How to open a Sweet Shop in India: Check this step-by-step guide

Congratulations for having the curiosity and willingness about how to start a sweet shop business? You are thinking about an ever-growing business because everyone loves sweets, from children to adults. And if you love sweets too and have a passion for making delicious sweets, then it’s a great thought to establish your sweet shop.

However, never initiate a business without the know-how, or you can say “Business Plan.” One of the most important things to understand before jumping into the subject is to know that the sweet shop business is already a competitive and highly saturated market. To run a successful business, you should have the sight to find the flaws in the market and fill those with your business offerings to attract loyal customers.

Likewise, you need to be a step ahead of your competitors with informed decisions and a proper business plan.

Thus, to educate yourself and understand the key steps, keep reading till the end to know the important steps for building a ‘successful’ sweet shop business.

1. Market Research

The most crucial task is market research. Know your competitors and understand how they operate. Visiting various franchises, ordering some sweets, understanding their service (at least a slight overview of their operation), etc., will easily help you to get the basic idea of various sweet shops around your city. It is essential to know the capabilities and flaws of your competitors before simply establishing a business.

You can add improvements in the areas where your competitors are lagging. For example, considering the current Covid-19 scenario, if your competitors are not offering adequate hygiene facilities, then it’s your opportunity to provide a well sanitised surrounding for your customers.

Take a diary or use your notepad on your smartphone and list down such little but crucial improvements to add and make prior arrangements to later avoid any customisations.

2. Location

Location plays a crucial role for any business. In every city, there are major 3 types of location,

Primary
Secondary, and
Tertiary location

Generally, the primary location consists of the busy roads of a city or the central shopping area where most shops are present. The primary location also consists of schools, colleges, commercial buildings, buses, railway stations, etc.

The secondary location is slightly at a distance from the primary location. These locations are within walking distance from highly crowded areas.

And the third, tertiary location is mainly found on the outskirts of a city or town. Therefore, to have maximum customers, it is recommended to have your sweet shop business at the primary location.

With a continuously increasing population, a city expands to new sub-areas, which later become crowded and can be referred to as a primary location.

Additionally, location also impacts the variety of sweets to produce. For instance, if your shop is in the Bengal state of India, then you may have to sell the majority of Bengali sweets. You can keep the limited stock of other highest selling sweets as per approximate sales. Therefore, do consider the location factor before establishing your sweet shop. Initially, you can develop the sweet shop at a location that is fairly known to you. This can reduce so many efforts as compared to handling a new business in an unknown location.

3. Franchise brand partner or own brand?

Partnering with a successful ready-made brand is not a bad idea as you enter the system with an already established business. However, other costs, like brand commissions and setup costs must be considered before making this decision. Partnering with a brand for a franchise can offer some benefits too. You can partner with a popular franchise to save money for brand promotions and marketing. You get a well-structured business plan support for staffing, recipes, and other things from well-versed franchise experts.

Thus, if you are a new business owner, purchasing a franchise is one of the easiest ways to handle the paperwork, administration, and related legal works.

4. Lease or Buy?

Should you lease or buy the shop after finalising the location? Both options have some advantages and disadvantages as well. Leasing a shop is recommended if your income or investment fund is not enough. However, directly buying the shop space is not a way of doing business as well.

A new business is always in the testing phase, where the owner or businessperson faces profits and losses depending on the business performance. Thus, if your sweet shop business is not running with profits, in such cases, your big investment for buying that shop will add up to your losses. It’s referred to as a negative impact. Therefore, always remember to begin slowly with adequate and informed investment, or you may lose a significant amount of money and end up in debt.

You can lease the shop in the initial days and buy it once profits start to surge and generate sufficient funds to buy a space with confidence. But, before leasing a space for your shop, do check all the paperwork and lease contract details to avoid any further issues for running your business.

Loan Option to support your buying decision

If you are confident about your business strategy and fixed your decision to buy the shop, there are many easy loan options. You can also go for business loans with competitive interest rates varying from 11.5 percent to 24 percent.

To get a clearer idea, here are a few pros and cons of leasing and buying a shop.

Pros of Leasing:

Less initial investment
Easy paperwork
Can move out if the business doesn’t work

Cons of Leasing:

No ownership
No flexibility for restructuring
Costly for long term
Constant rent hikes
Strict terms and conditions

Pros of Buying:

You are the owner
Do whatever you want
Can restructure (rebuild) when required
You can rent out space if you move out

Cons of Buying:

Higher investment (a lot!)
You will be responsible for property taxes, repairs, and maintenance
If the business fails, you may get stuck in one place due to higher repayments
Monthly instalments may eat up your business profits

5. Budget plan

We often continually pour money into a business, but the progress doesn’t seem to speed up. Thus, it is better to decide the budget factor way before you start investing in your sweet shop business.

Gather up all the monthly costs that may incur in your sweet shop business. A well-aligned budget plan includes the cost of staff salaries, raw material, equipment cost, electricity, rent, furniture setup costs, extra expenditures during an emergency, etc.

Such information will give a brief idea about the overall expenses per month. Accordingly, you can decide which factors to include and exclude from your business idea.

Additionally, a clear budget plan will help you decide your business’s loan amount if you are planning for a loan. It will eliminate many blind spots and assist you in saving money intelligently and investing wisely.

6. License, Registration, Government Permission

Here comes another important factor after selecting the location. According to your location’s government authority, every food business needs to have proper paperwork and certificates ready before opening the shutter. The crucial paperwork includes obtaining the license, registration, certificates of permission from tax authorities, electricity board, etc.

If you face any trouble, it’s better to contact an expert and get these things done.

For more information, you can visit official government sites to find the required documents for starting a new sweet shop business or franchise.

Basic Paperwork required:

License from Food Authority
Tax registration
Business registration
Electricity registration

7. Selecting workers

A highly trained workforce is a major backbone of every successful business, especially when it comes to food products. The majority of popular brands become successful due to the taste of their sweets. Good taste automatically promotes your brand’s/shop’s identity through word of mouth.

Therefore, if you have some master chefs in your shop, it will be a plus point. As mentioned earlier, depending on your location and customer preferences, you can prepare a list of sweets that should be made every day or as per customer demands. If you already know some recipes or are a master chef, you can do the worker hiring independently..

8. Improvements

Finally, once your sweet shop business settles, always look out for the improvement areas because constant improvement is key for a successful business. You can ask for customer feedback regarding the taste of the sweets, quality, staff behaviour, shop atmosphere, etc.

Such feedback-based enhancements will also help you to build strong customer relationships.

Also, when it comes to customer demands, they vary according to the season. Thus, planning your sweet production as per the situation will greatly help you tackle a sudden increase or decrease in sweet demands. Production planning further helps to reduce wastage and ultimately saves money on wasted products.

In conclusion, launching a new business is always a hectic task for those who don’t research. However, if you want to invest your hard-earned money properly, you have to go slow as there is no shortcut to develop a readily successful business. Building a successful business is a step by step procedure, and your own experience with customers and competitors will give more information as you embark on the path. Therefore, the steps mentioned above are initial but effective preparation to launch a successful sweet shop business that will benefit you in the long run. We hope that this information will help you start your business with confidence.

Also read:

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FAQs

Q. What are the challenges while starting a new business?

Ans: Following are the challenges while starting a new business.

Competition of rivals
Hiring talented staff
Building trust among customers
Developing financial goals
Raising the capital for business
Keeping up with changing trends

Q. Where should I establish my business?

Ans: Select the location where you can reach your customers easily. For example: If you are establishing a restaurant business, the location of that business must be near highway or city streets with more traffic vehicles. Thus, select the location where you can get the most customers for your business.

Q. How to do market research before implementing a new business?

Ans: Firstly, take a look at the industry and its potential to understand the profit capability of your business. Research about the strongest competitors in the market. Also, check for the latest trends and challenges that are impacting the business potential. Additionally, understanding the requirements of the target audience is a plus.

Q. How much should I invest in the beginning of my business?

Ans: The following points will help you to decide the minimum initial investment for your business.

Estimate your one-time investment costs.
Estimate working costs for the daily operation of your business.
Estimate hidden costs like legal costs and banking costs for loans.
Add a few more extra costs for unexpected expenses during emergencies.

Q. How can I get capital financing?

Ans:
1. Crowdfunding: Crowdfunding is gaining popularity in the market. You can list your business on any of the crowdfunding platforms to get investors.

2. Angel Investment: Angel investors offer good financial backup for new businesses. Angel investors have helped many companies like Google, Yahoo to build from scratch.

3. Venture Capital: Primarily big companies or entrepreneurs provide venture capital to small businesses that have large growth potential.

4. Self-finance: Self-financing or bootstrapping is the capital raised by the business owner through savings and contributions from family and friends.