Getting started.

Now I’m going to expand on the points that will ultimately make your internet café business a success. So let’s start with the Internet café business plan. Things work better when you have a business plan in place. You may not strictly follow the plan as laid out initially. But it should guide you some of the way.

Location of your café business.

Let’s start with finding a location for your business. By the nature of a café business, it should be located where other businesses can make use of the café services. Such as schools, offices, banks, etc. looking for a location near a school might be difficult. You can be certain other businesses have taken the available shops. But if you can find one that is available, grab it. It is an ideal place for internet café business. You will get a lot of patronage. Though, you may be competing with many other café businesses.

Another location you may want to consider is any central business district. This is where you have a lot of banks located. Areas where banks are located you have other businesses like eateries, government offices, private businesses etc. Locations like these are even more preferable to school locations because you have business patronage all the year round. Whereas, there is a business lull when schools are on holidays.

Yet another type of location for a café business is the residential area. Patronage will usually come from residents of the area. And if your café is very good people will come from far and wide. Your busy hours will normally be in the mornings (people want to use cafe services before they go to their places of work or business), evenings and nights (when they are back from work). You can even open for all night browsing. 

What computer equipment for your café business.

 What should determine the kind of computers to buy for your café business is the initial capital you can afford to put in the business. Like I mentioned above you can use fairly used (second hand) computers, branded computers or cloned computers. These normally consist of the CPU and the Monitor. The other items that will complete the set up is keyboard, mouse, UPS (uninterrupted power supply). The prices for these types of computers are;

1.      Fairly used computer normally goes for N28,000.00   to   N30,000.00  (CPU, Monitor, mouse and keyboard). That is, about $174 USD.

2.      Cloned computer goes for about N48,000.00 to N54,000.00 (about $300 USD)  depending on the prices of the different parts. A cloned computer consist of the tower (this houses the different parts of the computer), the hard disk, the mother board, the power supply unit, and the disk drive.

3.      The branded computer goes for about N90,000.00 to N100,000.00 (about $660 USD).

How do you choose which to go for if you have all the finance you want. Let me give the authentic info on these things, because I have gone through all of them.

1.      If you want a quick return on investment (ROI), that is you want to recover, as quickly as possible, money spent on the computers you buy, you have to go for the fairly used computers. This type of computers come with their own peculiar problems though.

a)      The hard drives can crash within a short period of time.

b)      There could be any number of hardware failure quickly.

c)      You may have to do a lot of repairs before you finished the life of the fairly used computer.

d)     There will be occasional windows freezing and crashing. You will have to be on top of things otherwise your customers will complain a lot.

So managing the fairly used computers in your café business could be tricky. The trick is to buy from a seller who also does repairs. Then you will save big on repairs because you can always get a favorable price on repairs.

2.      The clone computers will last sometime before you begin to have hardware problems. But you need to buy genuine parts to build up the computers, otherwise you will be changing parts before you know it. One problem I had with my cloned computers were the computer CPU fan. I changed most of my fans just about two months into operation. The fans were failing and causing the processors to overheat. Before I knew it, I had six motherboards down.

3.      Now for the branded computers. If I had the finance when I started my internet café business, this is the type of computers I would have gone for. They last longer than the other types of computers. Your customers will have the best browsing experience possible. The only downside is that, it will take a longer time to recover the money spent on them. So if you are in the internet café business for the long haul and you have the finance, go for the branded computers.

How are we doing so far? Please take some time to comment so that everyone can benefit.  In my next post I will talking about which ISP (Internet Service Provider) to use and why. And how you can get on top of the various problems posed by ISPs in a internet café business.