Anyone looking for brilliant business ideas should study the life of a man named Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Corporation.
In case you don’t know who this man is, Henry Ford was the inventor of the Model T Ford, the world’s first mass-produced car. Man literally invented the assembly line that is used in industries around the world today. The invention of the assembly line was significant because it allowed Ford to increase production and produce many more cars than before.
But what I want to focus on in this post is another business that he was involved in and very few people were interested in. This business genius took the wood scraps left over from the production of his Model T’s and turned them into charcoal briquettes (used for cooking and heating).
This “side company” (built from by-products) became so profitable that he built a separate coal plant and founded the Ford Charcoal Company, which was later renamed Kingsford.
There are obvious by-products or waste that many companies generate. For example, there is sawdust generated by sawmills. This can be very profitable. For example, you can make particle board and even firewood logs.
Every art of creation is said to have a by-product, which means that whatever business you are doing or want to do is sure to generate “waste,” which is actually a by-product that you can turn into huge profits.
Some of the brilliant business start-up ideas in my book involve making big profits from by-products and they don’t have to be your own by-products. Hope that helps you think in the right direction.
But let me tell you another true story from here in Kenya about a company that made huge profits from the waste it was generating.
Everybody knows the Nation newspapers. The company publishes the newspaper with the largest circulation in the region. A few years ago they had a serious problem. The price of oil, as always, was rising and the cost of distributing their newspapers was growing alarmingly. The waste they generated was the extra space in the huge pickup trucks that was left when the newspapers were packed for delivery to various towns and destinations. There was even more “waste” when the van returned from delivering the newspapers practically empty. What a waste.
And so they came up with a way to turn the “waste” or by-product into huge sums of money. They launched a courier service to deliver letters and packages across the country. Couriers from the Nation company were called. They immediately had a huge advantage because newspapers are delivered on a daily basis and generally have a very tight delivery schedule because newspapers are perishable goods that must be delivered on time. Today’s newspaper cannot be sold tomorrow. It has to be sold today and preferably early in the day. And so Nation’s courier service could promise its customers that the package will arrive at its destination without fail the next morning.
This new overnight courier service created from a “waste product” has generated huge profits for the Nation media group and also makes newspaper delivery very efficient.
Take a closer look around you.
What is being wasted?
Can you turn it into profit?