BIZEMPIRE
(South Africa)

Helping you start and build your small business empire

Selecting the better business ideas

Hopefully you now have a decent list of what people want or business ideas - they are essentially the same thing. Some may have been generated from the thoughts and suggestions presented in our last message. Others will be ideas you already have or were given by others or perhaps its a slight variation on your current employment.

Whatever the case we need to start whittling the list down to one idea which best fits the sideline plan. If you only have one business idea on your list you may still want to go through this process as it may help you tweak your business idea to suit the sideline plan.

Step 1: Our main priority is to find a business that provides a product or service that has no unit cost. In other words it makes little to no difference in cost to you if you sell 1 or 10 items. An good example would be if you sold subscriptions to your website. If you allowed 1 person to access the members only section of your website or you allowed 10 people to access it, there would be no extra cost to you involved. There is of course a cost involved in setting up the website in the first place, but this is not typically affected by how many customers you find.

A poorer example would be if you were selling built model airplanes. For each one you sell, you need to buy a new kit and assemble it and this means a new cost to you for each sale you make.

Eliminate the business ideas that are poorer examples and if you still have more than one business idea left , move on to the next step. If none of your business ideas fall into the good example category also move on to the next step. If you have only one business idea left, than that is what you can work with. You can then start using your other ideas too once this first one is up and running.

Step 2: To eliminate some more ideas we need to next choose only those that have low setup costs. A good example would be an ebook which although it may require a fair amount of your time to write, the actual costs in terms of the money you have to spend to make it are reasonably low.

A poorer example would be the setting up of a retail shop as this will require you to probably employ staff, commit to a five year rental lease, buy stock and fit out the shop. This costs considerable money.

Eliminate the business ideas that are poorer examples and if you still have more than one business idea left , move on to the next step. If none of your business ideas fall into the good example category also move on to the next step. If you have only one business idea left, than that is what you can work with. You can then start using your other ideas too once this first one is up and running.

Steps 3 and 4 follow next time.

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