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Making Money Reselling Retail Bottled Water

June 5, 2007 – 9:24 pm

Neville Medhora’s Bottled Water Experiment was an interesting micro-business experiment involving the selling of chilled water bottles to motorists with the employed help of a homeless person. He conducted this experiment to determine if it was possible to turn a profit selling water with only $10 in capital.

That first experiment was way back in 2005 but he recently posted an update about a reader who took the experiment to another level. The reader is quoted with the following in Neville’s Bottled Water Experiment Part 2:

I started my own water business after reading this post. I put a twist on it however as I replaced the stationary location with a backpack lined with a trash bag full of ice and bottles, and parked my car in a stationary location with the ice chest and other water to come back and refill. I am MOBILE! I made the shirt that says “Bottled Water $1″ and headed to the river on a very hot day. People could not believe that I was doing this, everyone thought the idea was so awesome, and I couldn’t take credit. But I did sell ALL my water. 200 bottles on the first day.

I did this 5 days in the first week, for 4 hours before my shifts as a manager at chick fil a. I found out that I was making more money from selling bottled water than from my real job. So I posted ads on craigslist, offering to pay college students $10 an hour to do my bidding. I got 14 responses, and hired 5 people. Now I have a guy at the river, one at the biggest local park, two on the college campus of VCU and one in the popular downtown business sector. Each person generates about $100 a day for 4 hours of work at ten dollars an hour. thats 20 hours of labor for me to pay so 200 dollars gone, but 300 dollars are

Posted in Finance/Investment, Marketing/Business | Comments (0)

The Importance of Focus for the Small Business Entrepreneur

May 22, 2007 – 12:29 pm

I came across a quote I saved from author/entrepreneur Dave Taylor that I thought I’d share (emphasis added):

The most important rule for any small business is to stay focused. Identify the unique value proposition of your business or service, then make sure that every idea you have, every inspiration for expansion, is consistent with your unique value proposition and strengthens it.

Like most entrepreneur’s I often find the challenge of staying focussed to be well, exactly that - a challenge. It seems especially difficult when I’m in the middle of a ‘creative burst’ that keeps me up half the night for a week at a time. While I absolutely savor those adrenaline pumping flood-of-ideas moments, it takes much discipline and self control to check myself and categorize the ideas I’m excited about.

Certainly I know Dave doesn’t mean to suggest that you “throw away” any ideas that deviate from your existing value proposition. In fact I employ a suggestion he makes in his book, “Growing Your Business With Google”, where he recommends keeping the ideas you get from your ‘creative bursts’ in a folder that you can refer back to at a later time.

At the same time however, I think the unique market of internet businesses afford an entrepreneur the latitude to have a number of ‘lures’ or ideas, in the water at any given time. The amount of cost and energy it takes to cast those ‘lures’ out would certainly be worth it if even one was moderately successful.

Bottom line however, don’t forsake your cash cow.

Think of ways you can use those deviated ideas to promote your existing ventures and stretch your marketing dollars to their maximum value.

Posted in Marketing/Business | Comments (0)