1, 10? not really enough to start a business on, but probably at least a good amount for your bread and butter business...
2, find out, if you can get a 50k loan from a business alliance, or a startup fund from the government the repayments will be considerably lower, and you'll find that they'll offer advice as well.
3, that's a trouble then, no offence but when a lot of people open the door to find an 18 year old sitting there, they may just walk back out again.
4, you'll really need to get a bit of a concrete idea on this, and when you are buying stock, try to buy as little volatile stock as possible.
for example, when you build a PC, buy the cases, monitors/keyboards etc, (things that don't really go out of date), then you can sell people on how their system will look, when they've placed and order and left their deposit buy the components so that you don't have expensive stock depreciating in your back rooms until it's just too old to be bothering about.
5, cool, keep going, be as pessimistic as possible, -it'd be better to plan for the worst and be pleasantly surprised. than it would to convince yourself you'll definitely get ten customers a day, who'll definitely buy stuff, and you'd definitely have enough time to still do house calls bringing even more money.
6, bad idea, learn how to do it yourself, don't trade services, certainly not as a long term basis.
you'll be getting his services what once a year when it come around to fill in a tax return, he'll be asking for your help every time he's visited some spy-ware infected virus riddled porn site on his ageing business machine that he bought cheap ten years ago and really honestly should have replaced five years ago, that he's trying to run a pirated copy of XP on, that he got from limewire or something... even if the guy isn't a fool PCs break more than once a year, so the deal isn't fair on you.
just learn how to do the taxes, all the information you'll need is published on line and you can make a decent spreadsheet to do it all for you.
you won't need an accountant, unless you;re trying to get everything past the tax man that you possibly can. and whilst this is tempting, it's probably going to be more hassle than it's worth.
7, there is a reason that the other stores don't sell stock. it's cheaper online,
find the cheapest store that you can. buy some RAM.
now you can't let that RAM out the door without putting a markup on it, because you've had to pay for your time taken to order it, and the shipping costs. so unless you want to loose either your time, your money or your costs related to time money and storage space... you'll always be more expensive than the on line suppliers.
on top of that, you'll be buying components that depreciate...
if you manage to order the exact right stuff at the exact right time and get stock out the door within a week then cool...
if you've got stock sitting on a shelf for half a year, you might have paif $1000 for it, and it might only be worth $800 now. you'll be spending money to store stuff, because your premises will need to be big enough to have a store room. your insurance will be higher as you have to insure all the stuff too... on top of that, everyday that passes that you don't sell the parts, they decrease in value until you end up paying a waste contractor to take away a load of PC boards that you can't even ut in a bin because their full of heavy metals.
I looked, (quite a few years ago) into going into business with a friend and buying an established PC business.
when we crunched the numbers we figured that the only way it'd work is if we offered added value services, that's to say if we were THE computer centre to go to.
if we could fix machines the fastest, resell software on almost every sale, (virus scanners etc). and have a guarentted few customers through the door every day then we might make enough to pay for the premesis.
if we offered an internet cafe service, so people could come in off the street and pay to use the internet, whilst having a coffee. (so we'd be getting money for that too). -then we might make enough to pay the utility bills as well.
if we could work with other people to attract business in, (so people could establish a relationship with us by getting their websites made there), if we offered business support like taking care of their servers on their sites.
then we might be able to pay ourselves too!
most of that stuff was reliant on us being able to make links with businesses, something we weren't sure that we could do. or offering so much in the way of service we'd have needed to start being employers straight off the bat whilst still trying to pay back start up loans..
not that I'm trying to put you off the idea of opening a shop, but you could try working from home as a mobile repair person first, try to form some business links and get a good contract.
if you can go to a few local small business and offer them a support contract, where you'll come and fix their machines at a reduced rate for time and materials assuming that they pay a small monthly service charge...
really, I guess what I'm saying is that the thing to do, before you get into a 50k hole is to try to raise the money yourself!
see if you can work from home as a 'mobile PC mechanic' for a year, if you can't make 10k in that year then you wouldn't have made the 30k that you'd need to keep a shop, and pay yourself (before buying any stock!).
