Page 26 of Between the Shady Groves
“So… Maybe a bookstore would work after all?”
“How much do you have invested in the bookstore so far?”
“I inherited the store from my uncle, and…” He named a figure that he’d invested in a bunch of used books he’d bought online from a store that was going out of business.
It was high three figures, but it didn’t sound like a whole lot to Cannon.
“How much do you have to invest in your business?”
“Well, when I retired, I looked into it, and it said that you should have at least ten grand set back. So I do, but… That’s my savings too, so if I don’t have to spend it all, I don’t want to.”
Suddenly, Cannon knew exactly what Matteo should do.
“If I were you, I’d sell those books, buy exercise equipment, and open a gym.”
As soon as he said that, Matteo’s eyes lit up. “That’s brilliant.”
“Sure. You wouldn’t have to be there all the time. You could make it so that members get some kind of card that opens the door, and the door logs it. I actually can help you find a system that will work for that and install it for you.”
“A system… Like a security system?”
“Sure. Where the door’s locked all the time, but members use their cards. That way you can have—they can have availability 24/7 to the gym. You won’t have to be there all the time. You could actually have hours where you’re open, for people who want to pay for a one-time deal. That would be like your tourist people. So you’d have it open from like five in the morning until 10 or something like that. And then maybe open in the evening again, whatever the peak hours are for people to exercise.” He really didn’t know a whole lot about it, other than he had installed four or five security systems for gyms, so he knew that that was a thing, where they had morning hours and evening hours, which were apparently peak hours for exercisers. Although, when he’d had to do some maintenance to one of the systems, he’d been surprised at thepeople that were there in the middle of the night. Probably that’s when the introverts came out.
“It seems like you know a lot about this. Is that what your business is?”
“No. I work in security systems. So I wasn’t trying to sell you a system, I was just telling you what I’d learned from putting systems in three or four gyms back in Cincinnati.”
“I see.”
Matteo actually seemed interested, like he was considering this. Cannon felt bad for thinking that he probably had no intelligence. He’d thought some really unkind things about him, but he turned out to be not such a bad guy after all. It was his jealousy over his wife that had been talking. Still, just because he was jealous, just because he didn’t like seeing his wife be all chummy with some guy when she couldn’t manage to say two nice words to Cannon, didn’t mean that he wasn’t supposed to act like a Christian anyway.
He felt like he should apologize, but the dude didn’t know his thoughts. Instead, he asked forgiveness from the Lord for the lack of kindness and empathy that he’d had in his thoughts when he first met Matteo.
“I’ll have to look, but I bet I can purchase all the gym equipment I need for less than five grand. I probably don’t need a whole lot to begin with.”
“No. If the tourist trade really picks up here, you might want to expand, but to start out with, you wouldn’t need a whole lot.” He paused and then lifted a shoulder. “I still don’t know whether you’d actually make a profit in a town this size, but maybe there are more people living here than what I thought. Still, you might be able to find stats online, something like if there were ten thousand people living in a town, what percentage of those people have membership at the local gym? That ought to give you an idea of how much money you can make a month. And figure out whether it’s going to be enough to provide for your basic necessities.”
“Holy cow. That’s…well. Yeah. If I knew how many people lived in Raspberry Ridge?—”
“That information should be available online. It might not be completely up-to-date, but it should give you a rough ballpark.”
“And then I figure out how many of those people are likely to have a gym membership?—”
“You should to be able to find that out online by using percentages. I’m sure that information’s somewhere.”
“Then yeah. I can figure out how much I should potentially be able to make, to start with. That doesn’t include the tourists who walk in for a day or two of exercising.”
“I would charge a bit more for them. Like if a monthly membership fee is a hundred bucks or a hundred fifty bucks, I don’t know, because I don’t belong to a gym.”
“That’s pretty baseline. One fifty to two hundred in the city, one twenty to one fifty out here.”
“Then you’d want to charge say fifty bucks for a two- or three-day pass. If they’re here for a week, then maybe seventy dollars per week. They’d feel like they’re getting a bargain if they buy the week, but most people go on a week vacation, right? So you actually make more on a two-week vacation, and they would be slightly better off buying the monthly membership for a hundred twenty bucks.”
“Well. That’s smart.”
“Yeah. There’s lots of little things you can do—marketing tricks and that type of thing that I picked up. I can talk to you about it more if you need to.”
“Yeah. Thanks. I probably ought to get going. But I appreciate your help.”
