As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, I challenged myself to come up with as many business ideas as I could in 10 minutes that met the criteria I laid out. Here’s what I came up with. Feel free to steal any of them and start your own business.
- Offer training content creation services to businesses with a small (or non-existent) L&D department.
- Become a health coach and offer sessions in-person or online.
- Lead in-home personal training sessions for clients (a concierge training offering). As a bonus, help them set up a minimum viable home gym to meet their health goals.
- If you’re a clear and persuasive writer, offer your writing services to small businesses or the marketing departments of larger organizations.
- Help other people land new jobs, negotiate raises, or change careers by offering your services as a career coach. This one, you could offer as a no-fee upfront service and take a small percentage of their new salary as payment (like a talent agent).
- Become a health and wellness consultant for large companies and design wellness coaching packages for their employees as part of their HR offerings.
- Start a green lawn care service, using only electric tools to keep people’s yards looking nice while lowering the carbon footprint of that work (I’m sure you’ve seen all the e-lawn tools if you have a Costco membership).
- BTW, did you know that gas-powered leaf blowers are almost as loud as jet skis and pollute as much as driving halfway across the country?
- Become a piano tuner. You can learn how for less than $1,500 bucks, and you’ll have almost no competition as it’s a dying trade.
- Become a drum tech for churches. Have you ever seen how beat up and terrible-sounding those drum sets are?
- Here’s an easy one: teach music lessons. Specialize in helping students prepare for, and win, auditions. There’s a lot of scholarship money to be had for musicians in college (and the military).
- Become a tutor in whatever field you know best. Take the summers off or offer “preparatory” tutoring when school is out.
- Become a writing coach for K-12 students. This may be the most important skill students will learn today as AI proliferates and the skill that makes us human is supplanted by garbage.
- Create and sell a really helpful e-book that teaches someone how to do a very specific task or skill.
- Create an online course on a topic or skill you know well. You can put it up on an e-learning site like Teachable, or you can offer it as an “email correspondence” course like Ryan Holiday does with his excellent Stoic challenges.
- Shuttle seniors to doctor’s appointments. You could charge them a low price by the mile or see if senior care homes might pay you for the service.
- Start a “walking school bus” for the children in your neighborhood. Children need more movement in their days, and parents might be willing to have a responsible adult or two get their kids to school in the morning while also working off some of that kiddo energy.
- Here’s one I’ve been thinking about: create a membership group to organize people around citizenship and political activism.
- Offer pet grooming services in your town.
- Along the same lines, wash and detail cars.
- Here’s another: buy a sponge, bucket, squeegee, and cleaning solution, then sell your services as a window washer to businesses and restaurants in your city.
- This one is big where I live: powerwash houses and driveways.
- One more handyman idea: paint houses.
- Know how to promote the work of others? Become a marketing consultant for small businesses. Trust me, they all need help getting the word out.
- Are you a decent cook? Deliver home-cooked meals to customers who don’t have time to cook for themselves every night.
- Speaking of cooking, why not offer healthy cooking classes to small groups looking to improve their health and that of their families?
10 minutes, 25 business ideas. I don’t know that I could pull all of them off, but some of them seem promising.
The hard part is picking one and being brave enough to face rejection. Regardless of what you choose, you’ll get a lot of no’s.
But if you’re starting your own thing, that comes with the territory. Don’t let it deter you!
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