Good business ideas are all around you! Here are just a few ways to find the real opportunities to start your own business.
1. Do what you love to do
Businesses don't just happen. They are made. Whether you plan to profit by twisting balloons into smile-generating shapes or orchestrating the growth of multimillion dollar, multinational companies, your success relies on what you bring to the business. If you love what you do, your passion for the business will drive you to be knowledgeable, creative and persistent. On the other hand, if your feeling for what you do is lukewarm,
your success will be, too.
Just because you leave a company doesn't mean it doesn't need your services. Companies often retain the services of former workers on a freelance or consulting basis. That way they get the benefit of trained personnel without having to pay payroll taxes and benefits. If you leave a company on good terms, ask about contract or freelance opportunities. Don't stop with contacts who work with the former employer, either. Call your former employer's suppliers and customers and tell them about your capabilities. Call their competitors, too. Stress your industry knowledge, contacts and skills. You may soon find that the income you earn exceeds what you made as an employee.
Sometimes all it takes to create a "new" product is a slight change in an existing product.
Do you have a skill others want to acquire? Do you have a knack for explaining things so others can understand them? If so, don't give your expertise away. Start charging for it!
Don’t pay a premium for a top end domain name, there are plenty of good ones left.
Business ideas are all around you.
They are lurking in your garage, in your basement, in your kitchen, and in your children's room. You'll find them in magazine ads, at your neighbor's house and at work.
They are right there in the vegetables you brought in from the yard... in the stack of papers next to your laser printer... in the back of your truck... and at the back of your mind.
You don't need to be a genius or an MBA to spot those ideas and turn them into profits, either. Identifying business opportunities is often as easy as identifying problems many people share and finding a way to solve them.
1. Do what you love to do
Businesses don't just happen. They are made. Whether you plan to profit by twisting balloons into smile-generating shapes or orchestrating the growth of multimillion dollar, multinational companies, your success relies on what you bring to the business. If you love what you do, your passion for the business will drive you to be knowledgeable, creative and persistent. On the other hand, if your feeling for what you do is lukewarm,
your success will be, too.
2. Start With The Easy Stuff: Eliminate Expenses
Don’t rent an office! – work from home. Or better yet work from the best free office with locations everywhere: Starbucks. If you need to meet with a client and are worried about seeming small time without an office, don’t be. Just meet them at a restaurant for a lunch meeting. This is what people with the nicest offices do anyway.
Don’t hire lawyers, technical people, graphic designers, or assistants (see below)Don’t hire any employees! – do it all yourself until you have some $ coming in the door.
3. Turn old standbys into new products
Truly new concepts are few and far between. Most new products or new business ideas are simply spin-offs of old ones. Inline skates is one good example. Essentially, they are ice skates on wheels. Or, depending on your point of view, streamlined roller-skates. Other new business ideas are nothing more than new ways of marketing mundane products. Take1800flowers.com, for example. Florists were around as relatively small, local stores for years --but then Jim McCann, who started with a single retail shop in 1976, acquired the phone number 1-800-Flowers and developed a network of florists. The company saw an opportunity to grow online, and started selling through the early commercial online services, and then the Internet.
You may not have the money, management ability, contacts or desire to launch a major new product like inline skates or the energy or desire to turn your single store location into a multimillion-dollar sales organization. But you don't have to launch anything that large to start a business or introduce a new product. You need to think about what people want to buy and how they would like to buy it.
Years ago when my kids were little, I made money selling beanbags. The twist? I designed them in the shape of frogs and I filled them with birdseed instead of beans to make them pliable and less lumpy to the touch. To attract attention at craft shows, I displayed them in various human poses (sitting up, laying on their side resting their head on their hand, or hugging each other, for instance). I could produce them quickly and kept my costs low by making the frogs from inexpensive fabric remnants. That allowed me to price the frogs low enough to make them great impulse buys for parents who wanted to buy a small, inexpensive gift for a child.
You can spin almost any skill or industry knowledge into marketable new products or services.
A neighbor turned his skill at fixing cars into a repair and tune-up service. His angle? He was mobile. Customers didn't have to drop their car off at the shop. Instead, the "shop" (a van outfitted with tools and auto parts) came to them. Another acquaintance built a business by purchasing large quantities of chemicals and repackaging them in smaller quantities.
4. Look for mundane money-makers
You don't need to create exciting new products or services to go into business, either. Millions of business owners profit by selling routine and sometimes unglamorous services such as window washing, car repair, sandwich making, building maintenance, house cleaning and plumbing. The key to making money with the mundane is to sell something your customers can't do, don't want to do, don't have the time to do, or can't get done well elsewhere.
Tip: one way to making really big money with mundane services is to develop a unique and reproducible method for marketing and delivering the service and then open up multiple offices, or franchise the concept. If you plan to franchise your idea or sell it as a business opportunity, retain an attorney early on who is familiar with franchise law and can help you steer clear of the pitfalls
5. Turn that hobby into cash
Do people ooh and ah at your handiwork? Whether you are a whiz at creating floral arrangements or at writing software, look for ways to turn your hobby into a business. You might want to manufacture your items in quantity, license them to other manufacturers, sell them by mail order, at flea markets or on consignment, or open your own retail outlet selling supplies to others with similar interests.
Ask the reference librarian at your public library to help you find trade magazines pertaining to your hobby, and read those to generate new business ideas.6. Turn a former employer into a valuable source of new business
Just because you leave a company doesn't mean it doesn't need your services. Companies often retain the services of former workers on a freelance or consulting basis. That way they get the benefit of trained personnel without having to pay payroll taxes and benefits. If you leave a company on good terms, ask about contract or freelance opportunities. Don't stop with contacts who work with the former employer, either. Call your former employer's suppliers and customers and tell them about your capabilities. Call their competitors, too. Stress your industry knowledge, contacts and skills. You may soon find that the income you earn exceeds what you made as an employee.
7. Modify one of your existing products
Sometimes all it takes to create a "new" product is a slight change in an existing product.
Harrison-Hoge Industries is a mail order company in Port Jefferson, NY, that sells fishing lures, inflatable boats and other outdoor gear. To expand their line, the company added a wide-brimmed, canvas hat called the Campesino to its catalog. The hat was a big success, but the owners of the company thought there might be more they could do with it. And there was.
They discovered they could adapt the hat to sell in specialized markets just by changing the hat band. As a result, they began to supply the Museum of Natural History and the Guggenheim Museum (both in New York City) with hats. Each museum's hat has its own distinctive hat band.
8. Reach out and teach someone
Do you have a skill others want to acquire? Do you have a knack for explaining things so others can understand them? If so, don't give your expertise away. Start charging for it!
For instance, if you are a karate expert, you might teach at a karate school or open your own karate school. If you're a talented artist, you could teach art at home or in a school.
Tip:: Make extra money selling books, supplies, or other items your students will need to buy to complete the course.
9. Make a website for your business
Don’t pay a premium for a top end domain name, there are plenty of good ones left.
Test out your ideas by writing to a blog, you’ll get feedback on what people like and don’t like
Don’t pay a premium for a top end domain name, there are plenty of good ones left
When you’re ready to have your own domain, register it at domain.com and add this as a custom domain to your WordPress or Tumblr site. Get a free business website at www.wordpress.com or tumblr.com. It won’t be your own domain (it will be something like yourbusiness.wordpress.com) but…
Get a professional website design for free with a wordpress theme that you can install with a few clicks (no programming knowledge needed)10. Always be learning about business
Go to a meetup.com groups in your city related to business/entrepreneurship
Read all the best business books by getting them from the library
Get 3 of the top 10 books on building wealth for free in PDF
Make friends with other entrepreneurs and share material.
I hope this material, though theory, might help you in realty. Please feel free to comment, either good or bad, it might help in improving the blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment