Continual Bills
Monthly Advertising budget: I have $150. Is this enough?
T1 Internet connection: I hear this is ~$500/mo. Is this accurate?
Electricity: $300/mo?
Insurance: $250/mo?
Maintenance (misc cleaning supplies, keyboards, mice, controllers, cables, etc.): $800/mo.
New Releases on games: $400/mo
Food Sales (concessions): $1500/mo.
$150 a month won't cover beyond some business cards and photocopying of signs you make yourself. Unless you are going to be on a major roadway or shopping path that a $10K sign will bring people in, plan to spend 10 times that per month at a minimum.
T1 is the great fallback. But $500 should be enough to get you a good enough connection in most cities. In minor markets, triple that number.
Electricity? Plan for $25 per machine per month. You'll have lights and coolers to pay for, along with servers and whatever. But that number works well as a shoddy guesstimate.
Maintenance: $200 a month in cleaning supplies should suffice (bulk of which will be cleaning products). Keyboards/mice/controllers, depends on your customer base. I spent about $40 per machine per year on hardware replacements (not including core upgrades such as new machines or monitors).
New Games: If you think 7 games a month will suffice, power to you. Better double that number. I average something like $2K per month, but I am much more aggressive in buying games than most.
Food sales: Doesn't matter because it's all guaranteed sale and you will make margins on every transaction.
Startup Bills
Electrical Rework: $700
Extra Controllers: 1 for every 3 stations.
Decorations: $3500? Too high?
Central Server for PC's: $500 (Is this necessary)
The lowest bill I've ever had for an electical buildout was $11K. I don't think you can even buy enough extension cords and power bars for $700.
Extra controllers: I'd just have a box of 50 laying around.
$3500 in decorations: That'll pay for the paint and a touch of signage. Decorations aren't even in the running at that amount.
$500 server? That won't even cover the hard drives. You need redundancy, and redundancy ain't free. Plus if you want to run Server 2008 or whatnot, $500 won't even get you the O/S. $2000 minimum, though more is better because if it does down so does the business.
Also, how much should I anticipate startup costs to be. Right now, I am sitting around $100K, +-20K. Is this realistic, or should I project around $250K, as mentioned in another thread?
$100K sitting in the bank with everything leased is doable. $100K for everything will result in a sub-par store which will collapse.
