Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Are you looking to start a service business? A tangible product sales business? What kind of business you want will give us a hint so we might actually make some suggestions that are worth spending our time building for you.

The easiest way I know to get new ideas for small businesses is to get the yellow pages out for a major metropolitan city (i.e.; New York, Chicago, LA, etc.)... Go to the index and start drafting a list of the businesses that interest you, from A to Z. (Yeah, I know that`s time consuming, but it`s a whole lot cheaper than making a costly mistake! - - No need to go to the actual listings, just the index will do.) Write down, word-for-word those businesses.

Now that you have a nice long list of businesses that exist in a major market, and you`re interested in starting one of them - go to your local yellow pages and do that same thing all over again... Be sure to list `em all.

Now that you have two nice, LONG lists, compare them... note the businesses from the major directory list that are NOT on your local directory and put them on your new, third list. You now have a list of business ideas that have a good chance of working in your locale, given a sufficient demand and so on. Start by picking a handful of them that interest you most...

From this point, do all the usual due diligence and market research to see if there is a demand, a sufficiently sized market, and enough possible customers with the cash and willingness to spend it to make the start-up worthwhile. Repeat for each choice until you narrow it down to one, then you`re ready to start the really hard parts of getting the new show on the road.