If I were considering it, I'd have to be sure that I could do both walk-in business and internet catalog business. Making the right merchandising decisions (deciding what to stock and sell) is part art and science and part trial and error. If I were getting in, I'd try to offer a lot of boutique products, like locally hand-poured baits, locally built heavy duty spinner baits, hand built rods, and really focus on quality and not being a direct facsimile of a sporting good department at Wally, Dick's, Academy, etc. I'd consider selling good-better-best (as in 3 best spincast reels on the market, the 3 best spinning reels for under $200, the 3 best of X, etc. rather that a shotgun approach to merchandising), avoid selling crap, and maybe only sell the best of lines (e.g., if selling Zebco, only sell Zebco 33 Platinum and staying away from all the other plastic internals garbage sold by Zebco).
Go study all the best, most successful and long-lived sporting goods stores in your market. Your profile does not state where you are. Look up successful places out of state too.
Three places in GA: Hammond's Tackle in the Cumming, GA area; The Dug Out in the Kennesaw, GA area, and Barrow Automotive in Butler, GA. Those are all mom-n-pop operations that do it right and beat the living snot out of "category killer" box stores.
I'd also strongly recommend learning how to do a market study and survey focus groups. You need to quiz a bunch of people that do not know you about what the market needs.
I'd also figure out how to merchandise for each weather season and for the sporting activities of that season. For example, the hunting and fishing that is going on in Sept, in Oct, in Nov, in Dec. In December, it may be waterfowl hunting and stripers in the lake, and you need to provide what those folks want, and then you need to be concerned about Christmas sales in Nov. and December too, which means higher credit capacity and perhaps more cash to place orders and stock the store during that season.
