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Unusual
Ways Newsletter
(Subscriber Access Only)
(Subscriber Access Only)
What I am going to call "business projects" for lack of a better term, are not businesses exactly, because they require no long-term ongoing commitment. There is a start and an end, and you are free to repeat the project or move on to another.
For example, many years ago, a friend wanted to buy a Dodge pickup truck from a "repo lot" (where repossessed vehicles are sold), to resell for a profit. I put up the $900 purchase price and a bit more for insurance and registration. A few days later he sold the truck for $2,200. We split the gain of roughly $950 ($475 each). The whole project lasted less than a week, and involved a few minutes "work" on my end.
A more involved business project is flipping a house. Buying, fixing and selling the house might take as little as a month or as much as a year, but there is a start and a finish. You don't even need to have business cards made if you are doing this just once or occasionally. But you do need some experience, and a fair amount of credit and/or cash to get started.
Some Unusual Business
Projects
Creative Arranging
I am making these terms up, but here is a true story of "creative arranging." The details are fuzzy now, but the principle is valid even if I do get the numbers wrong.
Years ago a marketer (now famous) was helping an owner of a chain of furniture stores find ways to boost his sales. He had the idea that people buying couches and other furniture for relaxing on might also want to get in shape. Perhaps the stores could offer a health club membership with each purchase.
With that in mind, he went to the owner of a large chain of health clubs and discovered that a six-month membership was $200. He offered to buy 5,000 memberships for 75 cents each. Why would the owner agree to this? Because the space was available for more members, so there would be little additional cost to the health clubs, and some of these new members would enroll again at the full price.
The marketer went to the owner of the furniture stores and suggested that he offer a six-month membership to these health clubs free with any purchase. They could honestly say that the membership was a $200 value, and even a customer who bought a $180 chair would get one. He sold the 5,000 memberships he had bought for 75 cents to the owner of the stores for $3 each. Total profit; $11,250.
The whole project took a few weeks. The furniture sales went up sharply. Interestingly, many of the people who got the memberships didn't use them often, but about 500 of them (10%) paid their $200 dues in full after the first six months. That was $10,000 of revenue the health club wouldn't have had, in addition to the original $3,750 paid for the 5,000 memberships, and future renewals. Everyone came out ahead in this true story.
Anyone could have done this had they thought of it and been able to convince the furniture store owner to buy $200 memberships for $3. To make these kinds of deals work, you have to look for high-markup items that can be bought cheap. I have seen a furniture store give away a thousand bicycles, one for any buyer of a couch or recliner, and someone might have arranged to sell the bicycles to them for a $10 profit each, but this is unusual.
A more probable arrangement: Buying a thousand passes to a struggling local movie theater for 50 cents each, and selling them for $1.50 each to some other business. The idea is that the theater doesn't incur much additional expense by having more people go to the movies, and can make money at the concession stand, while the final user still sees a real value of perhaps $7 or $8. At $1.50, a restaurant could afford to offer them with any meal to boost sales. As the arranger of the deal you would make $1,000 for this business project. Everyone wins.
Buying And Selling Projects
There was a clock factory that shut down in a town where we used to live. Years later there were still hundreds of wooden clocks and related items in their warehouse, just sitting there. What had changed in the meantime was that the internet had become an easy place to sell things. Specifically, these clocks could have been sold on Ebay.
There are a couple ways you could do a money making project like this. The riskier, but possibly more profitable way, is to make an offer for the whole lot. Buy everything cheap and sell it on Ebay for a profit. If you have a lot of experience selling on Ebay, and can reasonably estimate how much the clocks would sell for, this may be the way to go.
A lower-risk, lower-investment way would be to talk to the owner and suggest selling everything for him for a percentage. At least one gentleman I talked to at the time was considering doing this. He was planning to take 25% for himself, as I recall. If he did it, i am sure the owner of the clocks was happy to have someone doing all the work while he made something for all those clocks he might have been ready to throw away.
A rummage sale is a classic buying and selling opportunity that you can use to raise money. Apart from the usual selling of your own things, you can buy things cheap when you see them at flea markets and other rummage sales, and then sell them for a profit at your own sales. If you try this one, keep in mind that not everything will sell. Because of this tied-up capital, I wouldn't pay more than 30% of what I thought an item would sell for. That way, if you sell half of the things you bought, you might still have a decent profit.
You might even scope it out first, to see what people there are buying, and then find a source for those things. Again, this is something you can do as a business project, with no commitment to continue. It can be a fun and unusual way to make money.
Note: This is part of the "Unusual Ways"
Newsletter.
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