So your rich Uncle Bob, that you barely talked to, leaves you 50K in his will with the catch that you have to spend it on your business, what's the first thing(s) you are buying? A big expensive item you've wanted to improve your store/manufacturing, a lot of little items to make the overall experience better?
At our Garden Center I would say I would spend it on more a luxury improvement that I am too cheap to do now and get automatic glass doors for the entrance and exit. I quoted them out like 10 years ago and it was nearly 20k (I can't imagine how much more now). We have fairly nice looking doors now, but they are awkward because you are trying to bring in an empty cart or push out a full cart and need to go around the cart to manually open the doors because in the earlier parts of the spring season, or on windy rainy days we have them closed, to keep the nice warm inside separate from the nasty cold outside. Once it is nice out we just have them permanently open but for more than a third of the season it would be a lot less of people banging their carts headlong into a closed glass door, it is amazing how people seem to just have faith it will open and not even slow down and hit it with a bang.
At our bakeries I would say new floors, in our original store we had an epoxy flake floor put in and it is beautiful and easy to clean, so the 2 other stores could be done and it was well over 15k for the first store.
