.

The working every day caring for animals would be a break for me. I work a shift job and then come home to care for an entire room of animals as is lol

I figure that feeders would be a huge profit source, especially since they are so scarce in my location. Plus, you can always freeze and ship the surplus through online orders. I just wonder what kind of profits margins are there exactly, since renting a large enough space for front store, feeder racks, quarantine area, etc., can be so costly. I know that the typical business plan shouldn't expect to profit within the first 1-3 years, so I wonder what kind of startup savings one would need.

So start with a few feeder colonies at your house first, sell the excess locally for cash, track income and expenses for the feeders, and see how many colonies you would need to run to justify renting space. Plus if/when you ever do get to that point you'll already have a customer base.

What about breeding some novel prey items? Right now, I don't think anyone breeds slugs. If you selected a nice species that's widely accepted, those could be quite popular with salamander keepers. Wild caught ones are at risk for pesticides and parasites so not very desirable.