Hello I'm a future Small business owner shooting for late Feb/ March 2024 opening date. I'm pretty excited at 24 years old to get this opportunity to do this but here I have a few questions...

I'm going to be honest I have crunched the numbers and it would cost between $8,000-$10,000 to get I started for what I'm want to do. I Estimate I should have $4k-$5k to play with by then. So I naturally talked to a buddy about maybe becoming business partners 50/50.

I'm slowly finding out a good friend who I thought would be a good buisness partner may not be the best fit for me...

Maybe I'm looking to much into this and overthinking and want everything to go fast. But hear me out I work in this line of work already but I want my own retail shop instead. So I know the profit margins and numbers it could potentially do in the next few years. In the first year realistically I think the shop could do 40,000-50,000 in sales.

So this is where we are divided. I'm very social with this community and they know me in this line of work so I wanted to work in the shop full time. My buddy says we need to hire a retail worker and just have them run the thing why we both work our "Real" Jobs and pump more money into it till it can support itself.

I just don't like that idea when I can take minimum money and we can grow our in store inventory quicker if I'm the one in the shop as we would have more cash flow and less payroll. I do agree if it does grow big enough in 3-5 years hiring someone but I don't think that is the right move out of the gate.

To make things worse we both work for his father in-laws company. So of course he makes more than I do and has more opportunities to move up in that company. I feel I won't have as much opportunity to do the same.

My only worry know is if I decide to open this on my own I had already talked about alot of information with him that I didn't want to get out to others in the community about this shop. I just feel I'm in a tough spot now. Unsure of what to really do...

Am I making a mistake going in buisness with my friend? Should I just find another way to get this started by myself?

I would like some opinions! Thank you! I have read other post in the thread and they are inspiring!