Economics - the why of a micro business

The Dresden firestorm bombing burning the Second World War is, admittedly, an unusual place to begin a blog about micro business, but bear with me.

When planning the bombing of Dresden, to shorten the war, planners were informed of Threshold Effects. In this context, that translated to: if the proportion of incendiary bombs being dropped breached a critical point - the Threshold, the uncontrolled burning would create a low pressure of air, like stormy weather, and stuck oxygen in from surrounding areas to create super combustion. This threshold effect razed the city to the ground.

Difficult to bridge this to creating businesses from £5 each, but not impossible.

Back in the day - in 2005 - I got my first mortgage. I loved the idea of living in a house older than America, so bought a cottage from the 1750s. For this tiny slice of history, the mortgage was the princely sum of £661 per month.

Inevitably, as anyone moving in to a new house, there was a load of things we wanted to change, improve and make our own. Everything costs an astonishing amount when you come from renting and just calling up the landlord and asking for stuff to be done. Money was fine, but not abundant.

There was no off street parking, and the nearest place to park was a council car park. Arriving home from work before the free hours and leaving after charges became payable each day, I would have to pay for two hours each side of the free overnight stay - £1.20 daily just to park. In 2005, a bottle of wine was probably about £4-£5 and a ready meal would have been around £2-£2.50. All these stack up.

I worked out that, in a 31 day month, if I could make just £21.50 somehow on top of my salary, I could pay my mortgage. Having that breathing space would make an enormous difference.

Most people can make a one-off £21.50 profit doing something - I've got a book that I've never really read that has been recently valued at £200+. Sell that, and that's a third of a month of mortgage contributions,

Doing that day-in, day-out is considerably more difficult. Turning something with an equity of £5 into something generating four times that daily might be an impossible task.

But there is a threshold somewhere for anyone creating such a business where doing just enough business takes the stress off to point that it transforms something. And that's what I'm going to try to find and pass on.