What is your business idea?
- Thread starter cyclone4L
- Start date
This guy makes me wonder if CNBC is no longer showing back episodes of Shark Tank, so he started a thread to keep himself amused with business ideas.
If you are looking at warehousing, you can start by being the middle man. Been a few years since I dealt with them but they would charge me something like four bucks to put it on the rack, 2 bucks to take it off the rack and around 3 bucks a month for storage. Get some pallets and like yourself up with a warehouse. In that sense, charge them 20 bucks to hold it and maybe a five dollar pick/delivery fee (total not each way) and then build up some cash to start running your own. The beauty of the using the warehouse is that they would be carrying insurance and such incase something happened and you would be needing to just worry about while you transported it.
Propane delivery, ouch, don't mess with that on that size of scale. To tell you the thin margins, I get a penny discount for locking down 5000 gallons at a time. The insurance and the upkeep would eat you alive, have one leak and you have a mess on your hands. Reason you have upkeep? Who do you think DOT pulls over more than anybody, haz mat, and they will pull that creeper out and start stacking those tickets if you don't have the right license or insurance.
Propane delivery, ouch, don't mess with that on that size of scale. To tell you the thin margins, I get a penny discount for locking down 5000 gallons at a time. The insurance and the upkeep would eat you alive, have one leak and you have a mess on your hands. Reason you have upkeep? Who do you think DOT pulls over more than anybody, haz mat, and they will pull that creeper out and start stacking those tickets if you don't have the right license or insurance.
I know you said in an earlier post you could not work with your wife, however for those who do/could, may want to make their wife a 51% owner. Depending on the industry or target customer, being a woman owned business may give added perks or opportunities.
The same goes for anyone that falls under a minority status. Making them the 51% owner could be beneficial.
In the business world, women are considered minorities. When I was a loan officer, there were several couples who came in and when learning that the current interest rate would be 8% for the husband or we could get them a 0-2% rate along with getting start up grants if the business was in the wife's name, they would switch it over quickly.
As BC said, there are absolutely benefits to having a woman being the majority owner of the company. It is definitely something you can market and will get your company into a lot of rooms and conferences that you wouldn't have been able to get in as a man.
If you are going in business with your wife, I would definitely do that; however, I would recommend against dragging your wife into a business she's not passionate about for the sake of calling your business "Women-led". The founders should have an unyielding passion for what they are doing. If your wife/partner is gung ho about the mission, definitely go with that equity split for the perks.
Doesn't really matter if your wife is gung ho or not, she just needs to be the owner. I've seen several of these where the wife owns but the husband is the manager. Shoot, when my dad passed away, my mom owned the farm, but I took care of all the decisions. She had trust in me and didn't want to make those decisions. If the wife is not interested, just have her be a silent owner.
In the construction/engineering world, there are tons of incentives (and requirements) to have minority-owned businesses take part in projects. I've seen very good and very bad sides of this. Most recently, we worked with a woman-owned business that was in name only. The wife and husband came to all meetings, the husband did all the talking and the wife completely checked out once she arrived. However, they got to bill for both their time and we needed credit toward our minority goal for the project.
This type of arrangement is not all that uncommon in my industry. It usually goes: husband works as a project manager in construction for 25-30 years, gains all the knowledge/relationships needed to run a business. He then retires from his employer and starts his own business with his wife as the 51% owner. He can now do the same job as before, but as a minority owned business.
Yeah, I saw that with plumbing businesses, a junk yard and a few others. I know one business that has used it to make a killing and actually ran an older gentleman out of business because she was getting so much government money and lower interest rates that she could lowball the projects until he quit and then jacked things up to where he was before she started.
