Light industrial units - cost?

betterl8

There are a number of companies that offer licences and not leases on industrial units, where the tie in can be as little as one month.

rental is anything from £2 TO £15 PSF, but often include standing charges and service charges within that rental. Deposits are normally about 2 months rent

Factor in power usage and water bills, along with business rates, although these are free for a small business until at least April next year.

Regarding planning. If you can prove that 90% of your trade is done on line, with only the occasional drop in collection, then you should be fine. check with the local council.

on line office brokers quite often have the industrial units on their books as well if you wished to do some research.

motorguy

Hudson1984 wrote: »

Hi all, I've started a little online store and it's going really well! selling £1000 a month so far (yup got an accountant on board)

I could increase this by having a fixed set-up i.e a store. (i've made previous threads on this) but wondered about using a light industrial unit to run from instead. The store wouldn't actually make huge amounts of money during the day but would provide a hub (and much needed storage space for stock!) But it would mean I can open for "flash sale" type things at weekends which is when most of my customers tend to shop.

So just wondered if anyone could give me a bit of a breakdown of costs I should expect. As if it works out too high then the spare room will be the way forward for the foreseeable future lol

Any help would be great. Sorry if this is in wrong place too

Theres a couple of business parks close to me that aim at startups and are government backed. From memory units start at £80 a week, plus £100 a month or so rates. They also charged a set fee of £50 a month for electric, so you're looking at perhaps £500+ a month.

If you're making £250 profit for every £1,000 sold, then you'd need to sell £2000 of stock just to cover your costs. How does that look in terms of effort for you, relative to what you sell?

If you spend 10 hours a week at the moment selling £1000 worth of stock per month, then if you have a unit you'll be roughly spending 30 hours per week to extract the same level of profit, after your unit costs.

Plus if you're then talking about physically 'opening' on say a saturday, theres a further 8-10 hours of your own time gone.

Hudson1984

motorguy wrote: »

Theres a couple of business parks close to me that aim at startups and are government backed. From memory units start at £80 a week, plus £100 a month or so rates. They also charged a set fee of £50 a month for electric, so you're looking at perhaps £500+ a month.

If you're making £250 profit for every £1,000 sold, then you'd need to sell £2000 of stock just to cover your costs. How does that look in terms of effort for you, relative to what you sell?

If you spend 10 hours a week at the moment selling £1000 worth of stock per month, then if you have a unit you'll be roughly spending 30 hours per week to extract the same level of profit, after your unit costs.

Plus if you're then talking about physically 'opening' on say a saturday, theres a further 8-10 hours of your own time gone.

cheers for that, more of what I was expecting in terms of an answer.

Profit is variable depending on the range sold some attract higher profits than others due to the discount involved. Won't go into all the profits and losses as it's not really what I need to know - I keep accounts and know what profits i'm making, more a case of where to aim for is all.

But your post is great and puts it into perspective nicely, I can more than happily continue as I am and not have a unit as an aim and that was the main aim of the post - is it worth it.

And yes, the thought was to open on a saturday but again adding that 8 hours in needs considering. It's a case of knowing what is involved i.e Gas, water, electric, rent - these are all pretty obvious costs but it's the others I was curious about like rates and others I hadn't considered. Tricky to work out how much I'd need to sell without knowing a ballpark cost. I wasn't expecting a cost to be given, just a little help in working those costs out.

Anyway, I seem to have pee'd some of you off by asking this question so i'll leave the thread here. I hadn't intended to ask the question as a "tomorrow i'm going unit shopping" was more of a "is this a good place to aim" but oh well, I obviously ask things in the incorrect way. so cheers for the above advice very usefull