Where Business Ideas Come From

I was reading the local paper and came across a picture of the cleanest garage I ever saw. In addition to a picture of the garage there was a picture of a gentlemen, in his late 60’s cleaning the cobwebs with an extension pole. I thought to myself I have never seen a garage so clean in my life. The accompanying article was discussing how this individual and another had painted and put cabinets in their garages, and how you could eat off this garage floor. Now we have all seen those storage cabinets for garages, but how many of us ever get them and if we do, don’t we fill them up and then the garage goes back to looking like it did before we got them. Imagine if someone would come to your home, condo or townhouse and clean out, paint and organize that garage for you; and you would tell them how you want it done. I am not talking about those expensive ads we’ve all seen where they can come in and re-do your garage. Not many of us have thousands of dollars to spend on our garages. It got me to thinking that this could be the perfect business for someone who loves to clean and organize. You could network with one of the local home depot places to provide you cabinets, or you could take your re-sale number and purchase them directly from the manufacturer, rather than dealing with a local company. The only negative sometimes with dealing directly with the manufacturer, you might have to purchase larger quantities or they might have minimum order requirements. You could run small classified ads in your local paper, in specialty papers in your area or make up flyers with a before and after picture of what you could do with someone’s garage. You’d meet with the homeowner and discuss where certain items would be placed, inform them of your services: painting and providing cabinets and then re-organizing the garage for them. If it were me I would certainly get half of my fee up front (which would also include the cost of the cabinets). Like the article I read, get your local paper to feature your business. Show them a before and after picture. It would certainly be a great way to get you more business. Remember a picture is worth a thousand words. What should you charge. I really don’t know. However, if I were thinking about starting this business I’d call homeowners and ask them what they would pay. Tell homeowners you are doing a survey and just want to know if they would be interested if someone would paint, and re-organize their garage, and if so, what would it be worth to them. You would also have to find out the cost of the cabinets beforehand so that you could factor this into your cost; in addition to how much paint you would need for the average garage. You would obviously want a paint that is easy to clean. The biggest thing is to decide how much time it would take and what you want to make per hour. If it were me, I would do it on a sliding scale. By this, I mean it would depend on how much work the garage needed. You could also do quarterly, or semi-annual follow-up for webs and washing of the walls and floors and do any re-organizing. I might be way out of line, maybe somebody is already doing it. Again, I don’t mean the redesigning and remodeling companies we’ve all seen, I mean a small or homebased business owner. Anyway, it was just a thought! It gives those of you that think there is no type of business you can run an idea of how some business ideas come about. Think about what you like to do, what your passionate about, and see if you can develop a business around your interests. Copyright 2002 DeFiore Enterprises