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Old March 26th, 2013, 10:48 AM   #66
Joshorilla
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Join Date: Aug 2012

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Great idea, though you will face some hurdles.

Liability insurance, novices renting out a space where they have lots of access to potentially lethal equiptment will lead to accidents, you will need to ensure you aren't liable for injury or death from someone leaving a chuck in a drill press and it taking someone's eye out.

You equiptment will break, people treat their own tools like heirlooms, they treat others like garbage, you will go through spanners, allen wrenches, torque wrenches especially like water.

You will need to do a lot of cleaning, spilt oil, metal shavings etc require a good amount of time to clean up properly, so that's lots of hard work.

The people who are inclined to do maintenance will more than likely have their own tools and a place to use them, you will attract the absolute novice whom will be the most likely to do damage to themselves and the equiptment and the shop, avoid this by upselling yourself to appeal to a wider audience, and run separate prices for hourly hire of larger machines such as the drill press or pneumatic tools.

I would sell yourself as more of a "biker bar" or cafe with a small communal workshop rather than a workshop with a cafe, you will make more money selling coffee with assorted baked goods and pastries due to the greater turnaround time and the higher density of customer to square footage, all you would need is a freezer for the muffins and cookies, an oven to bake them, a fridge, coffee machines and a display unit and you've got a cafe, imagine the cafe racer culture in England, they rode to get coffee and have a chat in a crowded smokey motorway service station.

So, tldr, focus on cafe culture, bike / biker friendly and by that I don't mean SOA harley style biker, I mean you will want bike parking spaces, hooks at the table to store helmets out the way, with a small workshop for basic tasks at an half hourly rate. Don't do subscriptions as that will put people off coming just for a coffee and atmosphere which will be your biggest earner, treat the workshop as a bonus.

The bike cafe's that do really well here are typically these http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greasy_...United_Kingdom although I can't imagine them doing well in america, however i've been to denny's, and that's not far off.
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