Car Audio Shop Ideas

I have been interested in car audio and security for a long time.  I started when I was a teenager fooling around with my car and friends cars. 

While in the USMC I worked full time also as a professional installer at a local shop.  When I got out of the Corps I had my eletricians liscense and went on to that.  Since then I have worked my way up to an electrical engineer. 

I have missed doing installs a lot over the last 5 years, I recently got into it again.  I had always dreamed of opening my own shop to do installs, at one point I was really close, until a best buy moved in in the same area, I figured that there was no way I could touch their pricing.

Anyway long story short, as I said I have recently got back into again as a hobby, but now I am itching to do it again as a business.  I am looking for suggestions from those that have made a business out of it.  How do you suggest going about it, startign up the business, and so forth.  Any advice is welcome.

As I said I stopped installing for a few years, but I have been an electrician and and electrical engineer since, I have over 11 years of electrical and technical experience, so it is not like I have been comletely out of the game al this time.

Option #1 and by far the best option is to purchase a existing business. (like mine for example). That way you automatically have a revenue stream, you have a clientele base, you have opening inventory and most importantly you have access to established lines that you cannot get if you just decide to open somewhere. It is easier to jump into a moving assembly line as compared to create a new one.

If you want to open your own shop the biggest sumbling block of course is capitol, when the opening order say to Eclipse is $30K and you need another 5 lines alongside of it, it does not take long before all of your capitol is gone on inventory alone. Then you need the shop location, renovations and you still are missing the one crucial thing, a customer base. You can  build the best shop in the world but if the customer base is not there, you are SOL.

i started mine just doing installs for the local dealers and eventually got into selling stuff... keep in mind this will severe your relationship with the other dealers willing to send you install work.... the hard part just beginning is conning the distributors into taking a chance on you..... you'll have access to crap like pyramid, etc right away but getting an Alpine or Eclipse is years away unless you live in a region with no other dealers of any kind.....in my case back in the late seventies when i opened up i got Nakamichi right away because no one else thought it would sell... they couldnt imagine anyone buying a $2000 cassette deck in 1979 dollars.... but hey, i sold quite a few of them and got established as a higher end shop fairly quickly.....

most of it is just doing a good job at a fair price and being willing to do the 12 hour days 6 days a week for the first couple of years to get established.....