Subscribe to our newsletter above we will be delving deeper into starting a business with little to no money

In this series:
Start a Broker / Agent Business
Start a Newsletter Business
Start a Lead Generation Business
Become a Temu Affiliate
Start an Affiliate Marketing Business
Best Affiliate Marketing Programs for South Africans

If you reading this in 2004 its likely that most small business ideas covered here are redundant. When we started we could say, this idea will work here and there but the base cost of living (electricity, rent, water, food) has increased to the point of unless you living rent free in an “informal settlement” you are unlikely do grow it to the point of success as most money will be going “to the pot” (cost of living) leaving nothing left to grow a sustainable business. There are also virtually zero places that fund startup small businesses, the taxpayer funded government funds spend most of their budgets on office space and salaries for people who are not writing any cheques.

How can you determine this? Simple: how much do you need to make a day to survive and thrive? Then take the working hours in a day: let’s say 10 for entrepreneurs and divide the amount by the hours. If you said R1000 a day, can you realistically make R100 an hour every hour? For some (the small well-off part of SA) its a laughable amount for most it is a lot of money as we see from those clamouring for R350 a month grants (a smidge over R10 a day). In theory many small businesses can reach R100 an hour including something as simple as a car wash. But how you going to get 10 people a day to your car wash? Washing one or two cars a day? That’s not even minimum wage and you better off working minimum wage at least that is stable income.

If you starting from scratch  or nothing to little or want to earn extra with little to no capital to deploy pay attention.

So if you are starting with nothing or little there is a small chance you will be successful. Even learning a new skill and then still having to market that skill in a competitive market is very difficult and even if you have the money to build infrastructure unless you know what you doing you are unlikely to be successful.

So what is the solution?

Focus on sourcing and selling and developing a system to replicate success.

Focus only on the most important things: sourcing and more importantly selling (and by extension marketing). You don’t need to look at anything in particular I don’t care what it is, its not important. Even just focus on the selling part. Just learn to sell.

How to tell people about product, where to sell it from, where to reach people interested. Sell physical products, sell virtual products, sell products on behalf of others, sell services, sell information. Just focus on sourcing and selling for now.

Then you try to find a formula that works. Where to buy where to sell. Then how to make more money: either get it cheaper, increase price or sell more units.  Are you going to sell a few high value items, or many low value items. These are all part of the formula you need to formulate.

And how do you do that?
You need to develop a structure or a framework that works, then you work on scaling that up. Develop a framework for everything so it can be easily replicated to sell more and more. But in order to do that you need to know more or less either what you want to sell or where you want to sell it. Or more broadly sourcing and selling. And then you see if and how you can pull it off.

Sourcing

When think of sourcing don’t simply think “where can I buy something” unless your business model is buying and selling. If you look at the business models below you will be asking many questions:

* Where can I source this at a good price
* Are there people who will let me sell their products/services/information on their behalf.
Where can I source offcuts, waste products that I can repurpose or resell down the supply chain.

Can you source it locally in your city, provincially in your province, nationally countrywide in other province, continentally in Africa or internationally in other countries.

Selling
Like I said previously just focus on selling. There are a few angles you can take: cheaper than existing, hard to get items (in your area), new markets.

Business Models
Sell physical
Buying & Selling physical goods (taking possession and reselling)
Agent / Brokering (connect buyer and seller)

Sell virtually, sell virtual goods, connect buyers and sellers virtually

Online business models:
Advertising products and services
Affiliate marketing
Lead generation
drop shipping
E-commerce

Sales Channels
Social media
Newsletter
Marketplaces
Own Website

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