This one may sound funny.
The Vatican Museum and Sistine Chapel are one of the most visited tourist destinations of the world. This museum does not accept reservations and you must stand, sometimes for two hours, in a long queue to enter it. And after that, it is such a huge museum (many museums are huge, but this one is the mother of all, I swear!) you keep walking and walking and it never ends. When you come out, your legs ache and you want to just sit down and relax. Imagine if a sign close by says, “Leg Massage € 5 for 10 minutes”.
That is the idea.
Each and everybody is tired when they have finished seeing the Vatican museum and the Sistine Chapel. However when you come out of the exit, you see restaurants and other shops and no such shop that talks about foot massage. I imagine this would work. But first some number crunching:
Close to 4.5m people visited the Vatican Museum in 2007. That is 16,000 a day if you ignore the holidays and 2000 per hour, varying greatly by time of day and seasons of the year. If 20% use the foot/body massage service, annual revenue is € 4.5m at the above prices, at 10% it is € 2,250,000 and at 5% it is € 1,125,000. Let’s go with the worst case scenario here, revenue of € 1,125,000.
To earn this revenue, you should be able to service 750 customers per day. (750 x 300 days x € 5). If you are using those typical massage chairs, and they are running on 75% occupancy (4.5 consumers served per hour), then each chair is servicing 36 customers per day. You may need close to 25 such chairs to service your clientele, working 8 hours a day. Let’s look at the investment.
One such chair may cost you close to at $4000 (http://sitincomfort.com/masloun.html). Rental space of 2000 square feet may be close to $100,000 per month (this one is a guess). Annual running cost including salaries and other overheads could be close to € 1m. (Salaries 10K/month, OH 10K/month, writing off two chairs every month and the 100K rent, all converted to Euros)
Does 750 customers per day seem high? With 16,000 visitors per day, it may not be. You need to attract just 5% of that. The trick though is that consumers will vary as per season and hours of the day but your costs will not. And the math above suggests that there is not enough room for profitability. So what could be the other way to go?
Well, if you look at it, rent is killing the idea. So if you already have a shop, restaurant, space around there, just buy a chair or two and you will be doing very well for yourself. The chair can potentially pay for itself in a month! (€ 5 per customer, 4 customers per hour for 8 hours for 25 days)
Alternatively if someone could comment on the rent bit, we could be more sure-footed on this one and explore further.
Buyers, anyone?
