New business ideas?

[Timeforchange12]

Hello all

My OH and I had a bit of a heart to heart a couple of days ago and we've both decided for various reasons we want to start our own business - but doing what?

I've just started reading How to start a business on your kitchen table by Shan Nix Jones which so far I'm really enjoying but I thought I would see if I can get a bit of mumsnet inspiration!

OH had been a professional poker player for the past 18 years until last year where he started working for a bank. I worked as a kitchen manager up until a couple of years ago when my eldest daughter became unwell and needed full time care - whilst shes not fully recovered, shes doing amazingly well and my youngest daughter is due to start reception in September so it feels like now is the time to explore working for ourselves.

Some thoughts we had were running a cattery, a catering van, small cafe? We also thought about online shop, e.g. A gift hamper company, pet supplies etc. Or perhaps hiring out equipment such as bouncy castles/marquees.

I probably sound totally clueless and that's because I am! But I'm also willing to learn - my daughter is giving me a crash course on TIk tok and instagram as marketing on social media seems incredibly important whichever route we take.

I would love to hear any ideas, or even better, hear from someone who has branched out on their own and started a new venture and how it went?

Catering vans and cafes are very long hours and hard work, particularly cafes which are also not particularly lucrative, especially with the high overheads such as power and utilities - you'd barely earn minimum wage. It's hard to find good pitches for catering vans - pitches at events etc are ridiculously expensive.

Online can be good, but you need to find a niche. You're wasting your time buying from wholesalers and ali-baba as everyone else is doing the same. You need something unique - a product or service that other online retailers can't replicate. Pet supplies etc is a saturated market. Same with bouncy castle hire - what is different about your bouncy castle that customers will come to you and not the others in your vicinity? Please don't compete on price - that'll be a race to the bottom and the competition will just under cut you and no one will win.

You ideally need something that others can't replicate, whether that's a new product, or a particular skill that you have which few others have, or a specialist hobby or interest that you have which most people don't.

I've had two millionaire clients who literally started a business from nothing. One was an engineer who realised there was a gap in the market and spent years developing a new product in his garage workshop, got patents for it, and then started production small scale, which grow and he ended up with 3 factories, several hundred staff, and sold to an international oil/gas exploration form for around £20 million! The other was a husband/wife combo, wife had a particular hobby/interest, and she always struggled to find things to buy - she got fed up with what the Hobby shops, supermarkets and other outlets sold (it was all the "same old" she said), so she started looking for manufacturers who would make small "one offs" for her and started making things for herself in a small home workshop/workroom. She just thought that if she wanted different things, then others would too, so instead of making "one offs" for herself, she started making a few of each, and putting them on e-bay - people bought them and she started asking buyers for ideas of other things they may want, and started making them too! She outgrew Ebay then made her own website, which grew, and then she started advertising in specialist hobby magazines and the business continued to grow. Got too big for her to make things herself, so she partnered with a couple of small local factories and did bigger production runs. Eventually sold out for a few million to a big online hobby retailer.

Both those cases were businesses arising out of an established skill/hobby, so there were barriers to entry for others, i.e. in the first case, very few people would have known there was a gap in the market in the oil/gas exploration industry for a very specific product. In the second case, someone who wasn't involved in the particular hobby wouldn't have known the limitations as to what was available and what else could be popular.

I'd suggest you build on skills/knowledge/experience/abilities you already have rather than venturing into something you don't know much about, especially if anyone could do the same thing!