Cheap small business ideas
 

So once again I find myself without a job and once again it had nothing to do with my performance in the job. I feel that this is the nature of IT work. You work someplace for a year to three years, then you're gone and you do it again and again.

This is how it's been for the last 20 years with the exception of how bad it got when the dot com bubble burst and I found myself delivering pizza, bartending, and doing anything else I could do to survive.

There are other things about IT that I just hate too. For instance the fact that you have to spend thousands of dollars to acquire and update certifications every couple of years. In virtually every other kind of work, you learn how to do it once, and that's what you do for your whole career.

The economy is in the crapper again and there aren't many IT jobs. The few that there are either don't pay well or there are thousands of people applying for them.


I've discussed small business ideas before that don't require a lot of startup money but which make pretty good money. I was ridiculed for my idea to open a hot dog cart like my uncle Manny, even though dog carts in a decent area make pretty damn good money.

That idea won't work very well in California anymore since a year and a half ago, laws were made that make it extremely difficult and impractical to run a dog cart. For instance you have to grill dogs rather than steam them, and you have to follow the same rule for restaurants that you have a sink with 3 compartments to wash/sanitize/rinse your utensils, not that a dog cart uses any other than tongs. Then you've got to have a completely separate sink to wash your hands. You can't use the same sink.

This makes the carts much heavier and more expensive. Larger restaurants push for these rules to put cart vendors out of business.

I suppose you could get a catering truck and work it that way, but you'll have to spend about 4 or 5 times the money and I don't really have $60k sitting around.

You could also setup a booth using a customized EZ-UP canopy with a small rolling sink etc. like this electric one...

http://www.northbendoriginals.com/images/sink.jpg

or this propane one

http://www.northbendoriginals.com/im...-comp-sink.jpg


I think with this sort of a setup, you'd want to do more of a gourmet sausage business at farmer's markets and things like that than a regular hot dog business.

The other option is to do a Kettle Corn business in the same kind of setup. Your materials are cheaper, and the whole business would cost under $10k.

I love kettle corn myself and I've been to a lot of events where people sell it and they always seem busy.


Do you guys have any other ideas for a small business that requires little start-up but which could make enough money to support a family?

Math / Science tutoring?

$40/hr is the going rate, if you can get 4 hours of work 6 days a week (4pm to 8pm daily, 10-2 on Saturday), the math looks decent.

4x6x40 = $960/wk x 50 weeks = 48k/yr

It's not coke rich, but it'll do.

yes, Kaplan is hiring.

One of my cow orkers got a gig teaching Math at one of those As-Seen-On-TV crap tech schools.

It was very frustrating, because those people who are there because they saw an ad for how to be a nursing assistant on TV are not the sharpest pencils in the box.

But she made decent money.

Didn't last more than one semester, though.

Do you have a hobby which you are expert at that others would like to learn?

You could do vending machines.

Or start a diaper delivery service.

Computer networking has always been my job and my hobby. I just don't find any joy in it anymore.

I doubt it's for you but my company is hiring for drivers.

A month of school, a minor investment for tuition (free if you're into indentured servitude) and two months' mentoring puts you into a shiny truck that will pay halfway decently, give you a job no matter where you live or how bad the economy gets and allow you your self-respect.

It's hell on families though.

Is prostitution not an option? You don't really have to invest much into the business and so long as you don't have a pimp, it's all profit.
The only down-side is lack of benefits or retirement plan.

Out here, we call that "Consulting".

I can picture someone walking up to a car and asking, "Hey baby, wanna consult the shit out of me?".

You've never worked for Ernst & Young, I see. :lol:

Radar, what happened with your home-schooling supplies business?

make crafts using papier mache. $10 start up costs + discarded paper.

My sis in law once had an idea to snag one of those tiny old photo-mat booths and make it a reallllly quick morning drive-thru coffee station.

Probably can't find any of those around anymore and that was before there was a Tim Horton Hears a Who on every block.

California made it all but illegal by creating a law that says you must be a certified teacher to teach at home. The state doesn't want to lose the money it gets for sending kids to their failed schools.

Also, I realized that about 90% of the homeschool market are religious nutjobs and I wouldn't want to carry religious items.

Never heard of Tim Horton Hears a Who. In L.A. pretty much all of the old photomat booths are cigarette booths/mini smoke shops now.

Heh, It's Tim Horton's...supposedly a better class of coffee than, say, a MickeyD's.

All our fotomat booths were paved for parking lots. So goes paradise...

I think all of our Fotomat booths got lifted onto the backs of flatbeds with cranes one day ... suddenly, long before the rise of digital photography, the most convenient form of photo developing disappeared from the face of the earth. Much like the dinosaurs.

One briefly did receive new life as a coffee, newspapers, and cigarettes drive thru (ultra convenience store), wish it was still around, but I guess it was well before it's time (must have been more than 15 years ago).

I always wanted to open up a walkthrough Toast Shop in a narrow unit next to a busy train station. It could be a Toast Cart easily. People love toast for breakfast - from harried businessmen to figure-conscious shopgirls. It's nutritional, fills a gap, cheap and you can eat it on the go, fast, smells great, simple.

That's all I would sell - toast. And maybe tea/ coffee (but British style, where your choices are black or white, sugar or none).

Toast. Two slice minimum.
- White, brown or malted?
- Butter or spread?
- Any topping?
- Take a number and move down to the till please.

Kerching!
50p without topping, £1 with.
50p for tea of coffee. Using volume of sales to drive profits.
Move along please, I have millions to make.

I think it would be too simple (in terms of choice) for Americans though.

Not really. The single best American hamburger chain has a very simple menu (though there are a few things not on the menu)

http://media.nowpublic.net/images//3...85a4ab15f7.jpg

You guys must have strange cash registers. American cash registers don't go "Kerching". Ours go Cha-Ching! :p

Love me some jungle style burgers. :-)

You mean animal style? (burger cooked in mustard on the grill with grilled onions and extra sauce and cheese) They also have protein style (wrapped in lettuce with no bun) and animal fries (they'll kill you, but you'll go out with a smile on your face)

They don't have those in our area, that I've ever seen.

You are missing out Shawnee

Hmmm, double burger meal works out at £3.78.
1p cheaper than a Big Mac meal here.
People always say food is so much cheaper in America - is this an expensive chain?

I ate out in America and found it was cheaper, but more than that, the portion sizes were larger, so you could order less. I don't remember having a burger though (shocking!) Then again, both times I went I actually had plenty of money, so it might just be that I wasn't paying any attention to how much things cost.

All I know is that the Dairy Queen has some good specials here. 2 double cheese burgers for $3.33 and 2 single cheese burgers for $2.22. There's also a deal for some chili cheese burger meal thing.

I don't eat fast food, so I couldn't compare it to In 'n Out. But it's all fast food so it's probably all the same sort of suck.

Radar, how about solving some pain point for computer network professionals? If you come up with some product that network pros can't do without that's a good source of income. Services might also be something you could get into... Play to your strengths, don't sell dog shit.

I just looked at locations online; doubt I'll be near one anytime soon. :(

Whats the update radar?

Here's an idea your IT skills may be able to realise:

How about an antisocial networking site. Make a big list of all your enemies and post it on the web, so you can shove it in their faces whenever things go right for you. Call it Arsebook.

Whaddayathink?

there's a guy round here who bikes round the day's garbage collection area each morning before the recycling truck comes and takes all the cans and bottles with deposits on them. He seems to collect a lot pretty quickly. Cheap Idea, probably makes enough to live on, probably lonely and not terribly pleasant.

I get the feeling a cheap small business idea is not what you really want, but more of a get-rick-quick-with-minimal-initial layout scheme. suggest you watch the late-night informercials if that is the case. or help one of those nice Nigerians rescue their money from the evil dictators.

....wait wait wait... yo need to produce a late night infomercial offering to help people set up the IT part of their home offices so they can efficiently take up the other schemes offered by late-night infomercials.

more people are being laid off and trying to strike out alone -a good percentage of them are bound to need help setting up the IT side of it.

That's actually a good idea. :lol:

You could bill yourself as Nick Burns, Your company's computer guy.