Mobile Business ventures
BY CAR, VAN, rickshaw or chariot, you’ll find these 20 travelling business ventures will open a whole new world to those bored with the desk constraints of office life:
- Cosmetic service
A local mobile make-up service could prove a popular enterprise in your region. Most people want to look and feel good, especially if they’re planning a special event like a wedding or birthday celebration. You could offer an appointment-based service to help apply cosmetics, offering advice and tips to regular customers. By operating a mobile service you’ll be making people up in their own homes where they’ll feel more comfortable and relaxed.
Conduct a little market research to find out if the local community would be interested in your venture and how much they would be prepared to pay for your services.
A good knowledge of skin care and cosmetics will be necessary, so if you don’t already have it why not join a short college course and gain a professional qualification? This will not only give you confidence, it will also help in marketing your business. You could leave flyers in hairdressers and beauty salons or try door to door leafleting, gradually building up a regular customer base.
- Late night deliveries
If you’re not lucky enough to live in the capital, you’ll know how annoying it is when your town or city grinds to halt at eleven o’clock. In most places, if you want to buy a pint of milk or a packet of cigarettes after eleven at night you either have to do without or walk / drive to the nearest 24 hour garage.
A great way of making money from this unofficial curfew is to set up a late night delivery service. You can deliver food, drinks and necessities to night owls, shift workers and late night parties who’ve exhausted their supplies. Purchase goods such as cigarettes, soft drinks, pizzas and crisps from the local cash and carry at wholesale prices and add on a huge profit margin. This mark-up is your reward for the unsociable hours you’ll be working. However, you’ll find that people will be only too happy to pay your high prices because of the convenience your service offers.
Advertise in clubs, bus stations and taxi areas to target people who will inevitably be in need of your service within the next half hour.
- Mobile painting exhibition
Can you or your friends paint and draw to a high, professional standard? If so you could forge a profitable business venture. By commissioning them to paint pictures of personalities and popular events (for example, pop singers or football matches), you could display and sell the paintings to fans. You may take a collection of motor racing pictures along to the British Grand Prix or perhaps sketches of a band to a gig venue.
This venture won’t involve a great deal of marketing or advertising. You will, however, need to find a busy area to set up your exhibition – preferably inside the venue or at the entrance to the event, where you can easily attract the attention of potential customers.
Encourage sales by stressing the originality of the artwork or by framing the images to induce a professional appearance.
You may find that this idea also works well in shopping centres where passers-by can stop and admire your wares.
- Mobile dog grooming service
Many proud dog owners like to keep their pets in top condition and this means regular grooming. However, a thunderstorm or violent wind on the way home could ruin all that costly combing. A great alternative would be to establish your own mobile dog grooming service. Your canine customer can then be groomed to perfection in the comfort of their own home.
Market your venture at pet fairs by distributing leaflets or advertising in your local paper. Better still, turn your vehicle into a mobile advertisement by decorating it with striking color scheme which incorporates your business name and phone number.
- The roaming delicatessen
You may live in, or know of, an area that is short on pantries and luxury food establishments. The local community will be crying out for cream and jam doughnuts, chocolate cakes and treacle pies. By operating a mobile delicatessen service you could sooth your sweet toothed neighbours’ culinary cravings and make a tidy profit out the business.
You will need to make regular visits to local villages, two or three times a week, to build up a regular customer base. Once you’ve done so you could even begin to take orders from individual customers.
Marketing your business should be fairly simple job of distributing leaflets at community occasions – a church meeting or fayre for example. If your cuisine is of a high enough standard, word of mouth will soon have customers queuing up for a taste of your goods.
- Mobile laundry service
Launderettes provide a quick and efficient means of cleaning clothes. Without a vehicle, however, the prospect of carrying your dirty linen all the way to the local cleaners can be daunting. By establishing a ‘pick up / drop off’ business, you could be providing the local community with a useful service.
You may find affluent households will be more receptive to your venture, being better able to afford the luxury you provide, while having little spare time for such trifles as doing the laundry. Your fees should cover the laundry costs and travelling, but don’t go too high as you may put potential customer off.
Advertise in shop windows and local launderettes with leaflets marketing your business, and try posting leaflets through letterboxes in well of neighborhoods.
- Mobile fishing tackle business
Fishing is one of this country’s favorite pastimes. People seek relaxation and peace and quiet, a chance to get away from it all. But what happens should you run out of maggots? There’s no shops nearby because you’re in the middle of nowhere.
By offering a mobile fishing tackle shop you can offer local fishermen peace of mind, as they can rely on you to do the rounds providing spare kit and necessities. You’ll need to be well prepared for any angling altercation with a well-stocked arsenal of aquatic accessories.
You could travel to specific fishing sights on a regular basis, perhaps twice a day, building up a relationship with your customers. By doing so it won’t take you very long to learn the most important pieces of equipment to carry and the peripheral stock that people may forget and leave at home.
Word of mouth will soon have you graduating from small fry to king of the ocean, but just to make sure, why not have some business cards made up advertising your service? They may even provide a timetable, informing anglers of your schedule so they’ll know when to expect you.
- Roving mechanic
If you’re knowledgeable about cars you could set yourself up as a mobile mechanic and vehicle service person. Many faults which hinder people’s journeys can be rectified by simply replacing a damaged component.
If you have the skill to identify the faulty element and fix the problem you could establish a lucrative business. You’ll need to be on call 24 hours a day with a good knowledge of the local area to attend to breakdowns quickly.
You could also visit customers at home and at work to service their vehicles on the spot, making sure they are roadworthy and safe. By doing so, your customers will avoid the hassle of booking into a garage and being without a car for a day or two.
If you are considering this occupation, make sure you have insurance. If anything goes wrong with a vehicle you’ve serviced you’ll need negligence cover, as well any employees you take on.
Advertise in the Yellow Pages and by placing flyers under windscreen wipers. You could also market your business by distributing leaflets door to door. Once people have heard of your business you can bet the phone won’t stop ringing.
- Mobile janitors
Running and office requires considerable attention to detail. No matter how good a boss you thing you are, your staff will soon become disgruntled when there’s no toilet roll left and the paper towels have run out.
By taking over the buying and delivery duties as a regular janitor you could expect to be paid at a reasonable rate. Soap, toilet rolls and washing up liquid etc, can be purchased from cash and carry wholesalers to take advantage of low prices and bulk discounts, and you then arrange a regular delivery round with local offices and workplaces on your patch.
To get customers, try creating a leaflet and posting them to likely firms. Even better, approach them in person (remembering to dress up smartly). By targeting retail parks and getting one firm interested you can guarantee that very soon, every other office on the park will require your services. By charging between $5 to $10 per hour you could bring home over $400 a week.
As well as advertising in the local paper and contacting companies directly, business cards will be useful in getting your company recognized and remembered.
- Set up a house moving service
If you already have access to a transit van or similar you could be well on your way to considerable riches. Moving people’s property is no easy task, but that means you can charge rates of at least $40 per hour!
You’ll need to be fit and strong to cope with hauling furniture and beds around and you should also possess some sense of value for other people’s property (that old vase you just dropped may have contained grandma’s ashes).
Advertise your business in estate agents, the local paper and even decorating magazines – anywhere you think there may be a demand.
- On-the-move windscreen replacements
It’s happened to most of us at one time or another. You’re happily driving home when all of a sudden the windscreen develops and unsightly crack. More often than not the council has been at work again, ‘improving’ the road service by laying down a half inch of loose gravel to simulate third world driving conditions.
Companies such as Highway have transformed this irritation into a prosperous business enterprise. By providing a mobile windscreen replacement service Highway have filled a profitable gap in the motoring world.
It’s possible to share in their success by purchasing a Highway franchise, which you the training and equipment necessary to set up a mobile wind screen replacement service. Contact: Highway Windscreens, Cathedral House, 16 Cathedral Street, Norwich, Norfolk NR1 1LX; Tel: 01603 667058; Fax: 01603 619292.
Alternatively, why not set up your own such enterprise? You can acquire the necessary training from a number of college courses. Once you are technically proficient you’ll need to contact a windscreen wholesaler and buy in bulk. You’ll find these in the Yellow Pages, but you could also enquire as to where your local garage buys their windscreens.
With well over 20 million vehicles in operation on our pot holed, subsiding roads today, there’s no shortage of broken windscreens that need mending.
- Mobile cleaners
A mobile cleaning service is a fantastic source of income for those who don’t mind getting their hands dirty. The initial cost of starting your venture should be fairly cheap, as the only equipment you’ll need it the standard mop, polish, duster and vacuum cleaner. It may well be worth spending a couple of hundred pounds on a high quality vacuum cleaner so that you can guarantee professional results.
Marketing your business will generally involve distributing leaflets through letterboxes and contacting households directly. It goes without saying that the larger and more affluent the household, the higher rates you can charge. Aim at offering good value for money so as to entice new customers via word of mouth.
- Mobile DJ
Becoming a successful mobile DJ requires being a certain type of person. You’ll need to be outgoing, hardworking and able to cope only a few hours sleep. You’ll also need a comprehensive record collection.
If you intend to become a DJ for any occasion this should contain all the top hits from the last 50 years, from the Beatles and Presley through to Steps.
Unfortunately you’ll also need the unenviable ability to cope with repeated renditions of The Birdy Song and Agadoo (failing that, invest in a good set of earplugs).
Providing you already have a substantial record collection the startup costs should be fairly cheap. You’ll need a good set of decks (which cost around $200 secondhand) and a couple of powerful amplifiers. These should cost approximately $150 each. Finally, no DJ should be without their flashing disco lights to really enhance the atmosphere.
Advertise in the local paper and around pubs and party venues. Distribute flyers which mention you are available for all occasions, from 18th birthday parties to weddings and homecomings.
- Mobile health food service
These days many people are choosing vegetarianism as a healthy alternative to brain disease.
Unfortunately for many people, the availability of vegetarian food is restricted to the larger supermarkets in towns and cities.
You can alleviate this problem by establishing a mobile vegetarian and health food delivery service. Purchase your stock direct from wholesalers and make deliveries to villages in your local area. Do a little research before establishing your business: find out the level of demand for your service in the community and the prices people are prepared to pay.
You can then market your venture in local magazines, door to door and even on local radio. By making regular visits you’ll soon build up a dependable customer base.
You could expand your business to cover lunches for factory and office workers. Health food is seen by many to be an important ingredient to their success and ability to cope with stress at work. By providing healthy dinners to city workers you’ll find another profitable group of potential customers.
- Mobile advertisements
A mobile advertisement is a great way to attract people’s attention to a product. If you have a cycle you could easily establish this cheap service, riding round all day with a sandwich board brandishing the name and logo of a particular company.
Mobile adverts work so well because you can get pretty much anywhere and react a wide number of people. So contact local firms to discuss the benefits of the service you offer. You could work for different companies on different days, charging hourly or daily fees.
Ideally each client should provide you with a sign or board, although if you’re a good artist you could design and paint the adverts yourself, pushing up your rates and earning potential. With a little effort you could convert this idea to work with a car or van. A large billboard, attached to the roof rack, would really attract people’s attention and save you the effort of cycling all day long.
- Toymobile
When you’re eight years old there is nothing worse than seeing your best mate with the toy you’ve always wanted. By starting a business which hires out children’s todays for a day or week, you could be onto a real money spinner.
The start-up costs may be high as you’ll need to acquire buggies, video games, Scalextric sets and dolls, but all of these can be found at bring and buy and car boot sales.
Decorate your vehicle in an eye catching design (perhaps like Noddy’s car). Along with adverts in play centres and children’s stores, this will prove a fantastic way of attracting custom.
Concentrate your advertising in the period leading up to school vacations when harassed parents will be searching for new and exciting entertainments.
- Mobile caterer
If you know of a local restaurant that doesn’t provide a delivery service why not discuss the proposition of running a delivery service for them. By hooking up with one or more local eateries you can help them benefit from the increased custom.
Each restaurant may wish to pay you a flat fee, or and agreed percentage of every order. You needn’t restrict yourself to one establishment – you could become an intermediary for two or three companies, taking orders over the phone, relaying them to the restaurant and delivering the food to the customers front door.
Marketing your business would be a simple matter of informing the restaurant’s regular customers that you now offer the service, while also handing out flyers in and around the local community.
- Provide a taxi service
This idea is perfectly suited to smaller, rural villages. By using your car or van to ferry other people to and fro you could soon be raking in the profits.
If you are well known in the local area it won’t take long for the word to spread that you have gone into business. Decorate your vehicle, making your phone number prominent, and lave calling cards in pubs, clubs and on any notice board you can find.
You’ll need to offer a friendly, comfortable and reliable service with good rates. However, seeing a familiar face behind the wheel should help encourage business, as will your detailed knowledge of the local area.
Remember that you’ll need to apply for a license from your local council, and arrange suitable insurance.
- Dog walking service
A pressing appointment or tight schedule often means that the family pet’s daily run has to be sacrificed. You can ease of conscience of guilty owners by offering to exercise their animals for an acceptable hourly rate.
Leave calling cards in pet stores and even at veterinary clinics advertising your service and keep leaflets at hand to give to pet owners you see out and about.
- Delivery service
If you own a small van or estate car you could build up a prosperous delivery business. Contact small firms who don’t provide a delivery service and propose filling this role for them. You may then be required to visit existing customers and establish the delivery service yourself.
The start-ups costs for such a company are small (providing you already own the vehicle) and you can visit as many potential customers as you feel is necessary. The company may pay you for each delivery made or on a regular monthly salary basis.
By keeping the business fairly local you won’t need to spend a fortune on petrol and you can visit your clients regularly to build up a healthy working relationship.
