#27: Business Opportunities For 2019

SAM: Hello and welcome back to another episode at the lazy entrepreneur. I’m your host Sam Priestly and as normal I’m joined by my lovely wife Emma.

EMMA: Hello

SAM: Emma today I wanted to talk about business opportunities that I think exists right now and that will be, 2019 is the prime time to do them.

EMMA: Sounds good.

SAM: You may remember in my New Year’s resolutions, one of them was to start a new business, so these are the ones that I’ve been thinking about.

EMMA: This is exciting, I’ve been waiting for this.

SAM: Yeah, so hopefully you’ll like one or more. Give me your opinions and if we don’t end up doing any of them, then maybe someone who is listening will like one and it will inspire them. Well let’s start off with probably the one that I have spoken to you about before the most, I’ve been thinking about for a few years which is sort of flipping online businesses. Basically online businesses, especially ecommerce businesses, are very undervalued at the moment. So you can buy a brand that sells pretty much only on online, on Amazon, or on their own website for about two to three its yearly profit. Now if you sell a brand, so for instance, our gin brand, if we were to sell that to an established drink company we’d probably get about ten times. Now the difference between some of these online businesses and a traditional offline business isn’t as big as people think

EMMA: no

SAM: they’re actually quite similar and they’re just different mediums.

EMMA: It’s the same product

SAM: it’s the same product exactly or service so I think there is a real opportunity to buy these by like a portfolio these online businesses. Hopefully make a few improvements, try and shift them a bit more to be attractive to offline buyers or traditional investment companies and then sell them on. I mean in some ways it’s quite low risk because even if the business, you don’t manage to sell it on offline

EMMA: You’re still making money off it

SAM: you’re still making money off it and you can then sell it on for basically what you bought it like the prices aren’t gonna get cheaper for those sort of what a lot of businesses

EMMA: Yeah well not anytime soon

SAM: The risk though is fraud and I think that’s why they’re so cheap at the moment is that people don’t really understand how do you do any due diligence on online business.

EMMA: Which you know how to do quite clearly.

SAM: Well no I know more than most people yeah definitely.

EMMA: Especially on Amazon

SAM: On Amazon yeah but then how do you differentiate between real and fake customers like you can spend a bit of money to inflate your numbers inflate your traffic inflate your sales to make the business look appealing.

EMMA: Well I suppose if you if this is something that you did this year and say you invested in five businesses to start with there probably will be some of that and you’ll learn how to spot it but it’s not really something you can find the answer to before you start business I think.

SAM: Yes I agree with you I think it’s one of these businesses I would want to go in quite hard on so I would want to maybe look at doing five to ten maybe ten within the first year. Putting quite a bit of money or raise a bit of money for it, maybe build a little team who can focus on different parts of improving these businesses.

EMMA: Yeah like remote team.

SAM: A remote team or a local team or some freelancers who I know are good at this sort of stuff because I’m sure there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit with these businesses so ways that I can maybe add like an easy 20 to 30 percent on that profit without much work which kind of overnight would earn the money back at least cover a lot of the upfront costs and then even if I end up not really being able to sell them and end up with an income generator that’s earning me 20 percent a year, whatever it is. More than 50 percent a year, what a ridiculous return on investment.

EMMA: Well yeah and it’s interesting as well because I can imagine finding some potential companies that are looking to sell you could probably do some marketing on your blog I reckon there’s loads of listeners and readers out there that might be interested in you buying their business.

SAM: There might be I think it’s more likely the other way around that there’ll be people on my blog who are looking to invest.

EMMA: I think there will be both.

SAM: There might well be both yeah well there’s quite a lot of market places now there’s Empire Flippers, flipper dot com there’s a few different ones.

EMMA: What ridiculous titles.

SAM: Yeah and they’re actually really good business and did really well but I think they’re a bit handicapped by their name, it doesn’t sound like a premium broker.

EMMA: It sounds dodgy.

SAM: It does sound a bit dodgy but they’re selling businesses that have valuations of over a million pounds and they’re kind of the well known one. If you go on their website and you’re getting two to three years valuations, they’re really low especially when it’s a it’s a brand or they own all the trademarks, it’ll have its own website, it’ll have a bunch of stock probably as well.

EMMA: Yeah so what do you think are some of the areas that you’ll be able to improve in these online businesses, like what types of freelancers like in terms of skills do you think you could pull together and…

SAM: I imagine that some of them will be very good at one type of online marketing, on Amazon they’ll be very good at getting sales for Amazon. They’ll have the Amazon adverts nailed down they’ll have the keywords all that kind of stuff, something I’d be quite good at then it may be trying to find other avenues other ways to drive traffic maybe on the SEO side, building their own website, maybe finding wholesalers we could sell to and try and bring the business local.

EMMA: Yep what about their like supply chain.

SAM: I might be able to do some stuff on the supply chain. The problem is that when you’re buying stuff quite cheaply which most of these businesses are even if you can save 20 percent or something, it doesn’t add that much to your profit, it’d be much better to increase sales than to reduce the overheads. So that’s the first idea.

EMMA: That sounds really good idea.

SAM: Yeah that’s what I’m thinking about for a while.

EMMA: And also I think it really taps into your constantly wanting to do something new, I think the idea of all these different businesses that you can be thinking about all the time and the opportunity to keep buying new ones I think really would be really good for you because you like you like new product, new projects, you get really bored really quickly.

SAM: And there’s there’s other interesting things I could do. I could build a portfolio of businesses that are complementary towards each other.

EMMA: And connect them.

SAM: So I could buy an affiliate site to do with something, I could buy a brand that’s selling the sort of things you fill it so it’s promoting I could buy a little software as-a-service doing something or other all kind of linked and then help promote them yeah and then the SEO waterfalls between a lot of these businesses which could work quite well. So that’s something I’m very interested in, the only downside is as we said I would want to invest quite a bit of money into it and it’s not a very lazy business. This is one which I think will be quite a steep learning curve to getting it right, but I think is a great opportunity right now.

EMMA: It’s also not very you in terms of investing quite a lot of money upfront. You’d like to invest a little bit to start with.

SAM: I like to bootstrap, I like to test.

EMMA: And you can’t really do that with this can you? You can’t just buy one and have a trial. Well you could but it’s not really.

SAM: It’s not the best way to do it. The other thing about this type of business is the way to get the best return, I think, is to have a lot of connections with investment firms and stuff who I know would buy these businesses.

EMMA: Yeah which you don’t at the moment.

SAM: Which I don’t.

EMMA: But that is something you could work on.

SAM: it’s not that I could work on it but it’s not very me.

EMMA: No it’s not, going to networking events, dressing up in a suit, schmoozing

SAM: Schmoozing, talking to lawyers, face to face introductions, all that kind of stuff. Yeah be a lot of travelling up to London and meeting people in San Francisco or wherever.

EMMA: Maybe it’s something we do when we get back from traveling.

SAM: Maybe the problem is I’m not sure how long this opportunity. It’s a really big arbitrage and I’m not sure how long it’s gonna be there for so I think 2019 is the time to do it. All right let’s move on. That was the first idea. My next idea is more of a product based thing. The way we’re buying stuff is changing, has changed. especially here in the UK we’re looking for sustainability we want ethically sourced, we don’t want much plastic, we want to support local businesses so I think there is quite a big gap in the market to do the opposite of what a lot of a lot of other Amazon style businesses are doing which is instead of buying cheap products from China. Buy stuff locally and then build that as part of the brand. I think there’s quite a few advantages you can do that so for instance with food and drink actually makes more sense to do it locally than to import because I that’s a nightmare but also in terms of time to market, if you’re making lots of changes to things, having prototypes sent back and forth takes forever so I think that’s quite a big market. We’re kind of doing that a little bit with our gin at the moment.

EMMA: Or we’re seeing the demand for it.

SAM: We’re seeing the demand and the trend is seeing what our friends are doing they want to buy stuff that they kind of know where it’s from. They don’t want to support sweatshops, they don’t want to have too much, they don’t want the environmental consequences of goods being flown all over the world.

EMMA: When it can be made around the corner and they can pay a bit more for it

SAM: I also think that’s true with fashion. I think we’ve seen a little shift now of locally made fashion again so that could be quite interesting but that’s not an area I’m mainly thinking about. I’m thinking about toys, I think toys could be really good. So many toys are excess plastic like at Christmas we were with my cousin and her daughter was getting so many toys that you see she was always like cringing inside, she’s very careful about not using straws or whatever but when it comes to toys for kids, people are buying all sorts of stuff.

EMMA: Plastic wrapped in plastic.

SAM: Exactly so I think there’s a market there. I mean the toy industry is very much targeted at kids I think there is probably room to build a brand that’s targeted at the parents instead and focusing on that ethically local sourced stuff. I think it’d be quite fun what’s more fun than making toys? So I’m quite excited to do a bit of that. It appeals to my silly side. I would like to do something with a patent. I want to invent something and then have some patent protection on it because that’s something I’ve never done before.

EMMA: That’s interesting.

SAM: And I probably do that in the toy industry and basically invent a new toy so that’s kind of tickling my interest and I think there’s also potential for that to be quite a big brand. Next up I think there’s a demand for Amazon FBA style business in distribution in retail distribution. So Amazon FBA is a logistical network of warehouses run by Amazon where they charge you to store your stuff in them so for instance with my table-tennis business we’ll send in 600 table tennis bats. We’ll then pay a monthly fee and then if someone buys something on amazon, amazon will deliver it from that warehouse and I’ll get charged like a delivery fee. Classic distribution works kind of the other way around where the distributor will buy from you in bulk they’ll have a warehouse and they’ll have very high cash flow problems because they’re having to pay for all these random goods that are sitting around and it really matters to them if stuff doesn’t sell. They’ve got to be very careful about what they buy when they take on new suppliers so we found it particularly difficult to get in with alcohol distributors. They’re saying we don’t want another gin. Well that’s ridiculous, so for one of them we got letters of intent from 10 different bars who used them saying we will buy this gin if you stock it and that still wasn’t good enough for them that’s and they’re missing out on such a big market, especially if I’m right about the trend going smaller local premium brands. Artesan, hand made crafts because I think there is a good market for that. Food and drink, yeah that’s one of them. I also think shops as well so little retail stores. Getting a bit more boutique so to have a kind of Etsy style distribution list that they can look at you go into a little boutique toy shop or whatever and you say, oh well we’ve got all these small brands instead of having to buy, I don’t want to name any names here, but one of the big toy makers and it saves the business the hassle of having to go out and deal with a lot of different little suppliers themselves. We definitely found that bars were very happy to spend more money to buy through an easier distributor and just add it to their weekly order than to buy from us directly.

EMMA: Definitely all about convenience.

SAM: So I think that’s a really good really good market and I think they wouldn’t be too difficult to give it a go. So the way I do it is I choose like a little industry, maybe food or drink maybe alcohol things I am already doing it I then find a bunch of small producers all who had the same problem as us and then go and find a few bars to sign up, and then just build it from there. I think that can be done quite organically because it’d be quite easy to get a yes from the small brands because they’re really struggling and there’s so many little brands out there at the moment all doing really interesting stuff.

EMMA: This is something I can set up today. Yeah know the contacts.

SAM: Yeah we have good relationships with loads of bars and stuff like that.

EMMA: Locally.

SAM: Especially with food and drink like delivering your goods to people is a real pain and you really need large order sizes and the way to do that is for people to mix and match from different brands. One bar won’t want to buy six bottles of gin of us because it’s a premium and they go through one bottle a week and they don’t want to spend six weeks worth up front. They’d rather buy two and then get another two in two weeks time whereas this does like four or five different small brands that they work specifically local, sourced ethically all that kind of stuff I think they’d be really interested. That’s something I was thinking, especially the problem is we’re thinking of going traveling again. If we were hanging around Tunbridge Wells, I think that would definitely be a really good business that I’d want to push and again it is the sort of thing that could be really big. It’s a proven business model in direct-to-consumer. Can we make it a proven business model in businesses to business. The next one I was thinking was an Airbnb but for shop fronts so the idea would be that you would rent a shop front for a few days just to trial your product or for a week.

EMMA: I don’t know why this doesn’t exist.

SAM: It doesn’t and there’s been a few people who have tried it, someone like box park, that was their idea but I think they just balanced it all wrong. The shop fronts weren’t set up so the shop fronts had a really expensive cost of setting up. The box park is a retail is a retail outlet where it’s a bunch of shipping containers yeah and their initial business model was small brands who would get it on a three month basis to do a pop-up for that.

EMMA: Yeah so you’re rotating shops for the customers.

SAM: And that didn’t really work out for them and they’ve gone to look long-term tenants now

EMMA: Yeah and they’re all big brands.

SAM: I think three months is too long. You want a few days to a week. I think a lot of brands especially online businesses want a foothold in local and that’s something it can do. Especially brands who are trying to make themselves look more legitimate than they are. Having pictures of shop fronts and customers and all that kind of stuff is very important. I think that there is real diminishing returns for being in one place for too long. Let’s say I make premium high-end yoga gear. I could be on say the High Street here in Tunbridge Wells for two weeks and everyone here will hear about it and come a visit. And quite a few will buy. Six months in no one will ever come back in again. For those four businesses it’s a lot more value for them to be dotting around the place and moving moving town every few weeks or whatever. Paying a premium on the rent for that short term but in order to just get in front of physically in front of just a lot more people. So how would I do that. I think without investing a lot of money and doing it like a proper Silicon Valley startup, the way to do it would be to find a few landlords who are struggling to rent their place and then sort of approaching brands directly with this idea. Someone else who I think would be interested in this are small artists so currently artists who want to get in with a gallery will have to get approved by a gallery will have to kind of come to them and take a big cut yeah well I think what artists could do if they had this option is open a gallery essentially for a week, display all their art that they spent the last year working on and then try and sell it and they get to keep pretty much all the profits. I think that’s a good market. Anyway there’s loads of businesses I think this would be great for and I think it wouldn’t be hard to find businesses who are up for trying. I think the difficulty would be in finding.

EMMA: The relationships with the landlords.

SAM: Exactly so I think that could be another interesting one to do

EMMA: Well we already know the people that do that for the pantars, we know the people that look after the big shopping center here in Tunbridge Wells and that’s just in here.

SAM: So somewhere around here, everything is quite expensive, it’s still the high street booming, so I think this could also work well in places where the High Street isn’t blooming as much. We’ve recently watched the Hotel Chocolat documentary and they’re opening stores in places where the rent is dirt cheap where people don’t have much money but there’s still a demand for premium chocolate even though the people themselves don’t have much disposable income. Yeah I think those sort of places being there for a few days or a few weeks would work quite well. That quite excites me and I’d be signing up if there was one already around.

EMMA: Yeah definitely we would have used it for the gin and I probably would have done it for the supper clubs and you could have done it for the table tennis bats and you could have done it for like a workspace.

SAM: Yeah for coworking. I’ve got loads of ideas for experimental style cafes and shops and stuff like that which I’d like to trial without having to sign up for a five-year lease. And you’re happy to pay a little premium for that. I think for product launches it’d be great, we’re releasing a new flavor, having a shop front for a few days for that. I think for bigger businesses even people like PwC and professional services that works quite well. You could have like a drop-in center for people. There’s loads of things.

EMMA: I like the idea that it’s a pop-up for particularly these online businesses so it’s not just about what we’re gonna make X number of sales in this week in Tunbridge Wells, it’s about we’re building this awareness and these customers will buy this product physically from us today and then hopefully when they run out of that product they’ll buy it online. I think that relationship is really good and being out and for those customers to be able to find out about your product and speak to the owners of the business, they’re obviously really passionate about it and you’ll remember that and you’ll want to buy more.

SAM: Yeah especially if you’re doing something like shampoo. If you buy shampoo from a random brand online, you might do it because you read a good review about it. Much better would be able to go try out and then be a customer forever. Because the barrier to entry for a physical business online is pretty much zero. With Amazon FBA which we’d been talking about you can have your own warehouse, you can do Next Day Delivery, all for almost no money. But the barrier to entry to having a retail location, it’s still very high. And this would be a way to get around it. I mean they could have all the licenses sorted so you won’t need to bother about it all the insurance, alcohol licenses, health and safety, all that kind of stuff already done for you. I think that would be really good. So those are the ones I’m thinking about for me. There’s a few other areas I think there is a lot of opportunity in right now, and probably the main one so I think there’s a lot room for new style agency or publicist or SEO firms that are targeted at these new style personal brands so what I mean by that I mean people like Instagram influences so you’ll have agents who work with singers and do all the promotion for them, getting them booked on TV all that kind of stuff. We don’t have that for someone who runs a course on how to learn table tennis or whatever.

EMMA: Well there are people like that but they’re just very few and far between and they’re not necessarily good.

SAM: They’re few and far between and there isn’t really any SEO agency that I’ve come across doing that.

EMMA: Because you want one.

SAM: Because I want one, I’ve been looking for one and I’m looking for a publicist as well so I think that’s a big opportunity I also think that is true not just for people like Instagram influencers but also for professionals, so let’s say you are a lawyer and you really want to get partner and you want to build your brand. You’re earning 120,000 pounds a year, I think there’s a lot of people who would be willing to invest 20,000 a year say on building an online presence for them in order to increase their chance of getting that partner. It’s like anything isn’t it, if the business you work for feels like they’re getting something out of you, they’re more likely to hire you. If you’ve got this online presence, you’re well-known for certain search terms in law, you’ve got relationships with potential clients, they’re going to pick you rather than your competitor who’s just busy, head down working in the business. Same with people in finance. A lot of City businesses I think, city companies I think it’s worthwhile. People who are on a real career path and want to become a high flyer to invest in their own personal branding and potentially hire an agent or a publicist to develop, to help them to do that. Yeah like a social media manager or something like that so I mean all that kind of stuff has got a bit of them we have opportunity and I mean it’s it’s mainly 2019 I think it’s the time to do it because there’s no one really doing it. If it gets to the point that everybody here is trying to get partner at the law firm has their own little PR agency then it loses its value. When you’re the only one, that’s worth quite a lot. Something that would be another good one. There’s a few other professional services I think like that that could be good. Accounting is a classic one, accounting for online physical product businesses. Amazon businesses, stuff like that. There’s not really many people who are good at that sort of stuff, there’s a lot of opportunity there. Same for lawyers, kind of the idea of you know GDRP and how what you are allowed to put on, what you have to declare when you have to pay VAT, what are your liabilities.

EMMA: But also patent stuff and competitors copying, where are your legal rights. Again all the stuff that have challenged you and you’ve been looking for professionals to help you.

SAM: Yeah and who don’t charge an absolute fortune because the problem is when you go to a lawyer and you say I’m trying to get someone who’s copying my products on Amazon kicked off yeah they like oh well I’ve never done that before. Well I know a bit about trademark and all this kind of stuff.

EMMA: But they don’t know anything about that specific issue.

SAM: So you’re paying them to work it out and you’re paying them a lot of money, you’re paying a partner 500 or 600 pounds an hour. You want someone is an expert online and all the intellectual property stuff that goes along with it which is a big thing at the moment, like Instagram what can you get away with sharing or retagging, all this kind of stuff and how do you how do you help protect what you’ve created.

EMMA: Yeah who ultimately owns the product or the image or the marketing yeah and yet what rights do you have over it and how do you protect it?

SAM: There’s a problem at the moment on YouTube where if you create a video and someone files a copyright infringement against it, they’ll just take down the video and there’s this process to get it back put up which can lead to you getting your account closed and the idea is that if you keep going you eventually have to go to court and it’s kind of who blinks first. If you drop out before the other person drops out it, it goes as a worse and worse strike on your YouTube account you can have it deleted, so what companies are doing is if someone posts something really critical about them, they’ll just put a copyright infringement on it.

EMMA: That’s awful.

SAM: And YouTube have decided that they’re not gonna play adjudicator. They’re gonna remove it until you go to court and the court decides and there’s like three or four steps before you get to court but if you’re the one who blinks first, it’s gone but if both of you are happy and some of these companies have got such huge legal departments they don’t mind.

EMMA: It’s so unethical.

SAM: It’s all about now isn’t it yeah, so if you can stop something being on YouTube for a few weeks.

EMMA: It’s worth your time.

SAM: That’s worth you spending quite a few thousand on that yeah and the consequences are very one-sided because you could push this, delay it for a few weeks and then blink and then go and get it re uploaded and it won’t cost you a thing because you don’t need to go to court. You can just stop it up to a point. Whereas with them if they blink first, if they oppose it and then push it and then blink first, they could lose their whole YouTube account.

EMMA: Which is worth a huge amount of money to them.

SAM: This is their livelihood and I think we’re just touching the surface. Especially on the international side with e-commerce, it’s a big issue with fakes and people copying it because a lot of them won’t be based in the same country as you so the traditional ways of enforcing that kind of stuff doesn’t really work anymore, so there’s definitely room for professional services that are aimed at smaller. Well not necessarily smaller businesses but more like one man band businesses who’ve got these big empires whether that be a content empire like a YouTube creator or a physical product creator empire like us with our table tennis equipment being everywhere in the world, and still just run from here in this flat. The other business opportunity that we haven’t spoken about that I think is quite highly likely that I do is back on the gambling stuff. Listener if you do not know, I used to be a professional gambler and I made money from a bunch of different things. Things like matched betting which taking advantages of signup bonuses, things like arbitrage which are hedging your bets and taking a profit, basically finding bookies who are slower but one area that I tried to get into and never really succeeded and it still still bugs me a little bit. I never made it work is on trading and basically writing kind of algorithmic trading bots that can monitor market patterns and look for opportunities and do a bit of AI type stuff, kind of take a lot of stuff that worked on financial markets and translate it over to the much more immature betting markets. Previously I spent quite a bit of time and money on this sort of stuff and never made it work and that still bugs me and I think the opportunity is still there.

EMMA: So what do you need to do that? Do you need a development team?

SAM: No no, I just need to spend the time on it.

EMMA: Can you do it all yourself?

SAM: Probably yes.

EMMA: Do you want to do it all yourself?

SAM: Probably.

EMMA: I’m not saying I’ve got an answer for you, yeah I’m just interested to see.

SAM: It’s one of those things that might never work.

EMMA: So therefore if you do it on your own then it’s just your time you’ve lost.

SAM: And the money you spend on it because you’re betting with money.

EMMA: So that’s definitely something to do when we’re traveling yes quite easily in the work space in their co-working spaces.

SAM: Maybe yeah, it depends on a few things. Such as, a lot of countries don’t allow gambling as illegal.

EMMA: Oh hadn’t thought about that.

SAM: Yeah is there a long list of those countries. Yeah it’s most countries don’t allow online gambling especially like an Asian country or any kind of Muslim country won’t allow it, even the USA doesn’t really allow it. You’re not allowed in France, a bunch of other countries a lot of countries you can’t.

EMMA: It’s not something I’d ever thought about.

SAM: So yeah do I then tunnel the IP address through to UK? Anyway, it doesn’t matter this is all a moot point, that’s just the logistics of how it would be done. But it could be done, it’s something I’d like to do and it’s quite locally. I might look into that. There we go there are some of the ideas I’ve got for 2019.

EMMA: What do people think?

SAM: What do you think? Any of them jump out to you?

EMMA: They all sound good, that is the problem. I mean obviously the first one is the most exciting and I think you suit it very well. It’s quite ambitious, it’s high stakes, you’d learn a lot from it. I like the idea of you building a team of freelancers and getting involved in lots of different types of businesses that you don’t know much about. I think it plays to your skill set.

SAM: Any issues? The easiest way to lose a lot of money is to invest in a business that goes wrong and so there is the risk you know of putting too much into it and then losing a lot of what we already have.

EMMA: Yeah and as I said, it’s quite unlike you to want to spend a lot of money on a new business and because you like to bootstrap it so it’s quite out of your comfort zone, it’s quite risky. I think that appeals to you.

SAM: It does appeal to me. I’m a bit self-destructive so I like betting everything on red.

EMMA: I feel like you just say well I would just do a bit of online gambling get it back.

SAM: That’s a problem right, we’re still young. What’s the harm of starting again from scratch. Is this a case of life is so comfortable that we need to risk it all in order to keep the keep the fire alive

EMMA: I really like the principle of the professional services. I like the idea of you kind of recruiting people and helping to set them up, obviously you’d need to partner with lawyers and accountants and blah blah blah. It’s not about new training in these areas, you’re helping individuals to market themselves. Basically help with their strategy in their business plan and then connecting these people with customers. I think you’d be really good at it, these resources you could then use for your businesses. Yeah I like that idea a lot.

SAM: Yeah maybe I mean the problem with those sort of businesses is I need a better way, I am so out of professional services and I’ve never been in professional services that I just don’t know the people, I don’t know the culture. I don’t really know what I’m up against. Whereas a lot of the other ones, I can see the route to market, I can think of like the A to D steps I would take to get that whereas with this one I’ve got to find the customers and I’ve got to find the people to do the job and I’m not entirely sure where to start with either.

EMMA: Yeah and I think the fact that you don’t know the answers is this incentive to do the business, not a blocker. I think that it’s a real advantage that you don’t know how slow and bureaucratic the professional service industry is. I think you coming in with a completely new approach is a positive.

SAM: Yeah potentially. I should talk to my lawyer about it.

EMMA: And I know a lot about professional services.

SAM: Yeah you couldn’t wait to get out.

EMMA: I spent my whole time there learning about the politics and the structure because it absolutely fascinated me. I spent all my time meeting with people for coffee and finding out what they did, what the politics was, where their issues where because it just completely baffled me.

SAM: Well, there we have it. Seven business ideas that I think are really good opportunities in 2019 let’s run through them really quickly. The first was flippin online businesses. The opportunity is to buy a business that is selling as an online business, rebrand it as a local or a traditional-style business and sell it on. Secondly, I think that if you’re creating a product based brand, there’s a big opportunity to look into local sourcing, sustainable, ethical all that kind of stuff. Do the opposite of what everyone else is doing which is buying cheaply from China and instead buy local. Next up was I think there’s a big market for an Amazon FBA style company but in retail distribution. So such as an alcohol distributor. Next up was an Airbnb for shop fronts so somewhere where you could rent a shop front for a few days. Either for your kind of online brand or a traditional style business if you wanted just to move around the lot. Or if you wanted to try out an idea. I think there’s a big area at the moment for traditional agencies or PR companies or SEO people to focus on individuals rather than say celebrities. So city folk lawyers and stuff like that to help them build their own personal brand online as well as of course online entrepreneurs and people, people like me who’ve got a little Instagram presence and are trying to build our personal brands. And I also think there’s room for other types of professional services such as lawyers and accountants. People like that for these kind of new style one-man-band online businesses whether those are content creators such as youtubers or sort of mini empires. Many international empires of product businesses like our table tennis business which is sold in many different countries but it’s still just only a few of us involved in it. And then the final one which is a bit of a wild card but I still think is an opportunity which is trading on the betting markets. We didn’t talk too much about that because it’s a bit random and a bit more specific to me. Alright well thanks for staying with me in listening to my ramblings.

EMMA: It’s very interesting. I’ve been waiting for this list for a while.

SAM: Listener if you have any questions or you feel like to give it a go or if you know have any businesses who are already doing these things, please get in touch you can reach me at hello at sam priestley dot com I’ll put the show notes up and I’ll write a little bit more about the different things on my blog which is sam priestley dot com. Apart from that good bye.