[airics]

Delivery service... Strippers that deliver Marijuana with a free bag of Doritos within 15 minutes

[Inquiring_Mind]

Originally Posted by Camaro5

Being self-employed is not easy, and you need to have a lot of knowledge and experience in whatever you decide to do. You can't just open up a restaurant, for example, if you don't know how to run one.

If you are just coming out of some bad times maybe just finding a good job in something you're good at or interested in would be better that getting in over your head with trying to run a business.

Another fair point. When he first approached me, I was completely taken aback as he knows exactly where I'm at in my life and knows my whole life story. He's been persistent about the offer though so I thought I should at least consider it.

[OmegaSupreme]

Originally Posted by Liverpool1960

How Greggs built a £1bn sausage roll empire
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business...e-roll-empire/
Start a savory Bakery

Please don't post anything related to food. Funny though, I've had my fair share of sausage rolls and even made some before.

In any event, that would probably be a bad business idea in Las Vegas.

Somewhat related, there was a meat pie place on Rainbow, that closed down due to lack of customers. They blamed the weather as part of their business was selling take and bake pies and apparently no one wanted to run their ovens at home during the hot summer months.

[OmegaSupreme]

OP, how much money are we talking?

What are you passionate about?

[OmegaSupreme]

Originally Posted by airics

Delivery service... Strippers that deliver Marijuana with a free bag of Doritos within 15 minutes

Strippers should sell used cars, since they can pretty much promise everything and deliver nothing yet still get paid for it... Or maybe real estate?

[Inquiring_Mind]

Originally Posted by OmegaSupreme

OP, how much money are we talking?

What are you passionate about?

He hasn't give me a specific amount. It's, so far, been along the lines of "Let's see what you come up with first."

What am I passionate about? That's the larger issue I suppose. I'm having a hard time determining that. There's along story about that mental state which isn't worth getting into here. I understand that I'll have a higher likelihood of success in doing something I can put some drive behind.

[JonathanLB]

Most people have a number of passions off the top of their head, not necessarily for businesses but at least interests. For business, it's often based on where your skills lie, and if you don't have those skills, you get a job in the field first, then you learn where there are potential holes or opportunities for you. When I started my business, I was a relative n00b but I understood perfectly well that most people in my business were artists and were craftsmen, but few were businessmen, and I had a business background with more knowledge than I had in filmmaking at the time (though I had some). I catered my business to serve corporations in fulfilling their video needs, which was an underserved market at the time, and we grew to working with companies that had nationwide video goals because there was almost no competition in that field. Almost every company was based locally and doing business just in one market, which seemed a gaping flaw to me considering most larger businesses operate across many states. We started to realize our clients didn't want to find 17 video companies in the 17 cities where they operate, they wanted to find ONE great video company and have us take care of the details, so we gradually built a network of trusted videographers throughout the United States and Canada.

What I'm saying with that story is that I didn't know exactly where the business would lead me -- we didn't plan to become national originally -- but I learned the market well enough as I progressed to understand the needs of our clients, then I adapted to those needs. Sometimes it's a matter of seeing what other companies are doing in a field and whether that actually serves their clients' needs the best, or whether it just happens to be more convenient for the companies. In a lot of fields, the "best" people at doing the job are not actually very good at business, sometimes they're terrible at it, but they succeed to a point because of their skills as artisans or whatnot. In those cases, there is opportunity to enter the market, hire those people who maybe are great at what they do, but couldn't make it in their own business, and leverage their talent for a better-planned business.

When it comes down to many startups, besides incredible technology or silver bullet type of ideas, it's usually about the people. I think we have made it 10+ years because we've always had a great team of people and clients felt comfortable working with us. There was no magic to any of it, and it is a struggle. I can tell you it's not a lot of fun running your own business much of the time. Sure, it's great working for yourself, but I've had years where I felt great because we made a lot of money and I wasn't having to work too hard for it, and I've had other years where I worked really hard and made nothing because of a down year. It came down to pure luck, which clients decided to pull the trigger, which didn't.

If I could offer any advice, I'd say try to find a business where you have a clear advertising plan and crunch the numbers to see if it makes sense. In our business, we're alive after 10 years, but we've never once had a winning advertising strategy. In fact it's fair to say at this point advertising doesn't work for us whatsoever. AdWords charges WAY too much money, we can't turn a profit paying $10-12 per click, we just lose money. We couldn't raise our rates further to pay for AdWords because it would make us uncompetitive in the marketplace. We couldn't cut costs because it would sacrifice our quality (we already don't have a physical office, so we keep our expenses extremely low to begin with). When we've tried SEO companies, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, in the distant past magazine ads, trade shows, none of them have even come close to a positive ROI. That makes this type of business very challenging, so be aware of that if you're starting a company. I've heard from some friends doing B2C stuff that they don't even hire professionals, they just pour some money into AdWords and "it just works, brings in money." For us, we have hired some of the top professionals in the field and they still failed, multiple times, always confused about how they were able to achieve success for other clients, but never for us. Part of it is being a B2B company in general, part of it is we are a smaller company. Imagine a company that offers print advertising, radio, TV, video production, creative consultation, flyers, brochures, direct mailing, etc., then maybe if that company finds a new client, the client is worth a fortune to them. We only offer video production, nothing else (besides photos, but we outsource that), so a client just isn't worth enough to us to pay the $10/click.

This is where you have to make sure your plan is pretty rock solid so that you know a bunch of ways you'd advertise and grow your business. Otherwise, you may end up not being able to survive the setbacks. I sometimes still have no clue how we do it without a single viable advertising method.

[Inquiring_Mind]

JonathanLB,

Thank you for the long and considered response.

I know what you mean about noticing holes in a business. One personal example is when I've been involved with disaster relief efforts and noticed a lot of social worker types on the ground didn't necessarily have good organizational or logistical skills, i.e. if someone needed individual attention, that person would be the one you would want, but if you wanted to figure out how to find Supply X and get it to Point A, they might not be the best choice. I'm not saying that is true across the board, just that's what I noticed in my personal experience. What I should do is review my career and see if I can notice similar type situations.

Regarding advertising, I have some entrepreneurial experience in selling a financial services product when I would outsource lead generation. It wasn't something that consistently offered a good type of ROI though it was always tempting because lead generation on my own was very time consuming being the market for my product was very saturated with other producers in my area which even made untouched referrals hard to come by.

Anyway, my own personal history lesson aside, I realize that marketing is often the over looked aspect by those starting a business. The good news is that I'm aware of that obstacle. For sure my friend is a well as one of the things he does is evaluate business plans, albeit for larger scale business. All this is to stay that I'm aware of that issue and for sure my friend won't let me get away with not addressing it.

Again, thanks for taking the time to respond.

[Merrily Gather]

Vegas needs a good hackers den. Get a warehouse. Spray paint some murals. Setup up shop to run troll farms. Rent services to clients online as white hat hackers. All above board.

Since Russiagate I've learned they have troll farms similar to the Russian ones in Bangladesh and India. They pay them $3-$4 a day and so much for each additional post. It's scripted messaging and disinformation campaigns for hire. Russia had 12 guys with 150 bot accounts each flooding chat rooms and generating content playing various groups against each other to divide people. We're talking about fake news articles and propoghanda.

Or maybe you could run a flower shop? I imagine a big warehouse of flowers. Or start a moped delivery service app for fast food like Uber Eats but for mopeds. You could work in partnership with the moped rental place. I think it's $10 a day to putt around? You could start a stained glass walking tour around Vegas seeing various pieces in buildings, if there is any. Maybe it's too hot to walk anyways. What about a pot shop brewery? You could have half a dispensary and the other half a small local craft beer brewery. It could be called BeerWeed like the internet slang.

Just having fun thinking about what does Vegas need.

[SoHoVe]

Originally Posted by Inquiring_Mind

JonathanLB,

Thank you for the long and considered response.

I know what you mean about noticing holes in a business. One personal example is when I've been involved with disaster relief efforts and noticed a lot of social worker types on the ground didn't necessarily have good organizational or logistical skills, i.e. if someone needed individual attention, that person would be the one you would want, but if you wanted to figure out how to find Supply X and get it to Point A, they might not be the best choice. I'm not saying that is true across the board, just that's what I noticed in my personal experience. What I should do is review my career and see if I can notice similar type situations.

.

I think this is pretty much true of the 40 and under "social worker types"...they expect a prize for just showing up and have zero interest in doing much of anything beyond that.

Just my experience here.