Having a classic entrepreneur mindset is great for small business success. Around the world, one in every 18 people is a business owner – that’s 400 million entrepreneurs globally – and six of the eight best global markets for starting a business opportunity are in the United States.
Most entrepreneurs say that money, being your own boss, and having full control over business decisions are the factors that draw them to entrepreneurship. If these qualities all sound like what you want from your work, you might be wondering: What is the best business opportunity for a new entrepreneur? The sky’s the limit – you can theoretically find entrepreneurial opportunities in any field you can imagine. Below, find just a few ideas you should consider in 2020.
Three considerations when launching a new business opportunity
Before you embark on any new business opportunity, you’ll likely need to do the following:
- Research your industry. Just because you have an idea you think is brilliant doesn’t mean you’ll encounter demand for your products and services. Look at growth, trends, and other statistics in your industry and see where, if at all, they align with your vision. Don’t hesitate to reshape your vision to fit the data you find.
- Know your consumers. Study the spending habits of your target audience. Project your audience’s purchase power based on its average income, unemployment levels, and other key demographics. Find the sales volume among your target audience for your products and services, and then estimate how much of this sales volume your business opportunity can obtain.
- Study your competition. Know how many local and national competitors you have. Build your business practices and ideal audience demographics based on your competitors’ strategies and consumers. Better yet, identify your competitors’ weaknesses and make sure your business model addresses them. Solving widely unaddressed needs is a great way to obtain more of the sales volume you determined when analyzing your consumers.
The leading seven business opportunities you can pursue in 2020
Choose one of these ideas to enjoy all the opportunities of a small business in 2020 and beyond:
1. Cleaning and disinfecting services
In 2020 and onward, the need for professional cleaning and disinfecting services for office spaces is expected to increase. You may want to consider entering into an agreement with an existing franchise of cleaning services to help businesses in your area keep up with the growing demand for increased sanitation.
2. E-learning
Nearly half of Americans are now working from home, and this trend is expected to continue for the foreseeable future. Additionally, schools are widely transitioning to hybrid models involving both remote, home-based education and traditional, in-person learning. That’s why e-learning is a great business opportunity for 2020 and beyond.
As long as you can create and share educational and instructive content that students can’t find for free elsewhere, you can enjoy all kinds of potential business opportunities in e-learning. Use video chat tools, cloud-based storage, and presentation software to harness all the opportunities of a small business in the e-learning world. Consider entering into a franchise agreement with a larger tutoring service to take advantage of their existing brand recognition or marketing support.
3. Direct selling
In a direct selling business, you’ll purchase products that aren’t easy to come by in stores and resell them directly to people who need them. As long as you’re willing to build your own client base, direct selling might be a great choice for you.
Direct selling is also a great choice for 2020 since this business opportunity tends to be more successful during periods of economic downturn. If that sounds counterintuitive, here’s the logic: finding sales reps for your company tends to be easier when employment opportunities are more sparse. And with economic forecasts for the next decade predicting shrinking GDP and rising unemployment, now might be the time to get started with direct selling.
4. Management consulting
Part of the entrepreneurial mindset is knowing how to manage a new business, so if you love entrepreneurship, you might excel as a management consultant. Plus, the size of the management consulting industry has grown every year since 2015 and is expected to do so in upcoming years.
As a management consultant, you’ll work with all manner of businesses to manage individual projects or even long-term performance goals. This work might be ideal for you if you’re looking for a natural extension of your entrepreneurial interests and skills.
5. Search engine optimization
In the modern age, every business needs to follow good search engine optimization (SEO) practices. Without proper SEO, a business will fail to appear prominently on internet search engines, and this lack of prevalence can negatively impact a business’s bottom line.
Despite the importance of SEO, most companies do not have in-house SEO experts. If you become innately familiar with SEO and launch a consultancy of your own, you may find clients rapidly.
6. Public relations consultant
It’s not uncommon that businesses neglect the need for public relations until they find themselves mired in controversy. As a public relations consultant, you can save the day for clients of all stripes by bringing an outsider perspective to an urgent situation. Your insights on messaging, imaging, and branding could prove invaluable to a wide array of potential clients no matter the time of year. The need for public relations remains constant for all businesses, so you can expect your new PR company to grow in 2020 beyond.
7. Online referral service
The world has no shortage of online listing websites, yet taken as a whole, the online listing ecosystem might not satisfy every consumer’s needs. Since people are constantly looking online for places to go, brands to trust, and professionals to hire, starting your own online referral service is a great way to get in on a trend that won’t die out anytime soon.
Where most listings include businesses from all over the country (if not the world), your online referral business opportunity may be more likely to set you up for success if you focus on just local companies. In doing so, you can fill in gaps that national referral services might be too thinly spread to even see. As you address this previously unsolved problem, you may well see ample profits.
Business opportunity vs. franchise
While many people use “business opportunity” to refer to any chance to start a new venture, the term “business opportunity” carries a precise definition in certain contexts. A business opportunity can refer to a packaged investment, in which you pay a fee to access the materials and resources you need to start your business.
Sounds like starting a franchise, right? While using this definition, all franchises are business opportunities, but not every business opportunity is a franchise. In fact, there are several key points which differentiate business opportunities from franchises. Many business opportunities have the following advantages over franchises:
- Lower initial fees. When working with a franchise, you’ll pay initial fees to get started, but the fees you’ll pay for a business opportunity are much lower than those associated with a franchise.
- Better financing options. It’s not just initial fees that are lower – financing for a business opportunity is easier to acquire across the board. Franchises collect ongoing royalty fees, but most business opportunities don’t, so maintaining the financing to afford a business opportunity will be much less challenging.
- Looser structure. A franchise has a name and image to uphold, not to mention several signature products and services. This means that many franchises will come with a precise playbook with how and when to make and market the products under their name. With a business opportunity, you’re at most licensing products, services, or equipment from a seller. Once these items are in your hands, you can do as you please with them to form the basis of your business. And if you have an unflagging entrepreneurial mindset, then this flexibility might just be exactly what you need.
