Anyone looking for brilliant business ideas needs to study the life of a man named Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Corporation.
In case you don’t know who this man is, Henry Ford was the inventor of the Ford Model T, the world’s first mass-produced automobile. Man literally invented the assembly line that is used in industries around the world today. The invention of the assembly line was important because it allowed Ford to increase production and produce many more cars than before.
But what I want to focus this post on is another business he was involved in that very few people were interested in. This business genius took the wood scraps left over from his Model T production and turned them into charcoal briquettes (used for cooking and heating).
This “secondary company” (built from by-products) became so profitable that it built a separate charcoal plant and founded the Ford Charcoal Company, later renamed Kingsford.
There are obvious by-products or waste that are generated by many businesses. For example, there is sawdust generated by sawmills. This can be put to a lot of profitable use. For example, you can make particle board and even logs for fireplaces.
It is said that every art of creation has a by-product, which means that any 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. I hope that makes you think in the right direction.
But let me tell you another true story from right here in Kenya about a company that made huge profits from the waste it generated.
Everyone knows about the Nation’s 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 its newspapers was rising alarmingly. The waste they generated was the extra space in the huge pick-up trucks left over when newspapers were packed for delivery to various towns and destinations. There was even more “waste” when the van returned from delivering the papers virtually empty. What a waste.
And so they figured out 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. They called the company Messengers Nation. They immediately had a big advantage because newspapers are delivered daily and they tend to have a very tight delivery schedule because newspapers are perishable items that need to 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?
