Business Ideas

My consulting firm specializes in marketing and developing consumer products. Currently we are preparing a hunting product for launch at a major outdoor products tradeshow. This week I took the opportunity to attend the largest expo targeting the archery/bow hunting product industry to scout trends and network for my hunting product client. It was revealing and a valuable lesson was strongly reinforced.

In every industry, and especially on display at tradeshows, there are mammoth players that dominate their category. These leading brands are the stars of the trade and are immediately recognized as such by competitors and consumers. Their products typically are well established, their distribution channels fulsome, the marketing strategies are dominant and awareness of their products nearly universal to their targeted consumers.

The bow hunting industry show I spent a day visiting this week was like most of the hundreds of other trade shows I have attended over many years. The largest, loudest, most active booths were populated by the biggest archery product marketers. The vast majority of the stands in the show, however, were small, independently owned businesses, featuring more targeted product offerings. The opportunity to participate commercially in an industry, in this case for avid bow and arrow hunters, where the entrepreneur shares a passion for the sport with the pursuit of profit is a strong lure for the driven creator.

As I walked the show, I was able to meet and chat with a range of small business owners who love hunting with bow and arrow and relish the opportunity to earn their living in the archery/bow hunting industry. They have created products that fill needs they have identified from their field experiences. These people were virtually all passionate, positive and proud of the many items and specialty products they were showing.

Consider the simple hunting arrow. We all, even if we have never hunted in the wild, have shot or held an arrow, certainly as kids playing cowboys and Indians. We know there is a tip, a bow shaft and feathers built into an arrows assemblage of parts. At the trade show there were numerous purveyors of all types of arrows. Interestingly, there were also numerous vendors offering only tips, or shafts, or feathers, in a stunning range colors and styles. The specialization of these products, their artisan nature and the small, even seemingly tiny, niches they occupy were testament to the idea that building a better mousetrap will be profitable.

I left the show re-energized. The lesson I relearned for the thousandth time is this: If you have passion for something, and can identify a way to improve the experience, you can profit and enjoy earning a living doing what you love most. Many people do exactly this. They earn a good living from commercializing their hobby, craft or favorite pastime. It takes a bit of vision and a bunch of courage to successfully take the leap from employee to entrepreneur, but it is being done every day.

One small business idea that has a huge potential of turning into a very lucrative, thriving opportunity with the help of a good laptop computer, is a web hosting business.

Lucrative Small Business Opportunity Laptop Idea: Web Hosting

Web hosting is no doubt one of the most lucrative small business opportunities even before anybody introduces an idea that involves taking advantage of laptop technology. One of the reasons is the fact that everybody with an online presence requires a hosting service of sorts. In other words there is a huge demand for this service that is a necessity, meaning that people cannot do without it. The second reason is the fact that once a client has been acquired, they will continue to be a client for years, paying their hosting fees monthly, quarterly or in whatever fashion your contract stipulates.

So as an entrepreneur you are sure that as long as you can bring a few clients on board for your web hosting small business venture, the idea is that there is a long term opportunity to recover all your costs and make a good profit.

Going on the road to seek your web-hosting clients will give you an edge over many other hosting services that concentrate all their client recruitment efforts online. This is an especially appropriate and lucrative idea and opportunity for a small business just starting out in the web hosting business and willing to take full advantage of the latest in laptop technology.

Starting a business can be an exciting and challenging proposition for some people. Selecting what area of industry to go into and what products or services to provide can present some difficulty to those that are not equipped with large budgets and the ability to recruit managers and staff to run the organization. However, there is one industry that requires very little training and virtually no supervision to run a successful enterprise. The business venture that I am referring to involves the placement of consumer vending machines to lobbies, lunchrooms, hotels, and schools just to name a few of the thousands of possibilities that are available for a smart investor.

With a little capital to start out from it is possible to rent or buy vending machines in Toronto that can be strategically placed in offices throughout the metropolitan area. By planning a route that is simple to manage a person can deliver snacks, chocolate bars, and crisps to the working population and reap the rewards of their labor with relatively little effort on their part. After successfully contracting with a building supervisor for the right to display a self contained piece of equipment, the entrepreneur merely needs to resupply the products that are purchased once a week and collect the money that is held inside the strong box where it awaits pick up. In only a few hours per day of effort it is possible to build a strong business that can withstand the instability of the economy and provide a steady stream of income to the individual that has dreamed of being their own boss and venturing out on their own.

Which company would you rather own: One in an niche industry or trade where more than half of business owners fail to make a profit, or one with 100, 1,000, even 10,000 percent growth over a period of three to five years, and stunning profitability?

Ask a group of unsuccessful business owners why their business ventures failed and most will probably cite “undercapitalization.” But there is often a more fundamental reason for business failure — selecting products, services and a business niche for which there aren’t enough paying customers! Of course such companies find themselves undercapitalized. In fact, one can never find enough capital to keep a company afloat if it has a shortage of customers!

Buggy whips aren’t the only product in low demand. Today, product life cycles are typically short, and getting shorter. Entering a market that has matured (and for which you don’t have a highly innovative plan to substantially increase demand, lower costs or differentiate your offering) likely will lead to financial disaster. So will entering a market that is oversaturated with reasonably competent competitors.

Why do most business start-up books and business assistance specialists focus little, if any, attention on the most important question an entrepreneur will ever ask: What business should I be in?

In part, because most owners, often unwisely, have already made up their minds about the business they should start. Many entrepreneurs incorrectly assume this decision should be based largely on the existing technical skills, interests and experience they bring to the equation. Or they may have a friend or relative who claims, often inaccurately, that the business they own is a raving success, and simply decide to follow their lead. But there are far better ways to plan for success.

An entrepreneur with 10 years experience working for someone else in the dog breeding field may enjoy the work, have great technical skills, and love dogs. But before starting up a dog breeding enterprise, wouldn’t it be important to know that more than 65 percent of dog breeding companies are unprofitable. There are many other popular small business categories that share a record of high risk and low profitability. Now, for an individual who is financially independent and for whom earning an income (and a profit) from their new venture is secondary, this may be fine. But few planning a new business enjoy that luxury.

Another reason most small business authors and specialists focus so little on business selection is that they know little about the subject. Though vitally important, market research and analysis are topics most business authors, counselors, brokers and advisors have failed to study. Even some business planning consultants gloss over this crucial aspect of entrepreneurial success.

Our entrepreneur with the dog breeding background can use research to discover that there are many companies in the dog products and services arena that are experiencing dramatic growth. One sells dog biscuits containing only organically grown ingredients via category killer pet stores. A franchise operation teaches dog owners to manage their pets’ behavior, anxiety and frustration using behavioral science methods. A third company offers health insurance for dogs. Dogs bred and trained for explosives detection are also in high demand. Many of our dog breeder’s skills may readily transfer to an enterprise in such a niche area, where with thoughtful research and planning, opportunities for success should prove far better than those for a risk-plagued breeding business.

Does this mean no one ever succeeds in dog breeding? No, but entrepreneurs seeking high income and growth know which odds to defy and which to respect.

How do successful entrepreneurs brainstorm and research high demand, low competition, highly profitable business ideas?

Many start by listing and analyzing their skills, interests and competencies. But they don’t hesitate to apply these broadly to business ideas they consider. For example, management experience is often transferable to many industries and niches.

Smart entrepreneurs also search for screaming success stories. More than a dozen business publications, including Inc. Magazine, Business Week, and Fortune rank the fastest growing large and small companies in the U.S. Some target hot growth businesses in Canada, Europe, South America, Asia or other countries and regions. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu ranks companies with growth as high as 20,000 percent across the globe. Links to these high growth companies’ websites are typically listed, too. There are similar ranking sources for top selling consumer products.

When an entrepreneur identifies a company growing as fast as 5,000 to 20,000 percent every three to five years, he or she considers how a new company might partner or piggyback on that white-hot growth. They may slice off a niche, or become a supplier, dealer, representative, distributor or reseller. They brainstorm ways in which their own new company can tap into this hypergrowth. When I-Pods exploded on the scene a few years ago, smart entrepreneurs recognized the concurrent demand for accessories, and moved quickly to respond with highly profitable new products.

Wise business owners also study broad, societal trends, as well as trends within narrow industry and customer segments. They learn from futurists (management science consultants, about diverse global trends, risk management and emerging market) opportunities. Some of the best known futurists are Faith Popcorn, who wrote Clicking, Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock, and Patricia Dixon, whose website, globalchange.com, is read by thousands daily. Books, magazines (especially industry and trade publications) and websites offer a myriad of free and low cost on trends and the future.

After homing in on a handful of rapid growth industry niches, the entrepreneur’s market research efforts continue with searches for market analysis reports targeted to those niches (many are free and available from your public and university libraries). Successful owners also gather statistics on the product or service and its potential target customers. Much of this data is available from the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the IRS, the U.S. Department of Labor, the U.S. Commerce Department and other federal agencies. Private sources offer data, too, usually more targeted, but at a price.

Available information includes national, state, county, city and other geographical area statistics on income, total wealth, gender, age, ethnicity, employment, number of companies in the same product or service category, number of stores per company, square footage and square footage costs per store, profitability of companies in the trade or industry, risk of failure, and benchmarking data (typical income and itemized expenses for companies with revenue comparable to your firm’s anticipated revenue), and more.

This information is recorded, logged, sifted and analyzed to determine the prospective niche’s and your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats before being incorporated into the owner’s business plan.

You’ll be amazed at how quickly you can build a wealth of information around one or two of your own favorite, highly profitable business ideas.

So, before you race down to register your business name, complete a IRS form requesting an Employer Identification Number, or run to the store for office supplies, ask yourself this question: Am I satisfied that I’ve found a high demand, high profitability business, with costs I can control (or even cut below the industry benchmark), in a low competition niche that is suitable given a broad application of my skills, interests and experience?

Once you have a well-researched, positive answer to that question, you’ll be ready to realize your own screaming small business success story.

The perfect business is a dream any new entrepreneur has the desire to own. We want to earn money on our own terms. We want to work when we choose and rest when we like. To find this perfect business we spend and spend on all sorts of books and courses that all promise you huge income. The problem is that the promises are often overstated. They sound too good to be true and in most cases they are.

But there is one type of online business that I believe has come of age and is the ultimate home based business opportunity of 2009. This business is called Affiliate Marketing. There are a number of reasons why I believe now is the time for affiliate marketing.

The Affiliate Systems Are Now Well Established

With market leaders such as amazon and clickbank showing the way the systems that control affiliates and payments are now very sophisticated. The early problems of stolen payments and missing cookies have all but been eliminated. You can rest assured that the programmers have sorted out the bugs and that you can earn money using affiliate marketing.

There Is A Massive Range Of Products Open To The Affiliate Marketer

Commission Junction must take much of the credit here for pioneering the affiliate programs for physical products. If you have a website about health foods you can sell Smoothie Makers and Juicers on your website. If you have a nutrition website you can affiliate to vitamin supplements and sell them online. As well as the hard products there are digital products such as video, audio and ebooks that you can promote.

You Can Set Up The Ultimate Home Based Business Very Cheaply And Quickly

You can start with an investment of less than