If you have available floor space in your retail or industrial location, consider renting it out to another business or sole proprietor. A health food store could rent space to a nutritionist, who in turn uses the foot traffic to give away a free analysis and consultation—selling the health food store’s products as part of [...]

With a little creativity, you can turn downtime at your restaurant, day spa, hair salon, or other service business into an Instant Income opportunity. For example, if you own a restaurant, you can generate business on slow nights by offering specially priced menus, live entertainment, or other incentives on those evenings.

Many small businesses—especially food establishments, personal service providers, and retailers—seem to have a slow day of the week or a slow evening. Many service companies have a difficult time booking house calls on weekday mornings and during the entire months of August and December. If you experience “slow times” or have excess service capacity, you’re [...]

Spiff programs If you sell to retailers, resellers, VARs, or other dealers and distributors, you can develop a spiff program that pays your accounts an extra incentive or a portion of the inventory’s wholesale price when they aggressively sell your inventory instead of other products that they might promote that week. Don’t think of a [...]

Whether you decide to sell your inventory to your own customers or you liquidate it to someone else to sell to theirs, you’ll need to keep in mind that certain kinds of offers work best for overstocks. In general, buyers expect obsolete inventory and overstocks to be sold at a price that’s well below full [...]