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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It's hard work.

I know a couple who did this, opened a lunch only restaurant (not DC area, economically depressed area with lower prices). Served sandwiches and hot dogs, basically a grill, and did ok as it beame a retired person gathering spot.

Not sure a lunch only restaurant would be profitable here. [/quote]

I don't know if lunch-only is the way to go, but I agree with the idea that this is not the right choice in the DMV area. Commercial rents are too high, labor is really expensive, there are a lot of regulations and fees. It's a bad place to start a small business from scratch in general.

But there are a lot of lower cost of living places where starting a small "retirement business" would be less risky because your overhead would be lower and there are fewer pitfalls. In fact if this were me, and I wanted some kind of retirement project and to see if I could make a business like this work, I'd want to be living somewhere that I could BUY a small commercial space for this purpose. Then see if you can make a business go in the space, if it works and you get what you want, great. But if it doesn't work or it turns out you don't enjoy it, you've got a property you can sell or rent out. If it's set up as a cafe, you even get the benefit of the kitchen/store front infrastructure, which will enable you to charge higher rent to a business coming in.

My dad has done stuff like this many times. He's in real estate development. But he's started a myriad of businesses in various properties he's picked up. Some have become very successful and he's sold the whole business years later for a lot of money. Others failed, but his losses are minimized because he owns the property (also you can use your losses as tax benefits against profits). It's worked out really well for him. He even owned a cafe at one point, which he basically handed over to my sister and her husband to run. It failed, but they got experience running a business, my dad was then able to sell the cafe to another business, it all worked out.[/quote]

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