Starting a small business can be an incredibly rewarding thing to do and it allows you a lot of flexibility to work the hours you want to work and decide how things should be run. Affordability is now more important than ever for most of us, however, so you might be wondering how you can start up a small business in 2022 without breaking the bank. If you’ve always felt you have an entrepreneurial streak but you’re still weighing up what exactly your focus should be, you’ve come to the right place.
Here are a few quick ideas to get you feeling inspired.
Become a personal chef
If your culinary skills are top tier but you also enjoy the business side of things, you could take a relevant training course and set yourself up as a personal chef.
Think about what type of audience you would like to market yourself to. Families, single parents and busy people who live alone all provide opportunities for personal chefs, so perhaps think about the pros and cons of each and decide who you might be the best fit for.
As with any small business, you will benefit greatly from using a personal website and also making use of social media to market your services. Instagram is a magnet for foodies, so this would be a good place to start. Make your go-to dishes look as appetising as possible with lighting, garnish and aesthetically appealing kitchenware to draw your audience in.
Also think about how you can network with the right food vendors so that you can get the freshest and most in-demand ingredients for your customers.
Start a B&B or Airbnb
When you start up an SME, it’s important to make sure that you’re covered in case any issues arise. In this example, damage to property or even a fire could be a disastrous blow to your business so get this sorted as quickly and efficiently as possible, use an insurance broker that will pull business insurance quotes for you and also offer you free advice to save you the hassle of wrapping your head around thousands of T&Cs on your own.
Tourism in the UK has been the fastest growing industry in the UK since 2010 and is predicted to rise at an annual rate of 3.8% per year until at least 2025 (a much higher rate than that of the overall economy).
This means now is the ideal time for homeowners to start running a B&B or Airbnb, particularly if you live in an area that tends to attract tourists.
No formal qualifications are required to do this, though it’s certainly in your best interests to take a B&B training course if you do decide to go into this industry.
If you’re setting up a Bed and Breakfast, you will also want to obtain a food hygiene certificate from the Food Standards Agency. This helps you cover yourself if anything ever goes wrong, as you would need to prove that all your kitchen processes and equipment are kept to the government’s minimum standard.
Consider whether you need to employ staff or whether you can simply run the operation yourself, as would usually be the case if you let out a flat or room on Airbnb.
Airbnb has enjoyed rapid growth and is a great platform to set yourself up on if you just have one or two individual rooms to rent, or even a small flat. It offers a secured payment platform to take care of the fees to stay in your lodgings, though do check what tax regulations apply to you and familiarise yourself with this before you get started.
When you list your lodgings on Airbnb, the process itself is very straightforward, simply requiring you to submit photos and an accurate description of what your place has to offer. Every positive review you receive from a lodger bolsters your credibility and helps you secure a steady stream of business.
Start a blog
A viable side hustle for anyone who has a flair for writing and a niche to write about is blogging. Whether you blog as a supporting act for an existing business you are running or just for the sake of blogging itself, this is a great way to start building something that could help you network and turn a profit in the future.
