This is my fifth question submission, do you have any habitual submitters? And for my sixth, I have wanted to open a business in Las Vegas for a long time—a gift shop in a casino, a restaurant, or even being a vendor. I have contacted many of the hotels and don't even get a response back on leasing with them or how to become a vendor. Is it all still a "who-you-know" controlled business?
To answer your first question, yes, a number of people submit questions regularly. We start recognizing their usernames and email addresses and, on occasion, become email pals.
As for your second question, this is a big subject. Here, we’ll try to cover the salient points based on the information you’ve provided.
Opening a small business in Las Vegas, or anywhere in Nevada, isn’t particularly difficult. You need: an Employer Identification Number (EIN) from the IRS; a business license from the state (available on the Nevada Secretary of State’s website, $200); a sales-tax permit from the state Department of Taxation; a local business license from the city or county; a fictitious-name statement from the County Clerk (necessary to open a bank account in the business name); and other red tape if you’ll be hiring employees (mostly employment- tax documentation and worker compensation insurance).
Those are the technical details. However, we can’t help noticing that your ideas for what kind of business you’d like to open are a bit … vague. We’re not surprised that you didn’t get any response if, for example, you wrote to the MGM Grand and said, “I’d like to open a gift shop or restaurant in, or become a vendor for, your hotel-casino. How do I go about it?”
We have no doubt that casinos field these kinds of queries every day. But you won’t find too many mom-and-pop operations in big, or even small, Las Vegas casinos. They’re more interested in well-known brands, celebrity chefs, trendy shops, and retail and restaurant concepts from people with whom they have existing relationships — at least to fill their own spaces that they lease directly.
That said, you could try, by pounding the figurative payment, contacting commercial leasing companies in Las Vegas, and in some cases nationally, to see if they have any space available in casinos.
If you wanted to open a store, restaurant, kiosk, or cart, for example, in the Grand Canal Shoppes, you’d go to their leasing agent, Chicago-based GGP, which also handles retail leasing for the Meadows and Fashion Show malls.
The Miracle Mile Shops has its own director of leasing, to whom you’d submit your Application to Lease Retail Space, Credit Review Package, and photographs and/or renderings of your current or planned retail locations. Again, they don't lease to just anyone who wants to open a store in Las Vegas. The space is too valuable -- and expensive -- to lease to someone who doesn't have a solid track record and business plan.
Finally, we can’t answer a question about a starting a small business without addressing the failure rate.
There’s no better way to go broke than to open a small business, not only in Las Vegas, but anywhere in the U.S. The statistic we’ve seen many times is nine out of ten small businesses fail in the first seven years. Some surveys narrow it down even further to 93-94 out of 100. The odds of success in small business are so long that we’re surprised anyone even tries to start one.
There are countless ways to fail and really only a few ways to succeed, and those begin and end with a deep passion for and belief in your product or service, your potential customers, and your own abilities to be the one-in-ten, or the six or seven in 100, that beat the odds.
