Self-Employment Businesses Ideas (Part 2)
8. Temp service for project management
All businesses have occasions when they need a project done but don’t have anyone to do it. In such cases, what they should do is ask the busiest manager in the company — but many CEOs don’t have the understanding or nerve to do this.
Solution: a temporary service that employs specialists who want to work on limited duration projects in their areas of expertise.
Say you’re a VP of marketing and you want to try a new promotion but you can’t get your marketing people to talk to you. You call the agency and explain the project. The agency posts your description on its website, which is read by thousands of qualified people looking for part-time, tem- porary work.
Everybody is a winner. And you have a growing business.
9. Rent-a-tank
Buy an old tank. Figure out how to make it street-legal. Rent it out as a novel birthday gift for aging baby boomers.
If this works, think of something else you can rent out — something equally weird. Pretty soon, you’ll have a business.
10. Dog-sitting theme park
Instead of being cooped up in a cage for days on end, dogs are treated to fun and freedom in a wonderland of doggie delights, including a large, open, play area where they can frolic with other captive canines; an obsta- cle course for fitness training; a grooming center; a training facility; and more.
Troublesome dogs are segregated and given “special attention.” Bathing, grooming, housebreaking, and other services are provided at extra cost.
Aging yuppies who feel guilty about putting Fido in a cage while they sip Cabernet in Napa Valley are going bonkers over these guiltless dog jails where so much more is provided at very competitive rates.
The secret to the program is that it ends up costing less than a convention- al facility to house the dogs in groups — yet, because of the seeming ben- efits of all that freedom and mobility, you can actually charge a little more.
The typical rate for overnight lodging is $20 plus extras; half that for a daytime stay. If you can get 100 dogs at an average of $15 a day each, you’ll have revenues of $45,000 a month. Rent on an 8,000-square-foot facility might be $4,000. Three full-time employees might set you back another $7,000 or $8,000. Food, insurance, utilities, and extras would come to maybe $5,000. And advertising — that’s always the big “if.”
Ultimately, it’s a real-estate play (as so many retail businesses are). If you can get a good location — preferably near a major highway or airport — at a good price (think warehouse-space pricing), it’s just a matter of mak- ing your warehouse look like doggie heaven with cheap props and cement floors and some good hoses. Sublet the pet shop, bathing, and grooming services. Keep an attendant working 24 hours a day to keep the mutts from killing one another. That’s it. (I say this with the confidence of an outsider.)
11. Making money from teenyboppers
The size of the U.S. teenage market has doubled in the last 10 years (according to Michael Wood of Teenage Research Unlimited). The cur-rent market is approximately $150 billion big. And it’s getting bigger. Ten years from now, there will be 35 million American teens.
What I like about the teen market is that they are naturally rebellious. This means they favor what is new and have an aversion to name brands. Good news for the entrepreneur.
If you think you might want to get in on this market, you’ll be interested
to know that teens spend a third of their income on clothing, about 20% on entertainment, and 15% on food.
12. Catering to the echo boomers: the new market There are about 32 million people aged 12 to 19 in the United States alone. This is about 11% of the population. They are the children of the baby boomers. As our children, they are perhaps a bit easier to understand than earlier teenagers were. That’s because they’ve been forced to learn our culture as they were developing one of their own. Always self-cen- tered, we baby boomers have seen to it that our children are as fluent about Simon and Garfunkle as they are about Nine Inch Nails. And that presents a business opportunity for anyone interested in catering to that market.
Get in now — and as they age and start making money, you’ll do better and better. Maybe you can fund your own kid’s emerging entrepreneurial interests.