Fulfill your dream of becoming... The Lunch Lady. Wait, it's not how it sounds. No cafeteria involved. And Adam Sandler won't be singing about you. Check out The Lunch Bags and tell me that this is not a smart idea. What a luxury for so many working moms. (Or, I just realized what a great baby shower gift this would make for a mom with older kids in school and a new baby in the house!) For $5 a day, moms can have you make their child a sandwich, a fruit or veg, a home made treat and a beverage. Pick an affulent area and be creative.
Baby, you can drive your car... and get paid! Okay, so the Beatles may not approve of my use of their lyric but you don't need the Beatles or anyone to tell you that getting paid to drive your own car (or receiving a free car) is a pretty SWEET DEAL! If you are approved (have a license, a good driving record, drive a lot and some other requirements needed), The Free Carwill give you a car and pay you to drive it-- you just pay for the gas and the insurance. Ya, pretty cool. Of course, you are a moving advertisement, so if you care a lot about what other people think, this may not be your cup of tea. This is now available in the US and Canada! (A few months ago, it was unavailable in Canada.) This company is a middleman. The advertisers are big companies that I know you've heard of. Let me know if you get approved and how this works out for you!
Shop 'til you drop for other people. This could mean buying someone's groceries and drug store items. (A lot of moms hate buying groceries, especially with kids in tow. I love it, probably because I like to eat!) You could specialize in finding great deals on used eBay clothes, or find a solution to a problem someone is having and purchase the product as part of your service. This would obviously be a service targeting a higher income bracket, or moms of multiples, or elderly people. A lot of possiblility here for someone to explore. And if you start this service (especially in my area!) let me know: I need you! Shopping used to be a fun hobby, now it's a tedious Have-To.
If you're looking for a sign for your next business, then perhaps signing is what you should do! Baby Signs Canada or Baby Signs USA you could become a certified instructor to teach sign language to moms and babies.
Hey, there Shuttlebug! A friend of mine has a woman in her town who shuttles kids to and from school or from school to the babysitter and charges $2/head. This is great if you have some kids home sick and don't want to load everyone in to the van to got get your child at kindergarten. I would LOVE to pay someone to get my kindergartener. I have to bundle up a baby who hates to get dressed in mitts and hat, and a toddler, to drive 2 minutes and get my daughter. Ugh. When someone is sick, it's even more of a hassle. My friend said that she was able to call this woman in her town to pick up her son, just on this one occassion, because one of her other kids was sick. In her town, the Catholic school start and finish time is 20 minutes off from the public school, so she can shuttle even more children. This would be a straightforward business and could grow easily through word-of-mouth. You could offer a monthly rate and even hire other shuttlers and take a cut from their earnings. You'd need really good insurance, obviously, and carseats/booster seats for every child. (Remember, booster seats until age 8, people! Just in case you don't want your child's head cut off by the seat belt in an accident.)
Prove that proofreading pays! Would you love to get paid to proofread? Check out OnlineProofReaders.com. I'd love to hear how your experience goes if you land a gig with this. I love to proofread myself (note my "Report a Typo link below? I hate typos!") and might give it a whirl if I ever get a spare moment.
Designing Women. Do you know a lot about interior design? You don't have to BE an accredited designer to do some work as one. Just get some friends to talk around about you and build up a reputation for you as someone with a good sense of style and a good knowledge base of what new products are out there and where to get what. The benefit to anyone hiring you to help them out is that you would cost much less than a real interior designer. You could easily do this from home. Just take some digital photos of the client's room and bring them home to ponder over. Flip through some recent interior design magazines for ideas. Give some magazines and books to your clients to look through and get them to add little post-it notes to the pages that have details that they like. Then, tell them what they could do to make things look good, giving them different pricing options and telling them where they can go to buy these things. There are a lot of do-it-yourselfers out there who need a lot of help in knowing what to do. My favourite decorating magazine, of all US and Canadian mags is Canadian House and Home. They have a 101 section that people really need (how high to hang your pictures-- hint: not near the ceiling!), they show a variety of styles of homes and they have a neat project section in every issue. I have a library of every issue from the past 4 or 5 years and I refer to them all the time, unlike many magazines that just show you some nice rooms and you look at it once and then give it away. You can also add to your list of services that of house selling preparation. You can do some staging and redesign with the things that people already have in their home, to make it look just a little better prior to listing a house on the market.
Old Macdonald had a farm and he never got a break. So, how 'bout being a farm sitter? Farmers find it difficult to get away for vacation or to visit family because, well, animals are high maintenance! You could bring your family, if you have little ones not in school or if you are homeschooling, and stay in their home, both homesitting and animalsitting. It could be a really neat change of scenery, really cool for your kids and while you leave your home, you can turn off your heating and electricity and save a few bucks while making a few bucks!
Start a resume service. I have had occassion to view a number of resume applications at different jobs that I have had and I was shocked at how few people knew how to write a good resume and cover letter. I have even read a number of cover letters and resumes by law students looking for an articling placement and been shocked at how poor they were: grammatical errors, inappropriate information, and wordy, wordy wordy (and if I think it's wordy then it must be REALLY wordy!). It would be really easy to learn how to do a better job at this. There are a lot of great books out there and you could quickly become an expert in this field. You could start a website and take jobs online. Specialize in a niche, like only do resumes for lackluster law students. Maybe you wouldn't advertise that exact wording, however. ;-)
Can you get rich from poop? While this doesn't sound like a dream job to me, you could open a diaper delivery service off of your home. Maybe there could be some way to convert your garage into washing and drying central. You could also sell cloth diaper supplies. I really wish there was such a service in my town for this and if someone were to start it up, I'd be their most vocal supporter! I can't even keep up with the regular laundry like I should, nevermind wash diapers (I've tried) but I love the new cloth diapers that are out now. In fact, cloth really is becoming a trendy thing. Check out Jango diapers and ask yourself if we've come a long way in the cloth diaper world or what! (Jango cloth diapers are patent pending, for any copy cats out there! ;-) This would do really well in an upper middle class area.
"Research shows that people hate doing research." Be a researcher! You can get people like me to pay you to research the best hosting web sites or the best ways to market a business or... anything! There are so many web sites and companies that need to do research and don't like to. You can approach them with ideas of things that you can research so that they can add the results to their site, making them look more legitimage and professional, or offer to do research on their competition, or just do whatever research someone wants you to do. You would compile some statistics based on your findings and give all the sources for where you found your information. What a big shortcut for someone needing some research done. I could certainly use this service from time to time!
One thing that you could research is scholarships. Why not set up a website with a list of all the scholarships for students entering college/university? You could sell the list or show half and sell the other half or you could give away all the info for free and make money through affiliate programs by recommending products that would appeal to this group of people (students and parents). You could compile a book that you could sell at local venues and send a flyer around schools, advertising your book.
Mary, Mary quite contrary, how does your garden grow? "By the help of a great wahm that I hired who can do a much better job than I!" I have often wanted to hire someone to just make my garden nice for me. If you know more about gardening and enjoy it more than most people, you can easily market yourself around and start this up as a business with almost no start-up costs. Your clients would pay for the plants and supplies and you can even bring a "staff" with you (your kids)! Kids like to dig holes and find worms and this could be their part of the job. You can take before and after photos and I even heard of one really artistic woman who would drive around neighborhoods and draw pictures of people's homes and add in drawings of all the landscaping that she could provide and then mail it to them or drop it off in their mailbox, all rolled up with her name and number. That's all it took to get people phoning her for the job. If you are not that artistic, you can take a photo of their home and maybe with some digital imaging software, you can alter the photo, adding in plants that would work well in that area with that lighting and send it to people that way! Great marketing. I think many people would be impressed with your moxy, smarts and time spent in doing this.
There's no flaw in starting a spa! What about having a Spa-to-Go or Spa-to-You business? Many busy people, and especially many moms, don't bother to get spa treatments or professional massages because it's too much of a hassle. By the time a babysitter is arranged, and possibly paid for, and commuting home from the little luxury experience is complete, it's possible that the effects of the spa will have long been forgotten. I know if someone could come to me, I could make arrangements much more easily.
Take this idea another step further and consider a girlfriend spa party. This could be hosted at a hotel and provide the opportunity for another business (if not the hotel itself) to cater. Boy, do I know a lot of women who would dig that idea!
Gonna party like it's your birthday! Birthday party planners are becoming more common. Martha Stewart Kids has the best birthday party ideas! I simply can't live without that magazine (although I can live without her terrifying lack of a sense of humour)! Many parents feel too busy or stressed out to plan parties, muchly due to greater expectations upon us these days. Remember when we were kids? Cake with candles, balloons, musical chairs, presents, maybe some goody bags and if you were really lucky, you could have the whole she-bang take place at McDonald's with a ball pit! And frankly, that was probably considered a really well-to-do affair! But now you have to have a THEME, my goodness! So, for all the moms who feel the pressure and lack the desire, you can make some great decorations, make the cake, the invites, the goody bag, all with more time than cashy expended and charge around $150-200 a pop in some neighborhoods. I know from experience that buying treat bag material and decorations and cake decorating goodies has run me about $100 and a LOT of stress. I'll never surrender those miserable, stressful late nights, myself, but many women want to and if you think you would dig that and not mind moms taking credit for your hard work (ha, ha, you know it will happen!), then yea for low start up cost! Most of your start up will be marketing efforts.
