Recession inspired tanning salon

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In continuation with my previous post, as I looked at websites listing small businesses for sale in my area, I came across several tanning salons for sale. I decided to start learning more about the tanning salon business by reading more about the financials and frankly a lot of it made no sense.
The numbers did not make reasonable sense and so I started investigating the tanning salon business models a lit bit more in depth. To start off, I parked my car in the parking lot of a rather large plaza in my town where there was a tanning salon located and started making notes of how many people went in and came out. I started observing the age level of the people that went in, how many were men and how many were women, what kind of cars they came in and so on.

Then I went and parked my car in the parking lot of another tanning salon and observed the same criteria. I did this with several tanning salons within a thirty mile radius of my town and found that the traffic that came in to the tanning salon varied quite a bit from each other.

I needed to understand the business better, failing which my recession inspired tanning salon that is supposed to bring me more revenue might actually end up sucking up a lot of my already strained finances. I wanted to do more research and be absolutely sure before I spent a dime in the start up process.

I knew this meant spending a lot more time upfront than I had originally envisioned. But that is what separates successful businesses from the failing ones. The successful ones look into whatever details they can look into and plan for a sufficient margin of error and then start. The unsuccessful ones generally shoot from the hip with no fall back plans and hope that nothing will go wrong. I do know that a certain amount of shooting from the hip IS needed in any business but that cannot be done because of laziness on the part of the entrepreneur to conduct due diligence.