How to Start a Business for Less Than $500

There are people out there that if you run into, they can’t help themselves but tell you about their sports team, their local charity, their church they go to, the sports team they believe in, their politics, their views, and all this other stuff. If you’re around me, I want you to start a business and in this blog, I’m going to talk to you about how you can start a business for less than $500. I’m going to simplify it to you in a way that probably has never been simplified like this before.

There are six things you can do to exchange what you’re providing to the consumer and to the customer for money and profit.

1. Providing a service.
2. Give expert advice. (Your expertise is worth others paying for)
3. Sell a product. (Buy it for five bucks, sell it for twenty)
4. Educate.
5. Provide an experience
6. Entertain.

Let me explain each one in detail.

Services.

-Mobile auto detailing, this is the easiest thing to start off with.

• Go get a couple of the equipment or tools for less than $500 and start servicing cars in your community. Start with $20, $25, $30. I don’t want to go to a car wash. People don’t want to go to a car wash. Once you get a trail going, next thing you know there’s a ton of things you could be doing with that where you’re cleaning three cars for one house, next door neighbor says, “Hey, can you come by and do three cars? What are you charging? Can you come by and do this? Can you come by?” Then you come to a business building. Then you call the business management, the building’s manager, and you say, “Hey, I’d like to service car. For the people in the building, I’ll give free service to you and your employees as a manager to you, and I’ll give 20% discount for all the tenants there. It will be a cool service for you. No problem.” Then you got ten buildings. Then you got 20 buildings. Then you got 20 people cleaning cars in all these different places. Now you’re making three, four, five, six, seven, eight, ten thousand dollars a month because you started a mobile detailing business.

- Dog walker.
- Babysitting.
- Become a chef.

• If I knew how to cook, I don’t know how to cook, but if I knew how to cook, I would figure out a way … I remember I went to a restaurant one time in Kentucky. It’s called 610 Magnolia, if you’ve heard of 610 Magnolia. We walk into this place. I took ten of our friends. The bill ended up being $3,300. Right after Kentucky Derby, we went to this place. That’s when I met Arnold Palmer, just a real cool place. I said, “How did this place get started?” He said he was a guy, that he cooked so well that everybody in the community wanted him to cook for them. He said every Friday night he cooked in his house, but it was $200 and it was a seven course meal. People had no problem paying for it. Ten people would pay for it, so $2,000 every Friday night. Then he took a house and he turned a house into a restaurant called 610 Magnolia, that’s the address to the restaurant, that’s the name of the restaurant, just because liked his cooking. He turned it into a business.

- Landscaping.

- Running errands.

- Coaching kids.

• I was at a baseball game yesterday for my kid, and this guy next to me who played football, who played professional on the football side, I said, “What are there some programs here for baseball?” He says, “Oh my gosh. Coaching six year olds and teaching them how to swing and catch the ball has become a business here locally.” I said, “What kind of a business?” He says, “There are people that played college baseball, parents are having their kids be coached by this guy $50 per 30 minute session.” I said, “What?” “Yeah, $50. If it’s a pitcher, they’re going to the catcher position, they’re throwing him the ball, they’re doing all this other stuff because somebody else doesn’t have the time to do it.” There’s money there.

- Massage Therapy.

• I would bring people to my office and they would give massages to 20 people at a time, $50 a pop. That’s $1,000. I mean, that’s a pretty nice amount of money to be made. There’s money here if you know how to massage.

Expertise.

• Go get your notary license. People need to notarize stuff and they need fingerprints, signatures $10 a pop, $15 a pop. Then they pay for the gas as well. Get your real estate license. Get your insurance license. This is the route I took. I went and got my insurance license. I don’t have a two year degree. This became my degree. I got insurance and security, 37, 66, 31, 26. I started selling and I became an expert in investments. I became an expert in insurance, and I got paid for it by insurance companies for doing that.

- Security guard

• You’re a big guy.
• You know how to fight.
• You took boxing.
• You know martial arts. You want to figure out a way to go become a security guard. Go do it, and then find some of your other peers and maybe you can start a security guard business.

- Personal trainer.

- Translate

• If you know how to translate for people. There’s a very, very, very big need for this. I have a lady that I met at Harvard. She’s local right here in East Plano. She started a business simply for translating. Her business does $35 million per year just to translate for hospitals that don’t know how to speak to a certain patient when they’re doing their questionnaire on their health. She has all the different languages with people that are translating for them from their house.

Sales.

• Sell t-shirts. Sell flowers. Sell fidget spinners. Nowadays, everybody wants to buy that. I remember back in the days in 2000, a product had come out called Clip & Talk. Back in the day, there was no speaker phone and there was no Bluetooth on the phone. Clip & Talk will link to radio station, I think 88.7, and you would clip it on your phone and anybody who would call you, the sound would come out of the speakers and you would speak to them as if it’s Bluetooth.
  It was the ghetto type of Bluetooth back in the days. I would buy them for five dollars and I’d sell it for $20 a pop. I can’t tell you how many of them I sold during the time while I was getting into the Securities Industry.
  Shoes, hats. Pick a product. Buy it wholesale, sell it retail.

Educate.

• Teach me a language. You may know a certain instrument you’re teaching me. I want to learn. You may know how to teach kids how to read and write. Tutoring, that’s a big business. Then you’ve got online tutorial. Personal defense. There’s a lot of people nowadays that want to learn personal defense especially in certain communities. What if you start teaching personal defense classes and you do it as a group? Ten people show up, you show them somebody attacks you, what you do, how you get out of it, all this other stuff. There are people that are willing to pay for this.

Experience.

• What’s experience? Give me a fun experience for a bootcamp class at 6:00 o’clock in the morning and it’s an experience at a local park, $20 a class, $15 a class. Ten people show up, you made $150. Not only did you get a workout but you got ten people that also showed up. It was fun. Running to get all this other stuff. Hiking. Maybe you’re somebody that knows all the hiking trail spots in your area. Give me some of those secret hiking trailing spot and you have all the equipment, let me bring the group and say, “I’ll go with you for three hours. We’ll have a great time. I’ll take you to a secret spot. I know everything in this area, but it’s $100. It’s $20 a person. It’s $30 a person.” Whatever. People are willing to pay for that.
• Surf. You know how to surf. Most people are afraid of surfing. Almost everybody I know, most people, want to know how to surf because it’s cool, but they’re afraid. “What if I don’t know how to do it? It’s embarrassing. I’m going to fall. You know how to do it. Give me a fun experience, I’ll pay you for it.”

Entertainment.

• You go on YouTube, people say, “Man, no one watches these educational videos because people would much rather laugh than be educated.” Guess what? Turn it into a business. Comedy, art. Teach people how to paint, or at the same time, entertain me. Draw me. Paint me. There’s people that do this everywhere, $20 a painting, $30 a drawing. People pay for it.
  Dance. You know how to dance. I was in Miami. In Miami South beach right off of A1A there was this boyfriend and girlfriend that were dancing. What they were doing is, in the middle of the strip, in the middle of the strip, they were dancing, and they were going and bringing people to dance, and they had a bucket. People were dropping $20, $15, $20, $10, $10. All night all they did, as boyfriend and girlfriend, danced all night Friday from 9:00 o’clock until 1:00 o’clock in the morning and they made $400. Can you imagine dancing all night and you make $400 just from dancing? There are so many ways to make money.
• YouTube stars.
• Singing.
  People will pay for it. Have the CDs, sell them, people will buy them. I bought a CD from a guy who was from Argentina. He and his brother in Santa Monica, they would play the guitar in a way I’ve never seen before. I bought the CD from him for $20. I listened to that CD for a whole year in my car, because he had this one song he would play would just speak to your spirit. He’s not a big name person. No one knows him, but I paid $20 for him that day to get his CD and I listened to it for a year. Magic. You know how to do magic tricks. There’s many ways to make money doing magic tricks. People want to be entertained.

Whichever one of these areas is your strong suit, I would encourage you capitalize on it.