Free is the magic number

There’s little doubt that late 2020/early 2021 will be calamitous for business. The combination of Covid-19 lockdown economic inactivity and Brexit will destroy vast amounts of businesses, large and small.

And yet, from some perspectives, there’s never been a better time to go into business. The arguments in favour off this are as simple as they are brutal; people going bust sell their goods off at knockdown prices, businesses that begin and make it through what will almost certainly be the worst economic events since 1929 are fundamentally sound business models, and information technology has democratised business tools to an unprecedented level.

Consider the children’s story, ‘The Indian in the Cupboard’. In the story, a boy receives a cupboard for his ninth birthday. Putting things in this cupboard changes them and brings them to life. By putting the right things in, complicated new things can be made, explored or brought to life.

3D printing is rather the same; things that you could not otherwise have created - or possibly even imagined - can be brought to life at home in a way never before possible. Although the cost of the equipment put this outside the Three Fivers’ scope, the democratisation of IT has made this possible in the very recent past.

If your £5 business was consultancy, you could - via Zoom, Skype, FaceTime etc, reasonably have clients in Surrey, Singapore and Sydney. Even more so since lockdown, location matters not at all.

For free you can write word documents, create spreadsheets, design 3D structures, trade shares or, if you’re desperate enough - start a blog like this.

For the knowledge economy, free things are plentiful, manufacturing and physical things are less well served, though they can be supported.

If your £5 business is making pork scratchings, that’s not much help, but of course you’ll still have to market, sell, account for, re-order etc and for these, free is definitely the magic number.

What free stuff the three £5 businesses use, I’ll document and review. Comments and suggestions are always welcome.

Comments

Beginner’s luck

Three Fivers is predicated upon being able to start a ‘business’ that makes money from just five pounds of investment. Today I could close it down as successful. In my first ever venture into share dealing, I bought £5 worth of Harland and Wolff shares at 4:05pm. At 4:38pm, I offloaded them for a 13p (2.6%) profit. Not enough to pay the mortgage, nor even to qualify as a side hustle, but profit nonetheless. 13p doesn’t buy much these days - not even a Freddo - but, 2.6% profit compounded does add up; my love of a spreadsheet shows how profit becomes more interesting over five days below. Over 12 months (365 days, although you cannot trade for at least 104 of these days) that would turn my humble £5 into around £5300. Not bad. I’m not especially enamoured of share trading, but it can be quite interesting I think if I add in additional rules; devote a maximum of 5 minutes a day to it and invest the whole of the capital at once - no portfolio. Whether this will survive even the next ...

Failure is not the same as a business failing

Already, I have failed. It's not terminal to the project, maybe not even to the strand of the project, but it's failure nonetheless. Despite literally *minutes* of trying, I've been unable to link Google's AdSense to this blog to (hopefully) monetise the blog. (If anyone can explain to me how I get round a circular set of "Press this to verify > You need to do this in blogger.com > Go to Google AdSense > Press this to verify", I'm all ears.) Now, I'm pretty unmoved by this - I've lost nothing and I'd be writing these anyway. Everyday I hear of more and more businesses that are laying people off, closing UK operations or just plain going under. That's heartbreaking, because they're not just venturing a fiver and writing stuff in lunchbreaks. Fortunately, I still have a nominal five quid left - having used no resource other than my time - to invest into another venture. Comments are open and I'm open to ideas, before I start ...

Why the delay?

It's not going well. My vow to blog weekly has fallen by the wayside, and a blog a month must have tripped over it. However, to try to take any positives from it, I'm learning. Content planning is key. Plan it and you'll have it, or at least have the time allocated to make it. But, the whole blogging situation has made me realise one thing; I am the inverse of someone on the breadline/on Universal Credit. So ungenerous is our Social Security - it's not 'benefits', they are a right, not a gift - that people in receipt of it spend much of their lives, and probably all of their energy surviving. They've no time to enrich themselves, to 'invest in themselves'. I am the complete opposite - in trying to see whether it is possible to take virtually nothing - £5 these days barely covering a loaf of bread and some spreadable butter - and spin it into a business, I'm consumed by well-paid work which keeps me from experiencing the desperation to make mone...

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