Low start up business ideas

[Hoofy]

Equus said:

Hoofy said:

coyft said:

Take dogs into your house. Local woman to us is always full and charges £25 per day and has four dogs. There's your £100 a day, minimal effort, minimal start up costs.

And no need for OFSTED inspections!

you reckon?

I recently designed a boarding kennels, so had to wade through the standard registration and operational requirements.... they're surprisingly comprehensive and onerous.

Wasn't aware of that for kennels. Still, probably a good idea to avoid animal cruelty.

[Equus]

singlecoil said:

The man on the Clapham omnibus would think of boarding as staying overnight.

The man on the Clapham omnibus would be wrong - there's a definition within the relevant legislation:
"...the carrying on at premises of any nature (including a private dwelling) of a business of providing accommodation for other people’s animals"

There is no requirement for it to be overnight, or any other minimum period of time. I know, because I checked with the licensing division of the Local Authority in whose area I was designing the kennels.

[Anthony Micallef]

An interesting thread as I too have thought about starting up a business with minimal costs. I've tried selling on ebay but that just seems to be a none starter.

I don't earn a lot at my desk job do would be nice to try and earn that amount from home.

[Poseidon]

Not really a suggestion but an idea to get the creative juices flowing;

A (Facebook) friend of mine runs a gambling tipster service, he started off with a Facebook page showing results from his own betting and gained a big following. He then monetised it with a private Twitter account and charges users £10 a month to follow him and receive his tips.

Over the past couple years of it running the highest I've seen his follower count is 1,400, its current just under 1,100.

£132,000 a year income with no start up costs. Beats cleaning windows.

[Zoon]

Poseidon said:

Not really a suggestion but an idea to get the creative juices flowing;

A (Facebook) friend of mine runs a gambling tipster service, he started off with a Facebook page showing results from his own betting and gained a big following. He then monetised it with a private Twitter account and charges users £10 a month to follow him and receive his tips.

Over the past couple years of it running the highest I've seen his follower count is 1,400, its current just under 1,100.

£132,000 a year income with no start up costs. Beats cleaning windows.

It doesn't matter if the tips are rubbish, just keep signing new accounts up and profit.
What stops one person signing up and then passing the tips off as their own or just sending them to a mate?

Edited by Zoon on Monday 13th August 17:00

[Poseidon]

Zoon said:

It doesn't matter if the tips are rubbish, just keep signing new accounts up and profit.
What stops one person signing up and then passing the tips off as their own or just sending them to a mate?

Edited by Zoon on Monday 13th August 17:00

I guess there is only so much you can do to stop people sharing the tips. His ‘loss’ from people doing that though must be pretty small.

I’ve thought of setting something similar up with tips on shares, but I doubt it’d have the same uptake.

[angelboy]

Poseidon said:

Over the past couple years of it running the highest I've seen his follower count is 1,400, its current just under 1,100.

A friend of mine did something similar but in a different industry. Built up a subscriber list of 120,000 members and managed to convert 10% who paid him £100 for annual membership to an additional part of his site.

Not a bad annual salary at all!

[crosseyedlion]

I thought you where all worthy of an update.

So 'ALW Automotive Services' is now a thing, offering a mobile mechanic and carbon cleaning service. Total start up cost £2.5k - that covers marketing, t-shirts, website, van, painting the van, carbon cleaning machine, random tools I didn't already have.

Got myself a Transit connect for 1k, looked a bit tatty so I plastidipped it on the driveway - much smarter now and ready for sign writing.




I've been advertising through Facebook and hitting Sheffields business networking groups hard in the past week. To quite a bit of success! Everyone seems to want to know a good mechanic. I set myself a low target of £1k in labour/carbon cleans for September, with the bookings I have I'm 90% of the way there already!

The hard work has just begun really, but its been great fun setting it up. And nice to have some happy customers already...

[FredClogs]

Good luck! A reliable and skilled mobile mechanic will always be in demand. Once word gets around you'll probably be cursing the amount of work you've got coming in.

[Frimley111R]

Great stuff, well done!!

[Shuvi McTupya]

Frimley111R said:

Great stuff, well done!!

Seconded. I really hope it works out for you.

[InitialDave]

Top man, hope it works out well for you.

[48k]

Got any "before" pics of the van? It looks very smart.
Best of luck with the business, please keep this thread updated with your ups and downs I'm sure it will be an interesting read.

[Hoofy]

Congrats and good luck!

[anonymous-user]

crosseyedlion said:

I thought you where all worthy of an update.

So 'ALW Automotive Services' is now a thing, offering a mobile mechanic and carbon cleaning service. Total start up cost £2.5k - that covers marketing, t-shirts, website, van, painting the van, carbon cleaning machine, random tools I didn't already have.

Got myself a Transit connect for 1k, looked a bit tatty so I plastidipped it on the driveway - much smarter now and ready for sign writing.




I've been advertising through Facebook and hitting Sheffields business networking groups hard in the past week. To quite a bit of success! Everyone seems to want to know a good mechanic. I set myself a low target of £1k in labour/carbon cleans for September, with the bookings I have I'm 90% of the way there already!

The hard work has just begun really, but its been great fun setting it up. And nice to have some happy customers already...

It's great to see someone just taking the bull by the horns.

That can be the hardest part.

Well done. You will do well.

[ST565NP]

Carbon cleaning ? Does it really work ?

[InitialDave]

Not sure exactly how the machine the OP has functions, but on modern cars with things like direct injection and EGRs, if it does what it says on the tin I bet it'll make a noticeable difference.

[CoolHands]

Well done to OP - must be about the only PHer to not be all mouth and no trousers!

IMO key to profit is specialism. So carbon cleaning / dealing with diesel regen problems etc could be good. Altough personally I hate diesels so wouldn’t want to specialise in that!

[crosseyedlion]

48k said:

Got any "before" pics of the van? It looks very smart.
Best of luck with the business, please keep this thread updated with your ups and downs I'm sure it will be an interesting read.

Thanks all for your support and kind words!

This is the van before:




I'd love to keep you all updated on here, but I'm wary of being perceived to be advertising, so really walking a fine line now. I may have to have a chat with the admins as I'd love to keep you in the loop but need some do's & don'ts. It'd be nice to have some other small business threads on PH too.

This week (week 3) is shaping up to be excellent, I fixed someones broken spring today so they could get to work tomorrow and have quite a few bookings now! I'll hit my £100 per day (labour hours sold, average) target this week - which is a brilliant feeling. And I've got plenty of room for more.

About the carbon cleaning. Even though I had good results on my car, and anecdotally there's leagues of people who swear by it - the engineer in me was always a little skeptical/confused. And thinking that is fine.
What I will say is- the van had a cold start misfire until you gave it a blip of revs, with noticeable blue smoke wafting around until then. The carbon cleaner has fixed it! Its smoother, perfect cold start, feels peppier etc... (all the cliches...although its true in this case!).

In essence its an extremely simple machine, just a beefy hydrogen generator. To the point where I've decided not to market it yet and improve the machine instead. I may end up manufacturing them eventually (so you're allowed to take anything I say about it with a massive pinch of salt). It must burn off just enough carbon from multiple areas of the engine to allow the ECU to properly compensate for any deviations from original designs & tolerances. But it absolutely does something.

I'm hoping to rent somewhere like Blyton park for a day and do some before/after testing with data logging to prove/disprove the skeptics in 2019. If I can gather some figures myself in a controlled fashion, that'll be the ultimate marketing tool! But the bread and butter for now is the Mobile Mechanic'ing. None of the fun stuff would really be viable to do in my old job (I didn't have the time or energy)

Mostly though, I feel full of energy, the bags under my eyes have gone and my health is improving. This was a brilliant decision.

[crosseyedlion]

Also, forgot to mention.

The stunning thing so far is...customers seem to think I'm some sort of wizard. I'm doing nothing extraordinary, I'm just doing the job and paying attention to the process from initial contact through to completion with professionalism. Literally just doing the job. And it makes me stand out apparently.

This industry is in a terrible state.