Making money, especially when you haven’t got any capital is part ‘art’ and part ‘science’. What you have to do is offer personal services, do labour intensive tasks and sell yourself. Necessity is truly the mother of invention! There are many money making ideas around, but here’s a start…

 A great money making idea is to start your own escort service! Are you someone who likes to socialise and has free times in the evenings, has good social skills and you know how to put people at ease? Are you willing to work unsociable hours? Then here’s a great money making idea that will put your interpersonal skills to great use. This term is still used as a euphemism for call-girl businesses, but there are actually some very practical reasons why escorts, male and female, are in demand. There are now an increasing number of women in business and the professions. When required to attend formal occasions and corporate dinners where convention expects them to bring a partner, they may require a presentable male to fulfil this role for the evening.

Usually no pretence is required, just the ability to wear a dinner suit, eat a meal and make pleasant small talk for a couple of hours. Oh, and accept an agreed fee for your efforts. Nice work if you can get it, and what are great money making idea! It is still likewise assumed that professional men will attend such events with a female companion. For obvious reasons a lot of actors and actresses make a good part-time income from legitimate escort work. But you don’t have to be especially sophisticated in any way, just prepared to look and act the part, blend in and make up the numbers. If you’re a reasonable dancer this might be a fact worth advertising. Whether male or female be prepared for occasional sexual overtures and risqué invitations, and whatever your feelings in the matter, take care how you deal with them. You can either register with an agency for this sort of work, or advertise yourself. An even better money making idea is to start your own agency.

If you want other money making ideas that require no capital outlay, but just your energy and labour, try some of the following…The best money making ideas are those you can get passionate about. What turns you on?  Carpentry, cleaning cars, window cleaning, mowing lawns and gardening, home and office cleaning, dog walking, odd jobs, virtual assistant. The key is to get creative and use your imagination!

What are you good at what do you love to do? If you know the answer then you are guaranteed a sure fire way to earn an extra income and if you have steady job you don’t need to give it up.

 Can you put on a hat that says you’re an expert in Mergers and Acquisitions, strategic alliances, consolidation, customer relations, human relations, cross border trading, effecting a massive increase in sales, new cost effective marketing methods, CRM, efficient reporting procedures, fighting off advances from unwanted predators, disposals, ring fencing or bullet proofing companies?

 Do you have a bent toward corporate or entrepreneurial cultures? Do have a flair for IT or sales and marketing. What problems have you solved in the past for yourself, friend or a company that gave you a big buzz? Can you create the same results again, and this time get generate extra income?

 Do you have skills and experience in the mailroom or in mail order? Can you get excited about solving problems to do with fraud, security and theft? Can you add some business experience with some knowledge gained on various hobbies, along with some passion and enthusiasm and other things you are willing to learn? Can you make a list of the things that make you unique, skilful, user friendly? What are the things that set you apart? When do you come into your own? When can you operate with decision and verve? When do you get in the zone? What ideas have you had in the past that may generate extra income, but you have pushed aside.

 When you’ve answered these questions you will have the blueprint for sure fire ways to make extra income. Offer your services as a consultant.

 There will be plenty of other things that you will need to do before you can begin to earn that extra income. However, answering those questions will help you to identify your areas of specialism. And your specialist knowledge is what people will pay for your ability to act as an outsider who listens and can come up with solutions to problems.

 Here are ten more great ideas that may trigger something deep in your mind to help you earn extra income:

 #1 Earn extra income by becoming a business consultant. This is a multi-billon dollar industry and there is massive demand for consultants. More and more firms are turning to outside help and to outsource various and numerous services.

#2 Earn extra income by becoming a life coach. There have many thousands of column inches written and huge adverting campaign costing millions of dollar promoting life coaches. All the hard and expensive work has been done for you. What you need to do is start to help a few clients by holding their hands and assisting them in accomplishing their goals.

#3 Earn extra income by a sales trainer. By becoming a roving sales trainer you can travel the country, even the world, and earn huge fees by teaching people how to sell and how to increase sales.

#4 Earn extra income by becoming a workshop or seminar leader. If you like the idea of getting up on stage you can create your own workshop of become a valuable asset to someone  who has a promotions company and needs speakers.

#5 Earn extra income by becoming a public speaker. There are many speaker bureaus crying out for good after dinner speakers. If you can entertain for 60 or 90 minutes you’ll be surprised as to how much extra income you can earn.

#6 Earn extra income by becoming a tele-sales person or tele-sales trainer. Extra income is to be earned both ways but it all depends on individual preferences. Some like to work at the coal face selling life insurance, or shares or time-share whlst other like teach others how to do it. Either way you make you oodles of extra income.

#7 Earn extra income by teaching people marketing skills. There is so much to marketing, creating branding, and packaging and coming up with killer products and killer brands. If you have a creative bent you may very well be able to stimulate minds and give people enough options so they can make their products fly.

#8 Earn extra income by teach Internet marketing. This is the consultancy of the future and it is already in great demand demand. If you are computer literate and have picked up how to drive traffic to websites and sell online, these are extremely valuable tools you can teach.

#9 Earn extra income by teaching copywriting skills. This is a course that you may very well sell vie mail order or over the Internet. Failing that give workshops or go around to companies that wish to increase their sales…and which one’s don’t!

#10 Earn extra income by programming your mind with all the above ideas and then adding a few of your own. By doing this you will start to develop money consciousness and your biocomputer will start to delivering up astounding Eurekas! and money making ideas.

I remember the first day I met my first mentor, Seamus O’Rourke, nearly forty years ago. I had seven motorcycle shops and two furniture shops and had massively over expanded and he could see I was in trouble and carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. We talked things through and he gave me a concrete action plan to get back into profit – quickly. I agreed a massive cost cutting exercise with him, then I asked when we should begin to implement the plan. I don’t know why, but I had in mind next month or perhaps the month after but his response stunned me. “We start now, immediately, if not sooner”, and with that we jumped in a car and drove to each shop with Seamus in his famous “hatchet-man” man mode.

I was very nervous as I introduced Seamus to each manager, but he took great pains to establish a rapport with each of them in the shortest space of time, but then immediately got to the core of the problem; that if we didn’t carry out a dramatic cost cutting exercise we simply weren’t going to survive. We then got each manager so sign up to a commission only deal whereby they got a split of the profits made from repairs and bike sales. Wherever we could we would see the landlord of each shop and re-negotiated the rent – downwards.

I was amazed at how receptive they were once they realized we were serous about slashing our overheads. When we couldn’t get a substantial reduction we searched out cheaper premises and moved very quickly. Seamus taught me that overheads have legs and wherever we could, we’d get rid of staff who weren’t paying their way or get them to work on commission only. Failing that we would get rid of them. This really turned out to be the longest, most uncomfortable day of my life but by the end of it, like Seamus promised, I started to breathe freer.

We also looked at all ways of slashing utility bills, insurance, magazine subscriptions, window cleaners, (and anything that we could do ourselves) anything where that was an outgoing expense came under the scrutiny Seamus massive magnifying glass and sharp pencil. I have mentioned about five items here, but in reality there were literally dozens of expenses that got the chop, some small other large. This day I learned about massive immediate action, no-sentiment and doing the right thing. The very next day we started to activate many different ways to make the shops more profitable, see yesterdays blog for a few of them.

Margin! Margin! Margin! As a young entrepreneur I was fortunate enough to be taken under the wing of an astute old Irishman by the name of Seamus O’Rourke. I mention him in all my books, he was my first mentor. He taught me, among many other things, about margin. Prior to that I was clueless. I will now share a few things with you, that perhaps will stay with you for the next forty years! When you buy a product for $10 and double the price of it most people will immediately say that is 100% profit. That’s not quite right. When you add $10 on the price and then you eventually sell the product, what comes back to you is $20 – 50% was the cost price and only 50% was gross margin. Don’t forget out of the gross profit margin must come a proportion of your overheads, wages, salaries, rent, business rates and all other expenses. If you buy a product for $10 and add $5 (which many retailers do), when you sell it, you get $15 back, ergo $10 was the cost price and $5 was gross profit, so that is only 33% gross profit margin.

 Seamus quickly moved the conversation along. When you buy a product and then sell it most people will say the gross profit (before you take out overheads) is the difference between the buying price and the selling price. Again, this is not quite true. Profit is the difference between buying price and the REPLACEMENT price. For example: you buy a small gold bar for $1000 and sell it for $1350 you may consider the profit was $350. BUT, if you then go to your supplier and he charges you $1350 for the new gold bar stock, your profit has been effectively wiped out. This is of particular concern in times of high inflation, recession and unstable economies and this one point alone is wiping thousands of businesses of the face of the earth! And on top of product price increases, don’t forget postage, utilities, fuel, salaries, rent, taxes have all seen massive hikes and those increases are eating into your margins – dramatically.

 When I had my motorcycle shops in the early seventies, Seamus pointed out something that turned our lives around. He showed me that when we sold new motorcycles we made 17% profit, but on used motorcycles we made 117% profit so we stopped selling new motorcycles overnight and went from strength to financial strength. He then pointed out that when we broke up crashed motorcycles and sold off all the parts as used spares, we made 1117% profit. Needless to say, that’s what we concentrated on and ended up with the largest bike wreckers in the country. These days I urge young and old entrepreneurs alike, to concentrate on products and services that have huge margins.

My following has come to expect money-making gems everyday but I have made a decision to gear up even more and give you even bigger leverage…so here goes. I am going to give the farm away yet again, and for the next thirty days you can hear me squeal like a goose, so here’s a real gem for you: Over the coming years you’ll meet all sorts of people who will ‘talk the talk’ and convince you that they are the right ones to do your PR, web building or design, marketing, sales or some other service. You’ll no doubt sign them up, give them an advance and pay them month after month. Most times you’re going to end up bitterly disappointed! Why? Simply because most people can ‘talk the talk’ – very few, perhaps one in a hundred, (if you’re lucky!)  can and will actually deliver.

So just how can you build your business, prosper and save yourself heartache and frustration? Well, you can, but it isn’t simple, so here’s my best shot, based on over forty-years of experience in the field, dealing with lots of ‘talkers’ and a few actual ‘doers.’ Even if someone sounds really good, it still pays to have a colleague in the room with you listening to the sales pitch so that the two of you can decide how realistic the proposal is, then try to talk to at least three people who they have performed their miracles for in the past. Drill down on these previous clients and get to the bottom of what was really delivered and what wasn’t.

Don’t forget if they fail to deliver, the excuses you’ll get will be just as exotic as the sales pitch you received in the first place, maybe even more so. Unfortunately you can’t build a business based on excuses, not even exotic ones – only demonstrable results.  Try to get warm introductions from your own business associates who you trust and have known for years and get them to introduce you to people who really can deliver. Realize that some things do take a time to build up, like PR, stuffing sales funnels and leads times so don’t confuse your misunderstanding of business time frames with the lack of someone else’s performance.

Get a one page agreement in writing, as to what they get paid and what you can realistically expect in return for your money. In that agreement, try to capture all the promises and inferences that went down in the ‘talk of talks’ sales pitch to you. Cover off lead times and times frames in the agreement. Enter into the agreement with your eyes wide open – most people don’t. Have a weasel clause so you can escape and stop paying if you’re not getting the required results, so you can get on with your life, get shot of the ‘talker’ and tie up with a ‘doer. Sometimes you have to kiss many frogs to find the princess and once you do – marry her! (or him!)