Businesses are scared to start, especially when you’re a little guy from a bit of town. But when you’re out of jobs to pursue and have little to lose, you can always try your hand at some of these businesses. They’re all safe and reasonably profitable.
Ice cream parlors
There is not a demand for ice cream. Opening an ice cream parlor near a public institution or in a residential neighborhood is a fool-proof idea. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a prominent place. You can even use a van.
Just make sure to keep the space well decorated and clean. It’s going to put your customers off to have to buy ice creams and other fun treats from dirty, dead-looking places. Try to pull off a specific look for your shop – cutesy, sophisticated, fancy, etc. It’ll help your chances of survival by kilometers.
Food truck
Food businesses are unlikely to fail, especially when they’re small. The profit might not be ginormous, and the effort may be high, but at least you’re always bound to have a market.
Locate a famous school or office building in your area and take your food truck there. You can set up a small dining area around your vehicle. You won’t have to serve elaborate dinners and creative dishes; simple, delicious food will do. You can prepare fast food, as per the custom of food trucks. Recipes like that are easy to learn and practice, so you don’t have to worry about not being a five-star Michelin chef.
Laundry Services
Opening a Laundromat takes a high initial investment, but the money is recovered back soon enough. Laundry’s an essential part of life, and people won’t just choose not to use the service. Everyone’s got laundry, and so you’ll always have a market.
Locate your Laundromat somewhere close to a residential area or any place that hosts a lot of people. Laundromats require very minimal upkeep compared to other businesses. You’ll have to clean the site once every few days and do a check-up on the equipment, but other than you won’t have to pay for employees. People handle the laundry themselves at these places.
A pick and drop service
How many times have you wished someone could take the parcel from your house and drop it a few blocks away? It takes a lot of energy to dress, go out and deliver things yourself, even when the delivery spot is nearby. Time and energy are luxuries, and they’re hard to give up.
While courier services will happily ship things from city to city or even across countries, they won’t exactly help you deliver those last few slices of pudding over to your aunt’s place a few blocks down. Sometimes, we need some errand kid to come to pick things up for us.
This is where a small town pick and drop service could come in real handy. You’d need a few delivery people stationed in spots over the town ready to run out and collect parcels from nearby customers when asked. The logistics of this could get a little tricky, but the idea is valuable to the town residents and can save them a lot of time. And people will always pay for good value.