Money is important for a lot of things. Before you look for cash it is better to work on your small business ideas first. Work on a small business at low cost right from the start. By doing so, you will keep your enthusiasm and you can start selling hair very fast. Let me guide you to find small business ideas for selling hair or the beauty industry.
New Product or Service Development
Your business will only succeed if you have a new product or service your market needs. Only companies like Apple create products nobody needed, until brought to the market. You will have to listen well to your potential clients.
Girls talk
The first step is to gather your best friends, and some of their best friends and start to talk hair. No need to share your ambition for your own store. But find an excuse to talk hair with a group of say 10 girls. Prepare this gathering with a list of items you would like to have their ideas about when they leave. Think about what they like and do not like about hair extensions and stores. Or the way they search for new hair products. Keep the conversation going and make notes to get small business ideas. Read the chapters about how to listen to the market and potential clients in my eBook.
E-book Start your own hair business in only 10 days
Desktop research
Now you have an idea about the needs of a significant group of potential clients. Use this information to perform some serious research. Use Google or social media and write down your observations from the girls talk session.
You will have a list of:
- suggestions,
- ideas,
- bad and
- good remarks about the hair extensions stores.
Now you must turn these into small business ideas for hair stores. Validate the remarks with the desktop research. Again, do not forget to make notes.
Your own experience
If you already sell hair or any other beauty product. Do not forget to consider your quality assurance process. What is not going well and what activities lead to customer complaints for example. You can learn from your mistakes. This is the moment to learn and to convert these mistakes into small business ideas. Do not forget to talk to suppliers, they might have some interesting ideas too.
Market research
If you review the outcome of the Girls Talk, your desktop research and your own experience, you have a complete picture of the needs. The best way to confirm these observations is to perform a market or customer research. Part of this market research are your competitors. Analyze them and learn from them.
Pick your small business ideas
Now you are almost done, you have a lot of information and a lot of small business ideas. Now you should put the list away and do not look at it for 72 hours. Do something different and let your brains do the work at the background.
After 70 hours, you take a blank piece of paper. Write down the criteria you will use to check your small business ideas.
Think of:
- most identified customer needs
- product improvements most needed
- the benefits to your target market
- the technical feasibility of the idea
- the level and scope of research and development required
- the profitability of the idea. What is its potential appeal to the market? How would you price it?
- where the product fits in the market. Is there a gap? How close is it to competitor products?
- the resources it will need in development
Check all the ideas of your list using these criteria. You will see some will disqualify and others will stay relevant.
Now you have one or two well thought ideas you can start to work on for your small business.
