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Shopping List for a New Business

We are providing you with a basic shopping list for a commercial location since it is the most lengthy and detailed. However, we do not represent as complete for your needs. Depending upon your location, the building where your business will reside and its condition, there will certainly be variables. Other variables include the size of your new business, and whether your business will be in your home, a mobile grooming van or a commercial location. Certainly our shopping list is very handy in helping you consider purchases you might have otherwise overlooked.

Most people ask, "What does it cost to setup a grooming business, like a shop or salon in a commercial building, from scratch?" That is not an easy question to answer; there are many variables. However, we can provide a general answer. Shoe string startups of a salon or shop start at $50,000 today, and may increase by 3 times that amount for the same business in a location like Manhattan, or any other downtown area of major city. "Shoe string" means you are making concessions and won't have everything you plan right from the start, but you are in business.

When your shopping list is a Use of Funds worksheet in a formal business plan, the listing should be exhaustively detailed and relate exactly to the business as described in the body of the business plan. Our Webmaster recently created a Use of Funds shopping list for a large pet daycare center and it has over 300 line items. Yours could too. We suggest you take the basic listing provided here and breakdown its major sections into more detail. For example, we list "cleaning supplies" and you might want to itemize them such as 2 cases of floor cleaner, 1 case of floor wax, 1 case of laundry disinfectant, 1 case of toweling detergent and 1 case of window cleaner, etc. What a handy checklist you will have for shopping!

Keep in mind that our shopping list doesn't have "leasehold improvements." They include building improvements such as plumbing, electrical, a/c and heat, flooring, parking area and grounds, carpenter and building signage. Here is where some significant costs can arise. Pet grooming business owners in both homes and commercial locations face the possibility of having to boost the capacity of their building's supply of air conditioning, electricity, hot water, and more. Selecting the right building for your new business means that you have investigated the pre-existing conditions of the building in light of pet grooming's heavy demand for water, a/c and heat, electricity and more. Hopefully you will also have a landlord willing to share in the burden of these improvement costs.

It is vital that you maintain an organized collection of all receipts for every purchase you make. Provide them to your bookkeeper and accountant. They know which purchases must be classified as "current year expenses" and those which must be "depreciated" over a period of years. Does this sound "like Greek" to you? Probably so. That's okay. We strongly recommend you groom some extra dogs each month and at year-end and use the profit to cover the cost of having your monthly accounting done by a local bookkeeper and most important, have a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) prepare your annual business tax return. Most definitely you will make some "leasehold improvements" or similar purchases which must be handled correctly for the purpose of business tax returns, and if you don't and expense them, you may be hit with a serious increase in your tax bill should the return be audited. It doesn't cost much to have peace-of-mind knowing that your business return was prepared or at least reviewed by a CPA.

You can learn more about common leasehold improvements for pet grooming businesses in the Salon Design Main Menu and more about purchases in the Startup Costs Main Menu. For now, let's take a look at our "shopping list" on the next page of this Menu.