I have spoken about single product businesses in the past in the context of a high-volume low-margin wholesale business. Today we look at a single-product high-margin retail business: buying and selling fire blankets with potential profits of R50 per unit.

A fire blanket is a is a safety device designed to extinguish small fires by smothering them. It is typically made of fire-resistant materials such as fiberglass or wool treated with fire-retardant chemicals. While a fire extinguisher is an essential part of any safety strategy it can create a mess that can take hours to clean up (if used for small fire). A fire blanket can extinguish and prevent fires from spreading without much cleanup and should be used as a first line of defence instead of a costly and messy fire extinguisher. A fire blanket is also a fast and easy to smother a small fire that some people might not want to “waste” a fire extinguish on.

99% of people I meet don’t understand “business plans”, they think its going to help them start a business or get finance, they have some romantic idea of it they say in a movie, where the guy had a dog eared business plan under his arms going from bank to bank begging for finance.  This is not true. That is not how things work in real life.  Unlike the old days where bank managers could give you finance on a gut feel today they can only issue finance under the banks criteria which means two circumstances: if you have assets to put up as collateral (secured lending) or lending against existing income (unsecured) in SA this will usually take the form of “retail capital”  or “working capital” which is basically payday lending for businesses or a personal loan for a permanently employed individual. All the other forms of finance (cars, homes), plant and machinery, notarial bonds they all secured. And this applies to everyone no matter how big you are. If you don’t have shit you ain’t getting shit. So stop dreaming and start something simple and realistic.

The best way is to start a simple business on your own, a business that is easy to understand. Like a single product business: Fire Blankets Business