Starting a Smoke Shop business. Female Owned and operated. Tips and tricks.

10 Important Things ive learned from Owning/ Operating a Kava Bar and Smoke Shop and tips and tricks to help get you started!!
1. Location is everything. You need proper parking, traffic flow. Pay a little extra money monthly on rent and get a bomb location and it will certainly pay off.
2. Expand your hours to beat your competitors.
3. Expand your inventory and get new products regularly!
4. Don’t run out of certain flavors/products
5. Credit card processing!
6. The best way to introduce a new product is to get the WHOLE line.
7. Get a business credit card
8. Take care of your employees.
9. Be active on social media
10. POS….invest in a good pos system and get yourself a scanner from the start and learn how to input products in your pos system using a scanner.

A handful of Misc. tips
Get a scheduling app for your employees. I love Homebase it is soooo easy.

Go to Champs Trade show. Vegas is definitely the best show of the year but there are also other shows we’ve been to Daytona and Denver and they were good but Vegas is the holey Grail for our industry.

If a customer asks if you have an item and you dont have it chances are you should probably grab that next time you are at the Distro because its probably not going to be the last time you hear about it. RAW challenge cone and synthetic urine for example are actually a staple to have in the store even though it will take a special customer to pick that up.

Set all of your bills to automatic bill pay so you aren’t stressing about taking care of those things im sure you have a lot of other things you are working on if you are an entrepreneur. Make your life easier. Set yourself up for success.

Try to create balance with your business and personal home life.
Set cash aside for sales tax…

Get a scanner app I love Adobe Scan for all of my important documents

Ask your customers for google reviews and a thumbs up on Apple Maps, offer them a free preroll. Things like this really helped our store be put on the map in our town.

FIVERR is an amazing app for graphic design if you are super busy and dont have the time or talent to design t-shirts, menus, logos, stickers whatever….. get this app and you basically hire someone on the app to do your design and some of the artists on there are AMAZING…..We use this app for both of our stores created logos, t-shirts, menus….a ton of work done and its not super expensive. It takes them usually a week - 10 days to complete their masterpiece.

If you are a smoke shop in Florida that sells CBD, hemp products. Banks turn you away so fast! Don’t even try to get around it and just say you sell “nicotine” and tobacco. Once underwriting does their due diligence and finds out you carry CBD they will shut your account down leaving you scrambling to get a new account. Our Bank is First Citizens they accept CBD clients. They do make you go through a application process and you can send them your COAs but at least there is no question and you know your account is safe they know exactly what you do you pay a small compliance fee every month and everyone is happy…..

I’ve learned: Take it one day at a time its a marathon not a race. ROME wasn’t built in a day they say. Don’t be hard on yourself for all the things you have to do it all comes in due time.

I hope this information helps someone out there. I’d love to hear your questions if you have any.