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View Full Version : Advice wanted Start up business. Experienced Locksmiths and double glazing repair company.



Dazmondo
18-02-2014, 23:35
Hi everyone

Can anyone tell me if there are any double glazing / Locksmiths used on Tenerife.
Do you believe that this would be a business worth starting up?

Greg
19-02-2014, 01:20
A short honest answer for you. Nope. Sorry to be abrupt but a search of all the threads on here will give you a good clue. Also, if you don't speak Spanish don't even think about it.

CIM
19-02-2014, 02:54
If you can grasp conversational Spanish then the locksmith side can be ok for emergency call-outs (keys locked in cars and houses etc)
But you need to target the Spanish market as well as the English and think a lot about how you get the message out that you are there, on call, ready etc.

Double glazing has kind of been done to death here (Greg above knows more about this) and the same thing applies - build a business around the Brit expat community and your sunk - they don't want to pay much for anything and in general begrudge anyone they hire from making any sort of decent profit on anything (expat envy at its worst...)

If I had the skills and knowledge maybe emergency locksmith type stuff combined with mobile windscreen / double glazing repair - might be a market there but you need to go after the whole market and market effectively and professionally.

Too many people think cutting up bits of A4 paper with a phone number on or sticking flyers through doors is a good start - its not! Go pro, go big, dual languages and all you need to do is be better than the local competition (not terribly hard here in most industries to be honest...!)

The other tip Iīd give , whatever you do, don't be the cheapest and donīt target cheap clients. Cheap clients are crap clients and are more likely to moan and complain about everything abnd anything. Better going for higher quality service / product and better type of client willing to pay better money. Leave the cheap / whinging shop-around types to the new arrivals whose only strategy is to beat the price of everyone else (let them cut their own throats for business - its why none of them last!)

Muppet
19-02-2014, 17:02
Not sure this is useful, necessarily, for this particular discussion, but for another project I've been doing some research, and it may be of interest.

If the mods want to copy/paste/pin it elsewhere, feel free.

Using the most recent census data, If you take the southern and western municipalities as the primary area where Brits (and other foreigners) live, work and want to move to - i.e. from Santiago Del Teide in the west to Granadilla in the south (east), the total population adds up to around 210,000 people.

Of these around 20,000 or so are registered as being British which is, at best, about 10%. Not exactly a huge potential market for starting up a business serving specifically, or primarily the Brit market and it could be easily argued that any business proposition targeting at best 10% of the population would have to seriously achieve in order to have any chance of success.

Food perhaps for thought for dreamers