1. Equipment are not cheap: do not attempt to excercise your bargaining power. I design equipment as a Chemical (Process) Engineer. I teach equipment fabricators (The trade is called Mechanical Engineering Craft) in Technical Colleges. I am a General Metal Work Instructor. If a fabricator tells you an equipment is 500,000 naira just know that he will spend over 350,000 on buying materials of construction. Be polite and human as possible when approaching equipment fabricators. They are not the ones that will eat your money. The trade is not easy.
2. Equipment would not increase your profit: wake up from your dream if you believe that using equipment will boost your profit. Equipment will even take away from your profit. You only go for equipment if you need to increase your production to meet up your expanding customers volume. Equipment also will make you look like a serious business person. Users of equipment only survive by very large customer base. If your customers are not too large using equipment will only kill your business.
3. Plan for energy: many of you gets too excited whenever you hear of equipment. Before you use equipment your customers base must be large enough so that profit from them can go to paying for electricity and diesel you will need to power the equipment.
4. Can you still cope with house rent? You will observe that most people using equipment to do production relocate to villages to site their facilities. Using equipment will sure increase your burden in terms of production cost. You will not be able to afford the luxury of getting fanciful places to site your business. With this, plan to site your equipment at your backyard, your own land where you do not have to pay rent, your village, your father's family compound etc. The day you invest money into buying equipment you will know that business goes beyond pictures and videos you see on facebook. With equipment you do not look for block house to house them. Just old roofing sheets, tarpouline etc can shade where you are doing production. You can now have a display shop of one room in the city to showcase your products.
5. Tax savings: I do Engineering economics and my wife is an accountant. From my experience large scale businesses pay lower taxes compare to small scale. When your business is big enough for you to use equipment make sure you hire an accountant (even on part-time). The accountant will assist you to calculate annual depreciation on your equipment. This money will be deducted from your profit and shield them from being taxed. Depreciation will now be savings you make to replace your equipment in the future.
6. You need insurance: If you have never been in a pensionable career the day your your business grow so big till you have need to use equipment get an insurance company to manage your vulnerabilities. Insurance is like doing little savings to harvest bumper result in the future. Apart from accidents and fires there are many other insurance packages you that are available for you.
As a business owner you will need equipment someday. Start now to plan towards it. Above all know when to engage equipment. For now continue with your handmade production. Produce quality and chase customers.