The Runners Up

I once worked with someone who had done some consulting for Richard Branson directly, as opposed to working for one of his companies. He told me of his excitement on the first day of the contract, to be going in to meet the man himself.

Being a creative, he was expected to go into his presentation straight after the introductions. His presentation - effectively a pitch - was about a new venture for the company.

He began his presentation. Within a minute or two, Richard spoke with an idea - "what if we create a...", that being briefly debated and parked, the presentation continued for 30 seconds. Again, a voice interrupted, "why don't we market a...". And so it went on. Fizzing with ideas, Richard interrupted time and time again. The presentation's impact was lost and the whole experience was a dreadful chore.

A while later, the company got back in contact to offer another similarly lucrative contract, complete with a presentation. My acquaintance found that, on that week, he was busy doing something else.

There will always be opportunities to pass up, though they might appear lucrative. Sustainable business - and therefore scaleable business can't be something you hate.

Some of the runners-up in the Three Fivers project.

Dog walking

The UK minimum wage is, at present £8.72. A quick Google tells me that having my hypothetical small dog walked where I live would cost me £7.50 an hour. Amazingly, despite lockdown and people being at home all the time, the dog walkers are still earning money round here. Although this would not even see me taking home minimum wage, the hours could be flexible - allowing me to use my hypothetical lunch hour to walk someone's hypothetical dog. Better still, I could walk two at once - perfectly feasible - and earn substantially more than minimum wage. If I could get three dogs to be walked at once, one hour's work would enable me to cover the daily rate of the mortgage I wrote about in the second blog. However, I don't like dogs nearly enough to do this. Binned.

DJing

While at university, one of my friends had a mate that set himself up as a DJ. It occurred to me that this was an amazing business; once you'd bought the disc (that's how long ago it was, none of this digital malarky) you could re-use it near endlessly. A few pounds investment in a disc, and you would never hand over goods, it would always be yours and you could effectively re-sell it time and again. Your Return On Investment would be many multiples of the original cost. However, there's all sorts of machinery required to start as a DJ, the market is saturated and I'm not musical at all. Binned.

Commodities

I'm quite a fan of Diet Coke. This stems from my first six weeks at Sandhurst; they run you ragged for at least 18 hours a day and all you are allowed to drink is water, and tea. Army tea is unspeakably bad. During this six weeks, I was able to smuggle two cans of Diet Coke back to my room and savour them. Nothing before, nor since, has ever tasted as good.

A can of Diet Coke is aluminium, and aluminium is a recyclable commodity. A kilo of aluminium as scrap will get you between £1.50 and £2.50. A can is 15 grammes, so 67 cans recycled would get you at least £1.50. Therefore 14 kilos of scrap aluminium would pay the imaginary mortgage daily rate. I like Diet Coke, but not that much. As a side-hustle to the side-hustle, it might be worth considering as it is entirely passive. It could be useful to add to the initial £5 funding for additional investment, but as a business in itself, it's a non-starter. (Recycling) Binned.