business to business office supplies company good idea or not need answers! pleaseeeeeeee?
Hi, My names John and i am thinking of starting an office supplies company (business to business),
Now we would sell the office supplies over the telephone and face to face, all i want to know is does anyone think that this is a good idead? (businesses alwaya need supplies, Ink & toner, paper, staples etc etc etc),
Now please think about your answers before you just start typing away, as someone called SEWRROBB has severley pissed me off, telling me i will not make any profit,
Now heres come examples for you to base your answers on,
at first we will be working from a huge annex at the end of a garden which already has telephone lines and broadband installed (as it once used to be an office for an internet dating site or something)we will have to pay no rent as it is family,
we already have suffcient amount of computers, printers, and furniture,
We would cold call every type of company in the UK no matter how big or small, and attempt to sell them office supplies (which i have done before at another company and was on a 2,500 profit target a week)
Here are some general examples of the amount of profit we can make from one phone call,
i recently rang a small day nursery in scotland, she said she had an epson printer, i sai ok how much do you pay? she said £12.99 per cartridge from staples…
ok (now we get the same cartridges for around 60-70 pence) so i said ok if you take say 5 full sets of cartridges i can beat the price your paying at the moment and do them for £8.99, so i made well over £8 profit on each cartridge!! x that by 20 and thats £160 profit on 5 minutes, i package the goods (2 minutes) and then send them via royal mail so about £1.69,
and thats for 10 minutes work, do that 6 or 7 times a day and well you can work out the profit 
then if i hired say 10 sales rep’s on £187.50 basic wage a week, and they sold that much that would make sooo much money, even if i paid the reps 10% commission on top of there wages!!!
Thank you someone finally with some sense!!
thanks!
yes we do not tend to sell packagin though!, andmost stuff like pinter paper and stationery go diret to our customer under plain label from our supplier so no storage space needed
July 8th, 2009 at 9:55 am
If you already have experience of that type of business i think it is a good idea, you already know the business and prices.
Stationary/packing products are always needed, some of the biggest ebay sellers sell packing products
there will be a few other costs like insurance and tax/Ni if you have staff
Sales over about 60K will require paying VAT at 15% so you have to include that when working out profit.
If you get a website too and after gaining customers get them to order from the site then you won’t have to pay staff to take repeat orders.
you need to check all your competiors prices first (including ebay/internet), do they give free P&P, offer big discounts for bulk orders, have a wider range than you? are you sure you can beat their prices?
I pay 15p for a jiffy bag, if you could sell it to me for 10p I would buy it but I think it would really squeeze your profits.
From my experience packing products like jiffy bags, bubble wrap, printer paper take up ALOT of space and storing this may be expensive. ie an warehouse might cost £2000 a week to rent, but you could only physically fit £50,000 worth of packing products in it, if you were selling mobile phones you could probably fit millions of pounds worth of stock in there.
good luck
July 11th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Your cartridge call was a lucky one so don’t count your chickens just yet. The biggest problem you face i think is just how do you undercut big suppliers? They have the purchasing power to get bottom of the barrel prices on the goods they buy, as a start up you do not have that clout.
But every big trader started out like you at one stage and the difference between the wage slave and the business owner is that one was prepared to take a calculated risk and the other was not.