Business ideas are everywhere.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 575.

Part 2

v Active vocabulary

o Study the following vocabulary items and collocations:

To be tougher than nails

To sell at a high profit

A gross understatement

At last count

To identify obvious needs

To meet the needs

To run a company

To forgo

To expand the venture

Start-up costs

To be on hand

To launch a business

To go under

To turn a substantial profit

Credentials

To operate without the benefit of something

An academic career marked by missed deadlines

To work around one's weaknesses

To excel in something

To be a hit

To target a new, untapped market

The downside

v Cultural notes

Spring break – spring vacations. American students have four periods of rest: Thanksgiving vacations, Christmas vacations, spring vacations and summer vacations.

Deadline– the time by which something must be finished and submitted; this limit must not be passed.

o Read the text. Do the comprehension check below:

Really, everywhere. Consider a recent graduate whose business consists of analyzing the clothing styles and colors worn by comic book characters, then selling the information to comic book publishers, reports Stuart Spero, an assistant business administration professor at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln. He recalls another new grad who started a successful company by organizing and selling Yellow Pages data on CD-ROM.

"It's tougher than nails to find good information," says Spero. "In fact, information gathering could form the basis for any number of new businesses."

A quick review of newsletters being produced and sold - usually at a high profit - turns Spero's assertion into a gross understatement. Current hot titles include Hunting Ranch Business, Seafood Soundings, Circus Report, Dracula News Journal and Celebrity Bulletin. The last, by the way, tracks the arrival of celebrities into New York City and costs $1,500 for an annual subscription.

Although more than 17,000 newsletters were being published in the U.S. at last count, there's still a topic or two you can cover for a paying audience, says Spero.

Sandra Sowell-Scott, assistant director of Temple University's Small Business Center in Philadelphia, says a great source of ideas is your campus and college community. "Identify obvious needs that aren't being met," she says. For example, two students at Temple noticed the poor quality of spring break trips being offered to students. So the two put together trips of their own, and now run a successful travel agency.

At nearby Haverford College, junior Brad Aronson persuaded his friend Jon Hurwitz to forgo the usual part-time jobs and publish a book that reviews Philadelphia restaurants and attractions. They distributed it at eight small campuses in the area, each of which was too small for advertisers to target individually. The venture was a success, netting the students five times what their former summer jobs paid, and they expanded the venture after graduation.