Brilliant Business Ideas – Turn Useless Byproducts Into Cash

Anyone looking for brilliant business ideas needs to study the life of a man named Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Corporation.

In case you don’t know who this man is, Henry Ford was the inventor of the Ford Model T, the world’s first mass-produced automobile. The man literally invented the assembly line that is used in industries around the world today. The invention of the assembly line was important because it allowed Ford to increase production and produce many more cars than before.

But what I want to focus this post on is another business that he was involved in that very few people took an interest in. This business genius took the scrap wood left over from the production of his Model T and turned it into charcoal briquettes (used for cooking and heating).

This “side company” (built from by-products) became so profitable that he built a separate charcoal plant and founded the Ford Charcoal Company, later renamed Kingsford.

There are obvious by-products or waste that are generated by many companies. For example, there is sawdust generated by sawmills. This can be put to a lot of profitable use. For example, you can make particle board and even logs for fireplaces.

It is said that every art of creation has a by-product, which means that whatever business you are doing or want to do is bound to create “waste” which is actually a by-product that you can turn into huge profits.

Some of the brilliant business start-up ideas in my book involve making huge profits on by-products, and they don’t have to be your own by-products. I hope that makes you think in the right direction.

But let me tell you another true story from right here in Kenya about a company that made huge profits from the waste it generated.

Everyone knows about the Nation’s newspapers. The company publishes the newspaper with the largest circulation in the region. A few years ago they had a serious problem. The price of oil, as always, was rising and the cost of distributing their newspapers was growing alarmingly. The waste they generated was the extra space in the huge pick-up trucks left behind when the newspapers were packed for delivery to various towns and destinations. There was even more “waste” when the van returned from delivering the newspapers mostly empty. What a waste.

And so they devised a way to turn the “waste” or by-product into huge sums of money. They launched a courier service to deliver letters and packages across the country. They called the company Messengers Nation. They immediately had a huge advantage because newspapers are delivered daily and they often have a very tight delivery schedule because newspapers are perishable products that need to be delivered on time. Today’s newspaper cannot be sold tomorrow. It has to be sold today and preferably early in the day. And so Nation’s courier could promise its customers that the package would arrive at its destination without fail the next morning.

This new overnight courier service created from a “waste product” has generated huge profits for the Nation media group and also makes newspaper delivery very efficient.

Take a closer look around you.

What is being wasted?

Can you turn it into profit?