Political Crossfire Forums

What are some of the business ideas that you've had?

Non has some....Non's not telling you what they are.

Non ya business

I've had some decent arbitrage-ish ideas. One, which I quite liked, I went relatively far into the business plan stage (hired a few freelance IT consultants to put together a framework online portal and a finance guy to model out projected revenues and costs). The latter informed me of a company already doing it and making bank.

Well I have 4 categories of business ideas.

The first are the ideas that would certainly work but that I simply don't have enough capital for at the moment. Think franchising a mcdonalds or something similar. This is much much easier than most people think if you have the money and someone with experience who you can trust to run it.

Second category is business that I consider legitimate but which would probably necessitate some form of FCPA violation to make profitable. Mostly import export stuff. I looked into this for a while as well and started to put the process in motion but the markets I feel most comfortable with pretty much necessitate you paying a bribe to get anything moving.

Third category is tech. You don't have to know shit about programming or computers if you have a good idea, you can contract out most of that stuff for surprisingly little. Probably the easiest way to make good money quickly, but obviously a lot of competition in that sector so you kinda have to move fast and be ready to deal with a few failures. I don't have any ideas good enough to make it worth the effort yet.

Fourth category I won't say because I actually think it's viable in the near term. If plan A doesn't work out then this is my solid plan B.

McDonald's typically requires $750k in non-borrowed resources before they'll consider you for a franchise.

A few years ago, I had an idea that ran similar to what Menson did. I realized that companies, like ours was paying people to take away our outdated or non-working computer equipment. Most of this stuff still worked and had a lot of life left in it, but we'd replaced it with a newer system. Since, I had a box truck, I decided to start a computer reclamation company. I had some flyers printed and used a mailing list to send them to the business addresses in Alpharetta, Georgia. The difference between my service and the company that they were currently using? I hauled away old computer equipment for free.

Was it successful? After the initial stumbling, finding out that I needed to be bonded and insured, not really a big deal, it was too successful. My problem became that I quickly ran out of room to store the equipment, while I determined if it was good or not. My dream was that I'd fill up the lower floor of this barn, and use the upper part as a shop where I went through removing the memory, cards, and other usable parts from non-working systems then set up the working ones as new computers.

The plan was then to set up a shop in a flea market like J & J or Pendergrass. The problem? Within the first month the downstairs of the barn was full, the upstairs of the barn was full. My spare bedroom was full. I bought another 10 X 20 storage building, and it was full. One time, I had to offload my box truck outside my barn because I had another pickup that had to be done that day.

Did I sell some? Yes. I sold a bunch. That was in 2008. I gave away a lot of the computers to a friend, who bought the truck from me. His intention was to go into that type of business. He did it for a while before his main job moved him to California. I still have computers and parts from those days, around the house. I also bought some government auctions of computers to resell. Again, made money but it just took me too long to get them ready for sale.