[fostereast]

This is an interesting time to buy a business that makes replicas.

1) Raw and processed material prices are increasing with no end in sight.
2) Home prices, both primary and secondary are way down. People are leaving keys in the mailboxes again as they move out and abandon mortgages.
3) Discretionary income now that the Home ATM's are tapped out (Read home line of credit) is back to normal.

Several questions.

Has anyone checked to see if orders are up or down at the main kit car manufacturers? How long is their backlog compared to previous quarters. Kirkham and ERA should be more recession-proof than others, so you can't judge the market by their business very easily.

Are there more Cobras for sale now than in previous years?

Thoughts:

Get a conservative accountant to put together a spreadsheet for forecasted sales and cost in a way that lets you play 3 scenerios related to sales and manufacturing costs; good, OK and a little worse than OK and be conservative about your cost, everything always cost more than you think it will. Be very open about what you would like to get as a salary or return, because that is important in this. And see if it makes sense. Most of us could probably put together a draft spreadsheet, but you need to get a conservative professional opinion to help make this decision.

Selling something is a lot harder than most of us ever consider. Selling something once is not to hard, but building sales into a repeatable process is pretty hard, factor that into the equation. Repeatable sales that you can forecast is what provides cash flow. This can take years to get a handle on and until then you will have to rely on lines of credit or your money to pay the bills even if your books at years end show profit.

One other point be very conservative about how much time you have to spend on this because time is like money, you always find yourself wishing for a little more. Even if you are a silent partner, do you want to feel the burden of customer problems that can happen even in the best of plans.

If you think it will cost 250K to get started, you probably should be ready to back it up with another 500k or so.

Make sure you are making an asset purchase, if you buy a corporate structure you also buying all the liabilities and I would not want to own the liabiliites that can be associated with a lifestyle business.

Enough rambling, for all I know most of you have more knowledge about this stuff than I do. If any of you jump in I hope you have great success.