I recently had a conversation with a fellow retiree friend of mine. They were planning to take a trip through the country and visit places where they have never been before.
But they had a problem with not knowing where to stay. There are hundreds of guest houses to choose from, several in each town that they will travel through.
They did not know how to choose the good ones from the bad ones. They could find them all on the internet, but pictures can be deceiving. They are not so young anymore and don’t want to have problems.
This made me think about what we are taught about starting a business.
Find People Who Have a Problem
When you have people with a problem and you can find a solution for their problem, then you have an opportunity to serve them. If you can find several people with the same problem, then you can start a business by helping them to solve their problems.
Suddenly I saw a way to solve my friend’s problem and I just knew that there must be hundreds if not thousands of people with the same problem.
One could take your car and go on holiday, but you can take your cell phone with you. You can take photos of all the available places to stay in each town and talk to the owners about what they provide as accommodation. Record everything so that you can later type a review of each guest house.
You can ask the owners about all the places around town that can be interesting to tourists that visit the area and ask about the best restaurants in town. This information will be valuable for prospective visitors.
You can also tell them that you are planning to publish a guide about this, and I am certain that they would want you to feature their facility as the best available accommodation in town. They might even offer that you can stay overnight for free to get a better review.
This way your holiday can suddenly become even more enjoyable and less expensive. If you do this for every guest house in each town, you will soon have a very valuable asset.
If you are honest in your evaluations, then your readers will really appreciate the information. It would make their choices where to stay, what to see and where to eat so much easier.
At first you offer it free to everybody planning to take that route. You will not have to tell many of your friends about it if you have given good advice. They will tell their friends about it, and it will soon spread to many more.
Just be sure to put your contact details and a link to your blog in the document. Soon people will contact you to ask that you do the same for other travelling routes in the country.
Before long people will see you as the authority and they will contact you with all kinds of requests. This will be the opportunity to come to an agreement that they must pay you for your services and your business will be born.
Generosity is the Key to Prosperity
The more you give, the more you will receive. The guesthouse owners will offer to pay you to write a review of their accommodation and that is when your integrity will come into play.
If you will give a good review based on the amount that they offer, then you will compromise the trust of your readers. It would be way better to then ask these owners to rather send you compensation when they received happy guests.
They can ask their guests where they heard about them and if they say they got the information in your guide, then they can compensate you if they wish.
This will place the onus on them, and you can write your reviews without any fear of not telling the truth. Let your readers know that you are not getting paid for writing good reviews.
If people do offer that you stay with them, tell them that it cannot influence your review but that it will enable you to get a better understanding of their service. If they agree to such an understanding, then you are under no obligation to write a favourable review.
People will appreciate your honesty and always tell them that it is your opinion only and that they might have different experiences. You cannot guarantee that the service will be the same when they visit there. They should take your advice only as a guide.
Scaling Your Business
You might think that there is a limit to this business, but you can get affiliates that can help you with reviews. You can ask the guests to write a report after they had stayed in a certain guest house, and you can compensate them for it by giving them free access to your new guides.
I can also think of the involvement of tour bus owners. They might benefit from your advice and even ask you to do their bookings for them because you have met with the owners. This would save them a lot of effort of trial and error.
You can even organise some bulk discount for this service and then get paid the difference. This will be an incentive for the tour services to use your booking service and it would benefit the guesthouse owners in that they will know that they can depend on more bookings, and you get paid for your services.
This will be an all-round win-win-win solution. You can then afford to employ people to run this booking service and as such you give employment for somebody else as well.
You can even start to offer your services in other countries by inviting people to write honest reviews about the available accommodation in their countries.
Tell them that they will be compensated when those facilities get and receive happy customers due to their reviews. You can ask the owners to remunerate them for their service.
It is always better for a third person to give a recommendation than for the owner to talk about their great service. This way all parties will be satisfied.
The guest gets an honest opinion from a fellow traveller, the owner gets to receive more happy guests and the person who wrote the review get compensation in some way or other.
The owner might even offer them free accommodation in future for services rendered.
Conclusion
Can you now see how you can make use of an opportunity if you see people with a problem that you can solve. Be creative in you thinking and you can soon build a lucrative online business.
Here are the keys to success:
- Always be prepared to give more than you expect back.
- Be honest and guard your integrity like something precious.
- See how you can help others solve their problems.
- Give generously and you will receive unexpectedly.
- Think outside the box and see how you can help others to also benefit.
- Don’t be impatient but be prepared to put in the work first.
- Always create an asset that you can be proud of, and it will benefit you in the future.
I hope that you have found this helpful, and I would very much appreciate it if you can write a comment below.
Carpe Diem.
