Impossible to make a profitable business

[squishyog]

I’ve tried law firms, doctor offices, I’ll have the perfect amount of employees, own the building, max advertising and rep and I’ll just bleed money, please help lol.

[galadon3]

Biggest point is that it needs time, you will have to suck up losses for quite some time until the buisness is known enough and has a good standing.
I run a lemonade-stand a mortgage-broker and a bar now in my main game and all 3 make money, all I do personally is the bookkeeping (cause it has so small a number of hours that its just not really economical to hire somebody)
- So don't open a buisness until you have a comfy amount of money for those initial losses.
- Also keep in mind that some buisnesses will just make losses from their normal workings and make the money with contracts. So they basically loose money in between the payouts and those cover the losses and make your profit.
- Also make sure you can get all work hours covered each month, to avoid loosing those points that represent the perceived quality of your buisness.

I started with the Lemonade Stand and I feel its a good one to start with, low initial costs not many employees needed and it has a normal day-to-day buisness that can become profitable plus 2 contracts that get in bigger amounts of cash once its up and running.
Initially I did the janitor and bookkeeper hours myself and I never left my dayjob.

[PokingWaterGames]

Have you got a screenshot of your business income statement?

Are you working some of the base jobs yourself (e.g Lawyer at a Law firm) or is it all employees? It's pretty hard to get the perfect number of employees because foot traffic varies each month and contracts expire. Working the jobs a little bit yourself is supposed to plug in the gaps (although the next update is going to make foot traffic a bit more stable).

Also if your awareness is at max you might be spending too much on advertising, but the income statement will help in seeing if that's the case.

[witty]

Originally posted by squishyog:

I’ve tried law firms, doctor offices, I’ll have the perfect amount of employees, own the building, max advertising and rep and I’ll just bleed money, please help lol.

The key to getting a law firm off the ground is be a lawyer yourself, and don't advertise or open it to foot traffic. You want to keep awareness low and just take a contract job based on if you want to go business or criminal. Starting out the contract jobs should be under full time hours so you can also pick up a lawyer job to keep bringing in money since contracts don't get paid out every month only on milestone/completion so you need cash to keep paying monthly bills.

Your character fills all roles at the firm except receptionist, which shouldn't generate hours since you are only doing contracts for now - don't "open" the store. As you complete contracts you'll start to get better contracts because your rating will go up but since awareness is still down the contracts should still be short 6mo to 12mo which you want. Eventually you'll start to get full time hour per month contracts and then you can consider hiring a full time lawyer to work your business while you continue to part time and do the bookkeeping or go full time lawyer at another job yourself to bring in more money.