I actually just went there for the first time last week and spent about an hour chatting with the son and picked up some nice zoas! Small world!You should check out Reefkoi in Colorado Springs. He has been in the game for many years and started out selling in his house. Really nice guy and he might give you some advice if you go to his shop. I haven't talked to him in years since he quit doing the frag swaps. I think he finally realized reefing was taking up too much of his time.
We have several "basement" stores in my area. They all mainly deal off FB, not much from their websites. They run a batch of corals every day or every other day, either by "mine" game or auctions. Some do raffles though that is illegal. One of them is always posting what he is sending out that week, which is usually 12+ boxes of corals. All of them grow very few of their own corals. They just bring frags in from wholesalers.
I’ll definitely have to ask more about how they started out next time I visit, thanks for the tip
Yeah the further I got into planning the more I realized there was absolutely no way I was going to be remotely successful farming my own corals from frags. I set up a ton of wholesale accounts last week and have actually been really happy to find the pricing is really reasonable. Plus quite a few of the wholesalers I have accounts with offer 24-48 hr DOA guarantees which is huge!
Hmm… What’s a “mine” game?
That’s super helpful to have an idea of the number of sales smaller home operations are doing so thank you! A dozen orders a week is a good goal to work toward.