Regarding starting a longarm business: What is the longarm quilting community like in your area? Do you have guilds, local quilt shops, other longarmers; how much demand is there for longarm services? Have you written a business plan, figured out what you want to make, how much you need to charge, how many quilts you need to quilt each month to hit your target gross? Are there a lot of other longarmers in your area, or are there hardly any? Do you plan on getting most of your customers locally, or are you willing to promote yourself and get customers by mail? In my area, there are a lot of longarmers who are computerized or do pantos by hand, so pricing is fairly low. On the other hand, hardly anyone here does really good custom quilting, so that can be quite lucrative. Custom is almost always hand-guided, often with ruler work. Some computerized systems can be programmed with custom stitching, but be aware that can get very time-consuming.
Please don't think that you will buy a longarm, load a quilt on it, and start quilting and making money immediately. There is a huge learning curve even with computerized systems. You.Will.Need.To.Practice. How good you get and how fast you get that good depends entirely upon you and how much effort and time you put into learning and practicing. Practice every day and take classes.
Regarding purchasing a longarm: People will tell you to go to shows and test drive them. First of all, since shows are being cancelled left and right, that's hard to do. When I was test-driving machines, I invested in classes. A good 5-hour class will take you through loading your own backing, batting, and quilt top, winding bobbins, adjusting tension, troubleshooting and solving issues, then doing some actual quilting. I had a great teacher who also brought a bunch of rulers so we were able to test out different kinds and styles. She had a sampler quilt of all different kinds of quilting patterns and techniques, and she challenged us to replicate it, then helped us when we struggled with how to. You don't get the experience of loading your own quilt, adjusting the tension, etc. on a machine setup at a show. Invest in classes.
I have a little gang, a group of about 15 local longarm quilting friends. We get together monthly and have meetings, we have day-long sew days, we have week-long retreats. When we first started meeting, a lot of our discussions centered around issues we were having. Our machines ran the gamut - A1, Gammill, APQS, Tin Lizzie, Nolting, HandiQuilter, you name it, someone in the group owned it. There were a lot of frustrations with some of these machines. Gradually over the years, the Tin Lizzie, Nolting, and A1 machines were replaced by Innovas. Right now, our membership consists of 1 HQ owner, 1 Gammill owner, and the rest of us are all Innova owners, and we are very satisfied with our machines. The conversations have moved off of "how do you handle this problem" to "check out what I did". The great thing about Innova machines is they are designed to be owner maintained, meaning you can service it yourself instead of shipping it off to a dealer for service and being down for several weeks. The 24/7 support is excellent and they will walk you through how to do anything.
Here's another article to read.
https://longarmuniversity.com/Inform...ne-Choice.html
After you read that, click on "machines for sale" at the top of the page.