Custom vs. Retail: As far as a "blended" custom/retail business working out, it has worked quite well for us. In my market there is not quite enough business to be totally custom or enough business (with competition and all) to be totally retail.

Also, in the last five weeks, we sold four 42" plasma televisions and four Sony 60" Grand Vega LCD sets to walk in customers. This is $48K worth of business we probably would have missed had we been custom only.

There are four of us that work here. Two in sales and two in programming and installation. We also have one former employee who does "contract installations" if we get into a bind with too many jobs hitting at once. This has been our model for about the last ten years and it has worked well for us.