As a startup should you spend precious cash for quality furniture? Or should you find the cheapest thing you can get your hands on? Or somewhere in between?
Startup Furniture Budget
Furniture is probably one of the last things on your mind as an entrepreneur trying to get started, but it can be a major expense, so here is some data to help you plan and budget.
We took a look at 630 startups that had built furniture into their financial projections on ProjectionHub to come up with some average numbers to share with you. Here is what we found:
- Average Furniture Expense for Startups – $21,000
- Average Useful Life of Furniture – 7.3 years
- Average Salvage Value of Furniture After Useful Life – 14% of Original Cost
Key Points
- Whether you end up buying furniture at IKEA, Turnstone, or Wal-Mart, it is going to be a significant outlay of cash, but your employees need a place to work.
- Furniture should last for quite some time
- You aren’t going to be able to sell used/old furniture for anywhere near what you bought it for after it is fully depreciated
- I think the key thing to keep in mind here is that furniture is an investment, if you don’t know if your startup will survive through next month, it probably doesn’t make sense to purchase high quality furniture that will last you the next 7 years. On the other hand if you have found a business model that works and you intend to be around for the next 10 years, purchasing quality furniture that can last is probably your best bet.
If you want to see if you can make your startup budget work, use ProjectionHub for free to create up to 3 years of financial projections.