Money Making Ideas

For the next of many money making ideas, we are going to make smoothies.

Gather together about $2,000. If you don’t have that kind of money,
get a job (or a second job), and save it. Then, once you have the
money, buy yourself a stand, a few blenders, five hundred paper cups, a
couple chairs, and a giant stack of paper. Now, if it’s not spring yet,
wait for it. Until then, keep saving money.

Buy Microsoft Word if you don’t have it already, and make a flyer. Be
sure to make big bold letters for the name of your store, and include
your phone number. Pick any name you’d like, but use your common sense.
After you’ve designed it, print off fifty copies.

Now comes the fun part. Go to every restaurant and strip-mall in your
town and ask if they would like a smoothie stand out front. This is
where your salesmanship comes in. Tell them about the benefits of
having smoothies outside to attract traffic passing by, and explain to
them that smoothies will be especially desired during these hot summer
months. Remind them of the fact that a large amount of traffic in your
smoothie stand will increase the amount of customers for that store or
restaurant. Now, this will be a difficult sell, so you may have to go
to a whole lot of restaurants. If you run out of your fifty copies,
print more and keep searching.

When you’ve found a place, decide with them on a date for your grand
opening. Go back to Word and make a new flyer. Make it similar to the
one you had last time, but put the address of your location above the
phone number; also, be sure to include the words “GRAND OPENING” with
the correct date underneath. Print off five hundred copies.

Take these flyers and go post them all over the town, put them
everywhere. It may help to get some of your friends or family to do
this with you; if you have a lot of money, hire some help. Put them
everywhere until you run out. Go home and rest. Don’t be frustrated
over the number of flyers that gets torn down. Most of them will be.
It’s the ones that stay up that make it worth it.

The next day, decide on a menu. You’ll want to keep it simple at first;
have maybe two or three items. Make sure they have common ingredients;
don’t have three items with all different ingredients. Print up a menu,
and glue it to cardboard. You’ll need some tacks, too, to post the menu
up on your stand.

A couple days before opening day, you’ll want to go buy fruit and
whatever other ingredients you might need, such as soymilk, orange
juice, or ice cream. Don’t wait until the day before, because you might
not be able to find the ingredients in time. You want an extra day for
safety. Don’t worry; fruit doesn’t rot in two days.

Finally, have your grand opening. It may help to have some music you
could play, but make sure no-one could be offended by it. Try to find
circus music or upbeat melodies without words. If you can’t get music,
don’t sweat it.

Congratulations! You should make more money than you probably
anticipated, unless luck isn’t on your side and rain comes. Oh well if
it does. Try again the next day. You’ll want to keep your smoothie
stand up as long as you decide, but be sure that you are saving at
least ten percent of that forever!

Many people have excellent recipes that they make for themselves or their loved ones. Most of this food, if loved by all those who eat it, will be loved by the mass population. So, start a restaurant!  It’s a great one of several money making ideas.

If you want to start a restaurant with no money, you are in for a disappointment.  You either need a loan, or need to save up some money.  If it takes you a few years, so be it.  You simply need money.

But….most restaurants fail

Yes, that’s true. It’s true because the restaurants are started by excellent chefs. And that, usually, is a problem. Why? It is because they are not started by excellent businessmen. Many restaurants with outstanding food go under, but sometimes restaurants with only mediocre food grow into colossal-sized companies. Clearly, then, the quality of the food has little to do with the success of the restaurant.

So, when you start your restaurant, don’t make the same mistake most owners make; don’t focus on making your food better. If you think your food is good enough to start a restaurant, then your food is good enough. So, stop worrying about your food. Move on to the next thing.

There are many different aspects to a restaurant. First, you must get a good grasp on basic accounting. You could hire a bookkeeper, but remember, you only have limited funds. In the beginning stages of a restaurant’s life, you, the entrepreneur, should try to do as many of the jobs as possible, so more money can be saved and reinvested back into the company.

Next, you need to work out an inventory system. How are you going to keep track of what you have? Don’t just look at it and work through it like you do in your kitchen at home; you need to write down a system. Perhaps your company will work if you ran it like the kitchen at home, but it won’t grow very big. When you hire this job out to somebody else, and you will, you need a system in place for them to follow. If you just let them run loose, then your restaurant will have no structure. A restaurant with no structure cannot support any weight, so to speak, so it will collapse.

Next, you need to figure out what you’re going to do about your suppliers. You need to search and negotiate with them to find the cheapest supplier. While this may seem obvious, very few restaurant owners put in enough effort in this field. Most restaurant owners could find cheaper suppliers if they were more aggressive in their search.

Now you’re going to have to find a way to advertise. Advertising is critical; it is absolutely necessary. You need to put ads in the local newspapers. Stay away from television until you have a much larger restaurant. If you can afford it, put ads on the local radio, but your money may more effective elsewhere.  This is especially true if you start a restaurant with no money of your own; borrowed money must be spent wisely.

The bottom line is: you need to put systems in place. Every topic above needs its own system. You have to create systems in order for your restaurant to grow. Yes, restaurants can survive with no systems in place, but it cannot grow. You need to provide the right setup in order for it to grow. Without strong systems, your restaurant will be seem to grow well, but as the pressure from above grows, the cracks below get bigger. Eventually you will have a giant crack in your restaurant too large to fix, and your restaurant will collapse. If you have built strong systems, then your restaurant will continue to grow.  And, you cannot start a restaurant with no money.