With everyone wanting to try their hands at business these days, the market has become overly competitive. This definitely spells trouble for prospective business owners. But there are still ways to start a successful business.

For aspiring entrepreneurs, it is advisable to not start their business from scratch, unless they have some expertise in the sector they are planning to start their business in. Without proper expertise, you will learn only by trial and error, while this is an amazing method to arrive at a proper solution, it drains a lot of resources– especially time and money. Entrepreneurs won’t certainly have the luxury to spend their money in this fashion right after they start a new business. Even without any expertise or experience, there is still a way to start your own business, we will discuss this in the coming sections.

Check out our Before You Start Your Business Guide before proceeding further. This covers the basic must-knows that will greatly help aspiring business owners.

Business Ideas

Customized Product Repackaging

Repackaging involves buying products from manufacturers, and changing their packages, and/or labels. This means you are making external changes to the product and selling them mostly to customers, and very rarely to other businesses. But here’s where there is a slight change with Customized Repackaging, your target is other businesses. You find products that a particular business uses, you then customize those products with that business’ branding, and then sell these custom products to them.

Here’s an example to make it easy to understand- Find water purifier/ water-bottling plants, you can find plenty of them around. Employ a graphic designer or hire a freelancer to make label designs for a big restaurant/hotel chain that buys bottles from big water brands like Bisleri and Kinley. You pitch them an idea about supplying them with water bottles with their branding and an MRP of their choosing. With nominal margins, you can keep your costs lower than big water bottle brands, this will make your offer very attractive to potential clients.

You can do this with plenty of other products that businesses would love to have customized.

Salon

A premium Salon with good staff in Tier 1 cities is sure to rake in good profits. There are people willing to spend crazy amounts on beauty services, and if they like your service, they will keep coming back for more. Location is important for this, and you will need to keep your Salon attractive too.

Premium Salon isn’t the only choice, Basic Salons do pretty well too, you just need to hire good employees and provide a decent service.

Coaching Centre

Education is an excuse for business in India, and because of this very reason, there's a gigantic business ecosystem thriving in this lucrative space. 25 lakhs is a decent amount to start a coaching center, hire good teachers, and get adequate infrastructure. Your initial students will be low but don’t worry, if you provide them with proper classes, your coaching center’s reputation will increase, netting in new parents with just word of mouth. Depending on the budget you can spend on marketing. Just be wary of the new Age restriction rule if you don’t want to land into legal soup. Depending on profits and available resources, you can expand digitally to reach more parents.

Here’s a bonus idea- with almost little to no budget, you can start tuition classes at your home. Make sure you don’t disturb your neighbors, and don’t make it too commercial, since that will be stepping outside the bounds of a home tuition class.

Teaching online is another lucrative venture, you can sell courses online through multiple platforms. The investment for this is your expertise and time.

Cloud Kitchen

These are increasingly becoming popular due to their lower barriers to entry, this includes investment too. With just under 5 lakhs you can easily set up a Cloud Kitchen, the cost is low due to the orders being completely online, which means that you can function on a bare-bones setup without having to spend on aesthetics and hospitality. Since you will be operating completely online you will need a good website and a sound marketing strategy. The biggest advantage of a Cloud kitchen is the versatility they come with, they allow for a high degree of experimenting. You can operate multiple brands with just a single Cloud Kitchen, and you can also share it with other businesses, and rent or lease it out.

Printing and Photocopying

In the prime location, your printing machines turn into money-minting machines. Your investment depends on the number of machines you want, you can usually obtain good second-hand machines for your business- further reducing your costs. Locations with corporate companies, colleges, and government offices are a must if you want to get serious about your paper. These areas are usually saturated with plenty of photocopy centers, but if you assess the area properly, you will be able to estimate if you can squeeze in and thrive in that location.

In addition to photocopying and providing paper printing services, you can offer custom printing services for the likes of ID cards, T-shirts, banners, and more. Don’t forget to sell office stationery.

Digital marketing Agency

With the advent of digitalization and the increased use of the Internet, every business is trying to establish its presence online. Not many have experience playing in the digital space, this is where Digital marketing agencies come in. While there are hundreds of digital marketing agencies both big and small in the market, there is still room for more, besides this, most of the agencies are not even doing a half-decent job. If you recruit proper talent and treat them well, you can expect amazing returns. The setup cost isn’t too high either, you can min-max depending on the scale.

Event Management

Invest in a storage space, transport, buy equipment, hire people, and you are good to go. You can select your target audience depending on the size of your business. To expand your horizons, you can collaborate with catering businesses and photo studios or incorporate these services into your own business based on your budget. The key to successfully running an event management business is connections, so strive to expand your social circle. Your main marketing strategy is to show off your service, people attending the event are sure to enquire if they are pleased by the event management.

Cafe

The food business is what a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs initially get into, and consequentially the majority of their food businesses shut down in less than a year. The main reason they get into the food business is due to unrealistic expectations of the profit margins. The primary reasons for their failure are- bad location, mismanagement, spending too much on the less important things, trying to be everything, and inability to hire good and loyal cooks.

If you avoid the above pitfalls and start a well-thought-out cafe with carefully curated food options catering to your target audience, it is sure to click.

Franchise

Earlier I talked about a way for prospective business owners to start their own business without possessing any expertise or experience. While this is most certainly possible, you will still need basic management skills and some tact to proceed further.

There are thousands of brands trying to expand their franchises, for a first-timer, this is an excellent opportunity to learn the ins and outs of owning a business. While the margins are low for a franchise store, the investment is low too. In addition to this, you will receive help and guidance from the brand to run the business. They are perfect for gaining experience before starting your own venture. The best part is the investment, you can get a franchise store with an investment as low as 1 lakh to something as high as 5 crores. The store already has a reputation, and marketing will be taken care of by the franchise owner, you will only have to manage the store.

Remember

Before you blindly move ahead with any of these ideas, research your local market, and find the areas where it is lacking. Will your business fit in? Understand supply and demand, and plan for the future, will it still stay relevant 5 years down the road? Will it need expansion?

You will need to invest both time and money regardless of what business you start. Don’t start with false expectations, this is the biggest issue with aspiring entrepreneurs. There is no easy money, you will need to put in effort to learn everything there’s to know about your business and run it.

There are no cheat codes to success, you should be willing to take risks, make well-thought-out decisions at the drop of a hat, be prepared for failure, and always stay resilient. If you are trying to start a business just because you can’t handle your current job, then don’t even think about it. The stress from managing a business is manifold to that of when you are an employee.