A&R Technologie, INC.

I guess it's about time I put something in here about A&R Technologies, Inc. A year after my wife and I married, we decided to open up our own satellite retail store (primarily promoting DISHNetwork services). We had run kiosks successfully in the local malls for almost a year but the hours were overwhelming since we both attended University and college full time as well.

That first year we made a decent living but our living conditions were hardly decent (we were saving everything to earn enough for a downpayment on our first house). We lived in a basement---not an apartment but just a room in a basement. My wife and I (bless her soul) shared a kitchen and living room with the disfunctional family upstairs. What an experience! The good things that came of it were that we were able to save a lot of money and we found that we could live anywhere, even if it wasn't fun!

After almost a year in the mall, and a month before the birth of our first son, we left the kiosk, started our own company, and started doing the normal Dish Network retailer stuff: door-to-door, telemarketing, summer sales, and print advertising. Wow, what a learning experience. I am earning an International Business degree, but I could never have learned what I did in those two years anywhere but where I was. After being in business as a sole proprietor for a year, we decided to incorporate as an S-Corp. We sought out opportunities to expand to other areas and spread out to Oregon, Nevada, California, Idaho, Georgia (long story!), and Wyoming. After about a year, however, we realized that we weren't ready to expend the resources and time that it would take to be profitable in so many locales; we cut our losses and brought everything back home.

The lessons we learned didn't come cheap. We are still paying off $55,000 in credit card balances accrued during that time. We didn't realize that even when we were grossing $26,000 a week, our costs were exceeding our profits (primarily because of mismanagement issues, poor marketing decisions, and other problems we have chalked up to the learning curve), and we were definately not going the right direction. Hindsight is always 20/20, but it really would have been nice to diligently enter everything into Quickbooks and really measure what was going on so it didn't come as such a surprise that things were running so inefficiently. Also, to have daily and weekly reports to take advantage of good markets and to quickly get out of bad ones would have also saved us a lot of money. The ironic thing is is that running a Dish store that now offers television, telephone, and high-speed internet is less lucrative for us than real estate. My wife and I have made at least twice as much buying and selling houses as we have in four years of running the store. We can't wait for the day when we can either close the store or burn it down and just do real estate. We'll see. But still it is a great business and has been invaluable as a learning experience and also as a supplement to our income (or right now, just to paying off its own debts).

Hopefully this has been as useful to you as it has been to me. If you have any questions or comments please feel free to let us know.