Starting Your Own Tattoo Shop

There comes a point in time where a budding tattoo artist will want to think about working for themselves. Most tattoo artists begin by working in their local established tattoo shops. This allows them to gather experience and gain much needed confidence.
Once you have decided to go it alone, you will need to find premises, as well as equipping it with the best equipment that you can afford. There is much more to running a business than this however, you will need to conduct sufficient marketing to ensure that you receive ample new customers through the door, as well as keeping control of your costs and managing your books.
Making sure that you don't ignore any particular area of your business is very important. If you don't like bookkeeping it is very easy to ignore it and let it pile up. If you do this however, you will be unaware of the state of health of your business. Your up to date books will show you how successful or otherwise your business is.
There are only 5 numbers that you can affect in order to improve your business, they are; volume of leads, number of conversions into sales, number of transactions, average sale price, gross margin %. These are the only numbers that matter to you as a business owner. You can only get more people as potential customers, then you can convert more of them into customers, then you can sell more to them (more tattoos).
You need to look beyond the operations side of your business, and look at the overall health of your business. Investing in the best and highest quality equipment that you can afford will help you to maximise your gross margin as you will benefit from longer term efficiency of using better equipment i.e. the higher standard your equipment is, the longer it will last and so there is no need to think about re-buying for the short term.