New Business Plan

It took some experimentation (a lot of trial and error) but my routines, methods, quickbar lists and prices have been slowly tweaked and polished to work efficiently in smaller, less populated regions away from the main hubs too.

Naturally I started thinking about expanding to other regions further out from the heart of empire space.

After perusing Ombey's maps late one night very early one morning and taking a good look at travel routes, choke-points, hi to low/null gates, regional gates and such I found several locations that seem to have a lot of potential as spots for expansion.

Initially I was planning on starting another 3 month expansion plan for another 6 new trade alts. The first expansion is practically finished now so I was going to keep the accounts active and train up another 6 new trade alts to expand into new regions with.

I had it all planned out, I even started dual training new alts on 2 of the accounts.

Then I started thinking about the time, effort and amount of capital it would take to get 6 more new alts up to speed with enough capital to operate with. It was going to be a long, slow, painful process.

Then there's the fact that the 6 alts from the first expansion really aren't making much more than enough to pay their account PLEX costs. But they are well capitalized and just about finished training. They could move into new regions and be big players in the local markets immediately.

I really didn't want to move the alts because they're covering the lucrative upper low end to lower mid range bulk skill book market (books going for 1-10 million ISK). On the other hand it does take an awful lot of time and effort to work that market segment properly so maybe I'd be better off just dropping the 10 million and under skill books and moving the alts to new regions.

I really hate thinking about how buy prices will plummet and sell prices skyrocket within days of my leaving that market (that's happened every single one of the many times I started to leave the market in the past).

Another thing that made me hesitate to move any traders from the first wave of expansion is that they're named for the stations they trade out of. That made it really easy to remember which trader was where. Things could get a little confusing with the trader named for Hek moving to Teonusude in Molden Heath... Or worse yet somewhere not even in Minmatar space.

Decisions... Decisions...

In the end I decided to keep training the 2 new alts at least until dual training runs out in a month (no choice really about that) and move 1 or 2 of the first expansion alts to new areas immediately. Hek moved to Teonusude last night and I'll probably move another to Khanid within a few days.

6 Regions

I'll be expanding into 6 new regions:

Derelik region on Jarizza Tanoo

Khanid region on Agil

The Citadel region on Motsu

Placid region on Stacmon (or maybe Orvolle)

Khador region on Dresi

Molden Heath region on Teonusude

A seventh possibility is in Solitude on Octannneve  but for now I'll just keep it in mind as a backup location in case one of the other locations doesn't work out very well.

These will be primary traders each covering a different region. They'll mostly handle mods, implants, the more expensive skill books, maybe some ship hulls and a few other things. Mainly items going for at least 20 million ISK. They all have 305 orders and plenty of cash to go into full operation immediately.

It's funny how Teonusude went from being an afterthought (I didn't plan on moving there at first) to being the first of the 6 regions I moved to. The thing is the more research I did and the more I thought about it, the more sense moving there made. In the end the facts that the Hek trader was the worst performing of the characters I could potentially move and that Teon is only 4 jumps from Hek sealed the deal. Teon jumped from barely making the list all the way to the top of the list.

I also moved another trader from Couster to Renyn a couple days ago, same region, only 2 jumps away, but better positioned to catch through traffic. Oursulaert you say? No thanks, I had an alt there once and hated it there. Post just about anything there and the Ours bots will undercut you by 0.01 ISK within seconds.

The Skill Plan

Here's the skill plan the 2 new traders I'd already started will follow

Cybernetics I

Plug in +3 Charisma, Memory, Willpower and Intelligence implants

Trade I
Social I
Contracting I

Trade II - IV
Retail I - IV
Broker Relations I - IV
Accounting I - IV
Margin Trading I - V

Contracting II - III
Daytrading I - IV

Marketing I - IV
Retail V
Wholesale I - IV

Accounting V
Wholesale V
Tycoon I - IV

Broker Relations V
Tycoon V
Trade V
Daytrading V
Marketing V
Contracting IV

The only difference between this skill plan and the skill plan used in Part 1 is this time I'll only be training Cybernetics I and using +3 implants rather than +4.

As usual I'll be mixing in a few days worth of flight skills so they can fly a frigate fit with nanos, cap rechargers and velocity optimizers decently.