Introducing myself

[npeifer]

I posted a little on another area but thought I should put this here.


I should give a little rundown perhaps. I hate to say it and get bashed but I recently purchased a video store that has been in business for 17 years in a small town in Ohio. There is only 1 tanning facility that is combined with a hair/nail salon about 5 miles from me and they only offer 2 choices of beds both have 100 watt bulbs. My demographics are great with 95% white and about 19,000 people within a 5 mile radius.

The video store itself smelled terrible (due to smoking in it for years) so I painted everything, landlord replaced the carpet and I built 5 rooms with some extra space and I now have 4 tanning beds almost ready to roll next week and have been working on this for 2 months. I hung LCD TV's on the walls and made it look modern and new although the store itself was doing well for the previous owner who is now 73 years old and was ready to retire. I have very little invested and hope that my wife can earn a little money and have some fun. Our business is in between a large hardware store and a grocery store in a small strip mall that sits beside our kids middle school and in front of a newly built high school that opens up next year.

I have recieved some much needed advice from Sunsally (Ann Noe) and George from Prosun (thanks for the demo report) as well as many others on the site.

My business name is Colony Video II and River Valley Tanning.

Neal

[UVTan07]

Good luck Neal with this new businesss combo. I think you added a good mix because I also owned a video store for 18 years. With the cycles of the two when the pipline for videos are slow in the spring tanning will hopefully be booming. Not to mention being located across the steet from a high school.

[npeifer]

Thank you very much for the comment and I myself manage a Dodge dealership full time and my wife is running the store at this time. During the building process she has been at the store 70-80 hours a week and I have worked at least 40 hours a week at both places but hopefully soon that will ease up a little ?

[northtanman]

what did you go with for beds? are you also computorized? did you add more a/c?
sounds like a pretty decent location. have fun!

[npeifer]

I knew somebody would ask me about beds so here it goes and I will explain what I did and why.

Let me again explain that the only other tanning option locally is a hair/nail salon that has 3 beds. 2- 24 or 26 lamp sundash with 100w bulbs and 1 Tropical Rayz 30 lamp 100w bulbs and it is 5 miles from me.

I bought the following:

1 Perfect Tan 30 lamp/1 HP facial (20 min)<100 hours $1,000

1 PureTan JetStar 2000 32 lamp 160/100w (15 min) 109 hours

1 PureTan Quamtum 851 Stand up 51-160W bulbs (10 min), (95 hours)

1 PureTan Ellipse IV 42 lamp + 8-400w facials (10 min) 134 hours

I bought all of the Puretan beds above for $6,000 from a salon that was went out of business. The JetStar and Perfect Tan appear brand new and the others are in good shape with minor blemishes.

I realize that Puretan is out of business but I read some good things on the site here about the beds themselves and most of the parts are generic is my understanding. Also the owner included a Tmax manager Pro and the buckboosters to run the 3 beds.

In my area I will have the best around. As I mentioned I live in a small farm town with a population in the whole county of about 30,000 or so. I am always open to suggestions but remember i am adding these to an already successful video rental store to add extra income.

[npeifer]

Originally Posted by northtanman

what did you go with for beds? are you also computorized? did you add more a/c?
sounds like a pretty decent location. have fun!

The building itself is 60 x 35 and has a 6 ton A/C unit in the front and a 2 ton in the back where the beds are. I realize this isn't optimal but I wil see how it does ?

I am not computerized for the tanning at this time. I do have a computer program for the video rental business but it is ancient being an old DOS system.