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I’ve already talked here about creating a business that lets people get much better miles per gallon performance from their cars.  The potential problem with that particular approach was that it didn’t seem to have a lot of proof behind the methodology- at least not that was readily available beyond the claims on the website.

Now here is a story about another method for doing the same thing, getting better mpg performance, but using a different approach. This Connecticut inventor is also selling conversion kits for his system, and seems to have more proof that what he is doing actually works.

The limitations are greater however, and the cost and technical expertise required are more significant than with the other water for gas system.

There might be more of a market for already converted cars, though. Of course, this requires a more significant investment, but I am fairly certain that if you put a 100mpg car on the market, you would have no problem finding buyers, even if they were more of the wealthy save the earth variety than the can’t afford gas right now kind.

There may be some other opportunities for the true engineers, as well. If you read the website of the above inventor, he talks about several limitations in the current hybrid car design which may be problems looking for a solution that would be a perfect after market product.

It is not clear at this point who the winners will be, but it is clear that there is a huge and hungry market for anyone that can provide a solution to the current high cost of gas, and that market is worth billions to the right group or groups that can come up with answers. Now is the time, if you have any ambition along these lines at all.

First, here is the list from Entrepreneur Magazine of their Hot 100- the fastest growing 100 companies they’ve identified for their list.

Now, here are some things to note from this list that may help you better understand the reality of starting your own business or planning what to start:

1. There aren’t many very revolutionary businesses here. If you look at the company descriptions, they are mostly in boring, already established areas of business. Why is that? Because these are areas with proven demand and proven business models. All these people did to get on this list was execute a little better than their competition. The point is, trying to be a leading edge trailblazer is most likely not the way to the top. The way to the top for most businesses is a slight improvement over what everyone else is already doing in an already proven business.
2. Starting a business doesn’t require a ton of money, and that money is most likely going to come from you. If it doesn’t come from you, the next most likely sources are friends, family and various forms of credit. Big bank loans, private investors and venture capitalists are not a very likely source of funding for startups. So don’t plan on raising money and don’t try and start something you can’t mostly self fund.
3. Get profitable fast. If you can’t find the profits in your business, not only can you not grow, you can’t even continue in most cases unless you can keep finding more sources of money to keep investing in your staying afloat. Reaching profitability should be a top priority from day one for your business, or the days may quickly be numbered.
4. Start in something you already know. Trying to learn a new industry at the same time as you try to learn all the ins and outs of running a business is doubly tough. If you can start off in something you already know, you have a much better chance of making it because you are already established in the industry, the only part that is new is that you are running the show. Of course this isn’t true in every case, but you should at least seriously consider doing something you know well rather than trying to branch off into something completely new. Save doing what you love for the weekends like everyone else!

Now all you have to do is get your savings together and get started on your business, with just a slight improvement over what everyone else is doing.

Most of the ideas I come up with, and most of the ideas that most people come up with, are based on simply taking two or three ideas you’ve already been exposed to and fusing them or tweaking them in some slight way to create a new twist on something that already exists in some form.

I often meet people who search and search for a business idea, and they can’t come up with anything. When I look around, I see business ideas everywhere. The difference is not that I have any special powers, I just look for problems that need solving, and at solutions that already exist for one thing that may be adapted to fit something else. I think most people are trying to come up with something totally unique, which is much, much harder.

Today I have a perfect example of this combination of existing businesses that spawned the idea for a new business that anyone could start right now.

The first piece of the puzzle was a story I saw today here about a company in Canada that makes ID bracelets for kids, people with medical issues and for anyone in general I guess who might be worried about being identified.

Although this business was started only a few years ago, it is already grossing $130,000, which, while not a huge amount, is certainly respectable for a small business selling high margin products.

The second piece of the puzzle was when I recalled earlier seeing and writing about a business that creates on the fly translations for people with medical allergies to print out and take with them when they travel to places where English is not the primary language spoken. You might use this if you have a food allergy, for example, and want to make sure you are not getting peanuts in your Pad Thai in Bangkok and the waiter’s English isn’t too hot.

Alright, so have you already thought of the same thing I thought of when having these two pieces of information?

Exactly! A bracelet that lets you slide in a changeable piece of paper that has a translation of your ID and medical information for when you travel. Pretty simple, right?

You could just do something really basic that you use one time or you could make something a little fancier that lets you interchange the info within the bracelet itself so once you’ve bought the bracelet you can simply go to the website and print the appropriate translation.

All you need to start this dirt simple business is a bracelet you can buy at wholesale that will work for this purpose, and a website with the offer and a member’s area where a customer can log in to get their required printout. You can easily have both of these things put together for a few hundred bucks.

Advertising it may be a little trickier, but press releases along with hitting travel sites and medical information sites, and maybe specific allergy or medical condition sites might give you some better ideas on how to target the product. There are also travel specific stores, both online and off that offer a whole range of products for the regular traveler, who would be your likely market, so you might have some success getting them to resell the product for you.

There are also doctors who specialize in travel medicine, and they might also be a good source of sales and referrals.

I don’t expect this would be a huge business, but I do imagine for the time and startup costs involved someone could take it and run with it and build it into at least a six figure sales company with a nice net profit.

And if no one does jump on this, maybe one of the two companies above will branch out into doing it themselves. It makes sense to me, anyway!

Photo from Vital ID

There isn’t that much innovation in the food business, primarily because it has been around so long. All the good ideas have already been tried.

Frozen yogurt was big back in the eighties, but then it became pretty mainstream and only a fraction of the original wave of sellers survived.

The a few years ago a new kind of frozen yogurt came and it has been growing in popularity. It likely won’t get to be as big as it was the first time around, partly because it isn’t as new as it was the first time, and partly because it is the opposite of organic and natural, which is really bucking the trend these days.

But there is one small chain of shops that is doing the new yogurt in a new way- for yogurt, at least. They are letting the customers make their own creations, and then charging them by weight. The full story is found here.

Buying food by weight isn’t new, although it doesn’t come up too often in restaurants. There are plenty of buffet style places, but there you pay a fixed price for a plate and eat as much as you want. At a regular yogurt place, you pick the size and the number of toppings and they make it for you.

At Yogurtland, though, everyone gets to pick the amount they want and add as many toppings as they want, and then they pay by the ounce.

The beauty of this model (from a business perspective, not a waistline perspective) is that people are more likely to give themselves bigger portions and more toppings than if they had to pick and pay for each one across a counter.

Not only does this pricing model keep things simple from a customer standpoint and an inventory and sales tracking approach, but it also makes raising prices easier- only one price to raise- and the price increase won’t ever seem like much since it will be just a few cents per ounce at a time.

This is a terrific example again of the idea that a new business does not have to come up with a radically different approach to doing business or a totally unique idea. All it has to do is come up with a slight, incremental improvement over an already existing and successful business model to be even more successful and attractive.

If you can take an idea from here and an idea from there and put them together in a new combination that will be more than the sum of its part, you have the makings of a fantastic business opportunity without having to have any Einstein like mental breakthroughs or patentably unique brainstorms. Just be a little better, and you will succeed every time.

Over and over again the same pattern emerges when you watch new small businesses get started.

It is inspiring to see bright eyed new entrepreneurs making that first leap into having their own businesses and striking out on their own. It is also disappointing to see that despite all the information and resources available, they tend to make the same mistakes over and over again as well.

I came across this story today and it was deja vu all over again, as somebody once said.

The story revolves around a young art student at a Kansas university who noticed, based on his own needs, that framing was expensive and that it could be done for quite a bit less than he saw people being charged at other places.

So, he decided to start a framing business. He made a lot of smart moves, such as working out of his own space instead of moving into a retail location right away. He also decided to recycle materials when possible, so that not only did he save money, but he gave his products a certain cache in terms of uniqueness and being part of the general movement towards recycling and reusing instead of always using new materials.

He was also smart in that he began by marketing to a well understood and well targeted customer group- fellow art students in need of his services. They were willing to give him work because his prices were cheap and presumably he had a good relationship with them, which always makes the sales process easier.

The downside to this story is that the business seems to be focusing on competing on price. Certainly there is room to compete on price when you are small and you don’t have the same overhead and expenses that a traditional framing shop has. It also helps if you are a young single person without a lot of personal financial requirements.

The problem with competing on price though is that it really shortchanges the business over the long run. Growth is limited by lack of capital, and the fact that if you try and become a bigger more successful business you can no longer succeed profitably on the prices you were charging before. At the same time, you have a hard time convincing your same customers that they should be paying more for what they used to get cheaper even though it is the same product.

Time and again new business owners see low price as a great entry point for their business, because they forget to value their time, they forget to factor in the short term nature of their low overhead costs and they don’t plan far enough into the future for the cost of growth.

There is almost always a reason that retailers are selling their products at the prices they are, and it isn’t because they just want to screw the customers over. Their prices are dictated by the margins they have to live with and the other established competition.

A new working-out-of-the-garage business person can often provide a service more cheaply, but you can’t grow a large sustainable business with those prices.

Therefore, by all means consider getting into your own business, but please, for your own sake, try very hard to come up with a way to compete that doesn’t depend simply on charging less and surviving on lower profits. It just isn’t a viable long term strategy for the vast majority of small businesses.