When you walk into most Liquor Store you'll notice they are pretty busy. If you're going inside one to pay for gas you may notice a few people in front of you and behind you in line to pay for gas or for convenience items they've purchased at that store. You might think that owning a store like this is a licence to print money, and who wouldn't. Just sit in front of one for an hour and make a list of everything people are buying, and you could come up with a very rough ball park figure of what the store may earn in a day if you have time to do this. But Liquor Stores aren't the instant riches everyone thinks it is. It takes a lot of work and discipline to run one properly, and in the end it's how you run it that will make the difference of it sinking or sailing.

If you're store is in a busy area you might have a lot of customers but your profit margin will be lower because with more customers comes more stores and more competition. Plus getting a liquor license is tough and requires a lot of paper work, surveys of people in your area agreeing to it, background checks and so forth. State Regulatory agencies have a lot of say in what places will and will not receive a liquor license. I would advise doing some preliminary research before you sign a lease to make sure that your Liquor License has a good chance of getting approved. You can start by going to City Hall and seeing what needs to be done in this regard. If you are buying an establishment that already has a liquor license make sure you won't have any problems getting it transferred to you, since in some locales transferring a license isn't automatic.

You will need to be intimately familiar with the sellers operations so you can copy their efforts on when you take over. If you do your homework, your customers shouldn't even notice that a change of ownership has taken place. One of the main things to understand is that if something isn't broken don't try to fix it. Sometimes this can just hurt your business. If the previous owner had a good reputation for customer service try to run the business as close to how they did as possible. This brings me to another point. If you're gonna pay big money to take over a successful liquor store, make sure it's in the transfer agreement that they provide you with follow up support until you can get the hang of everything they are doing to run their business. This could be as little as 90 days or as long as a year. You don't want to be in a position where you are stuck trying to make business decisions for your new business without any guidance.

Keeping a close tab on the daily operations of your new business is a must. For example, if you hire employees make sure their are security cameras that cover the register and preferably the entire store. If you hire an employee you will need to watch them to make sure they don't steal from you. These employees struggle on minimum wage and they could be tempted to supplement their low income by siphoning some cash out of your register. If you notice a discrepency between the amount of inventory sold and the cash available, it wouldn't hurt to review your security videos to see if theft could be going on. In god we trust, all others need to be monitored. Not everyone will do this, but some will so you need to be ready. If you run a good, clean store and treat everyone nicely chances are word of mouth referrals will continue to build your business.