Business Idea - Washrooms Only Cleaning Service

If you’re got a strong stomach, this could be the business for you. Clean public washrooms are the holy grail of any extended shopping trip. Businesses should know that we all judge their operations by the cleanliness of their bathrooms. Bad bathroom, bad kitchen is the judgment I make of restaurants that don’t care about clean washrooms. A small purchase of cleaning supplies and presto, jingo, you’ve got yourself a Restroom Only cleaning service. Gas stations and restaurants should be easy to convince of the merits of hiring you. Do timed checks throughout the day. Offer a free demonstration. As you expand, hire other people to fulfill your contracts.

How Can I Make More Money Today?

I was reading Gene Simmon’s book, Sex, Money, Kiss a while back and was struck by the KISS rock n’ roller’s business acumen. The man knows his market. From magazines to artwork, snowboards to baby clothes, Simmon’s has been relentless in thinking up new ways to extend his product line. In his book he credits part of his success to waking up each day and taking a moment to think up answers to the question, “How can I make more money today?”

Try it yourself for a few weeks.

Here are some of my answers just to get you started:

1. Advertise more. Take out web ads. Try writing for off-line magazines and mention my blog in my byline. Classified ads for my blog?

2. Brainstorm ten products I can sell that would be a natural extension of my primary one - my blog.

3. What other of my interests would make for another product line? My obsession with home pizza-making? What about a pizza blog? An acrylic painting blog? A gardening blog for absolute beginners?

You get the idea. Now ask yourself, “How can you make more money today?”

Finding a Niche

A woman in Ontario made an obscene amount of money during the early days of the Pokemon craze importing merchandise from Japan and selling it online. Another stumbled onto a niche market as a graphic designer producing t-shirts, mugs, mouse pads, tea towels, et cetera with stylized drawings of a particular dog breed - I think it was a bulldog of some sort.

The point? If you can find your own niche market online, you can make big bucks. In their article, “Niche Marketing Secrets” Rufina James and Bart Baggett state that to find this kind of group you need three criteria:

1. They have a crazy, passionate level of interest in a problem, topic or hobby. Hopefully, they will be willing to spend any amount of money on their desire or obsession. For my mother it’s cookbooks. She has a few thousand already, but always finds room and money for that next one that promises something new.

2. They have money to purchase your product. I’d love to buy a house, but until I get that precious down payment together, a real estate agent would only be wasting her time trying to sell to me.

3. They must be large in number and easy to reach. Few leads and hard to reach ones at that means you’ll just be spinning your wheels before your business goes under.

Find a group like this, offer them what they want and making sales should be relatively easy.

Setting Up a Mall Kiosk

I just found a great article at www.entrepreneur.com on how to set up your own mall kiosk. I was surprised that this form of vending is now a $10 billion a year business.

If you have an inventory of jewellry or craft items, you might want to look into this. For an initial investment of $2,000 to $10,000 you can set up at a local mall and enjoy the benefits of the high traffic they usually draw. (Here in Vancouver, one local mall was offering a kiosk for as little $1,000 a month - kiosk provided.) The only catch is that you can't compete with mall stores, but this can often be negotiated from my understanding.

This form of selling is also great for seasonal businesses - like those that sell Christmas or Valentine's Day merchandise - or if you have an item you want to test-market first.

For more information find yourself a copy of From Dogs... To Riches: A Step-by-Step Guide to Operate Your Own Mobile Cart Vending Business by Denise Clark.

Also, check out the article at www.entrepreneur.com/startingabusiness/startupbasics/location/article63012.html

Mining Daytime TV for Ideas

I probably watch way too much daytime t.v. Occasionally, I can justify it by telling myself that it's for "educational purposes". In any event, home entrepreneurship seems to be one of the hot topics of the moment. Oprah has done a few shows on kitchen table moguls, as has Montel.

If you can catch a repeat of Montel's February 8, 2007 show, I recommend it. I particularly enjoyed Michele Hoskins' story.

Her maternal line had handed down a secret recipe for a honey, cream syrup for three or four generations. Ms. Hoskins decided that rather than just hand the recipe down to her daughter, she preferred to hand down a business: so she brewed up a batch in her basement, labelled the bottles and convinced her local supermarket to do a trial sales run by handing out free samples and a free case to the market itself. She then had friends and relatives buy like crazy and purchased the remaining bottles herself as a customer. This created buzz for her product and the manager decided to actually purchase a few cases and then to permanently stock her pancake syrup. From this humble beginning, a million dollar business was born.

I love stories like this.

Check out the show highlights at www.montelshow.com under "past shows" type Feb. 8, 2007.

Homepreneur

This blog is intended as a think tank for small home-based entrepreneurs.

I've found myself getting more and more interested lately in the success stories of kitchen table entrepreneurs - people who come up with a new pancake syrup or beautiful jewelry design or home staging concept and make it work from virtually nothing.

Partly, I think my newfound interest derives from a change in our culture, a feeling that the workaday world can be one tough place to navigate and that the business world offers its own forum for creativity. The main reason, though, is that I've been seriously ill for the past 8 years and now that I'm returning to health need to find a way to pay my bills. Returning to my old work isn't an option, so I'm looking for something new. Hence this blog.

I've heard that people make money from blogging. It's a sort of magazine business model, if I understand correctly. So I thought I'd gather up my home business research and see what we could accomplish. Stay tuned in the months ahead for information on what kinds of businesses people are thinking up, how they're marketing them and what problems they're encountering. I'll have ideas for you on businesses you can start at your kitchen table and what to do when you've outgrown your homebase. I'm aiming for a weekly post, hopefully more.

Welcome.

Arleigh Cee