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Untapped Business Opportunities In South Africa & Easy Business Ideas
These untapped business opportunities in South Africa are not only easy business ideas, but they also have the potential to provide a really good income.
Furthermore, as they’re largely untapped business opportunities, there’s not a whole load of competition.
Therefore, being easy businesses to start in South Africa gives you a reasonably good chance of turning it into a reliable source of income that you can depend on.
Benefits Of These Untapped Business Opportunities
- Low capital investment.
- High standard of expertise or qualification NOT required.
- Generating your own income is not only a viable solution for anyone who’s unemployed, but it’s immensely satisfying being the master of your financial destiny by having your own business.
Anyway, enough of the preamble, let’s take a look and delve into these untapped business opportunities in South Africa for you.
1. Cleaning Services
This is a good example of an of the untapped business opportunities in South Africa judging by the demand for cleaning services.
People are always looking for reliable home cleaning services and the ones I’ve used have delivered a mediocre service at best.
There’s a huge opportunity here for someone who’s able to deliver a superior service.
Furthermore, by providing cleaning services that stand out from the crowd, you’ll be able to charge a premium which most people will be happy to pay if you provide a quality service.
You could split your cleaning services business into various aspects like this, for example.
- House cleaning services
- Carpet cleaning
- Gutter cleaning
- Window cleaning
- Pressure washing
- Commercial cleaning services
Therefore, depending on your resources and staff, you could offer the whole suite of cleaning services.
However, if you’re a one man business, you could maybe specialise in one aspect of cleaning.
If you’re a one man show, don’t think that it can’t make good money because it can. It just depends on your attitude and work ethic.
Believe there is a huge opportunity in this space as many well to do households will pay anything to have a good, honest cleaning service that they can rely on.
All you’ll need is transport to get to places in your neighbourhood and once you’ve got one happy customer word will spread and you’ll soon be getting more business.
And more business will give you the opportunity to start employing staff and having your own vehicle to transport your cleaners and equipment.
Lastly, here’s an example of someone making a go of one of these cleaning opportunities.
There’s a guy in Sea Point, Cape Town who walks around with a set of poles which join together to form one long pole to which he attaches a cleaning device.
He then goes around cleaning windows of shops and buildings in the area which provides him with a regular income stream.
The message is that this is arguably the easiest business to start up that you can earn money from if you have the drive and energy.
2. Blogging
If you enjoy writing and have creative ideas, blogging is a viable business opportunity for you.
Some bloggers make millions whilst others struggle to make enough to pay their rent.
However, those who aren’t successful at it are usually the ones who aren’t willing to put in the time and effort to write meaningful content that has people coming back for more.
So if you’re a fairly persuasive person, you could make a killing as full time blogger and easily make R1000 a day online.
If you think you can but you’re not totally sure, I would suggest that you try it out and see how you go with it before committing to it full time.
This is how you can start you own blog for free which is a 100% risk-free way of trying it out to see whether it’ll work for you.
Lastly, I’ve been blogging for a while now and whilst I’ve made millions from it, there have been some particularly tough times with low earnings, however with determination & perseverance it’s always ended well.
3. Hair Dressing
This business opportunity is obviously not for everyone.
Whilst it’s one of the easy businesses to start in South Africa, you would probably need to know something about hairdressing.
However, if you’re willing to learn or if you are an unemployed hairdresser, this presents another great untapped business opportunity.
A mobile mobile hair salon has massive potential to generate a steady income in and around your neighbourhood.
Once you get started and have one or two happy clients, your hair dressing services will spread around your area and you’ll soon have enough clients to keep you busy throughout the month.
In fact once you’re generating enough money, you can decide on when to work if you feel like taking a break.
Furthermore, you don’t necessarily need a mobile salon to make this work, as you can do it from home.
Or you could build a regular client base at the local old aged home where most ladies can’t get out to have their hair done.
So whether you want to go the mobile hair salon route or just offer a home hair dressing service, they could both turn into lucrative business opportunities with scope for expansion.
4. Messenger Service
Starting your own neighbourhood messenger service is one of those easy business ideas and a largely untapped business opportunities in South Africa.
If you can’t afford your own vehicle, you can use private contractors or use owner-drivers who you pay per job.
In other words you do not need to employ anyone or pay anyone a salary as you only pay an agreed amount per delivery which keeps your costs in line with what you charge.
The benefit of this is that you have no fixed overheads, so when you’re not paying a salary to someone when you’re not busy. You only pay when you earn.
However, if you have your own vehicle you can even target companies for their same day drive-away jobs.
For instance often a company will need a document or part delivered urgently to a destination that cannot be reached by air.
For instance, a part that’s needed in Springbok but needs to be collected in Cape Town and driven directly to the factory in Springbok.
These kind of courier jobs pay really good money, usually on a per kilometer basis, and are way more relaxing than doing loads of small messenger jobs around town.
Demand is certainly high for all of these service and if performed well, you could coordinate with retail chains and other distribution centers to synchronise your services with their needs.
However, whilst this is one of those easy business ideas to start up, there certain things that you need to be aware of.
I. Customers Demand 100% Service Levels
In a time sensitive business like this, you won’t survive if you can’t deliver a perfect service in terms of on time delivery.
Furthermore, any loss or damage sustained to shipments will not auger well for you besides being exposed to an expensive claim.
To be successful with this type of startup, you need to remember that the critical success factor is the overall experience for your customer no matter how good you may think you are.
In this business you’re only as good as your last shipment.
However, constantly exceeding your customer’s expectations will place you in a position where you’ll be able to charge premium rates and make more money.
II. Optimise Your Operation
In this business you can bet that a few customers will be demanding urgent at the same time which could put your operation under pressure.
In this instance it’s crucial that you optimise the resources that you have by combining routes or doing shipment handovers at certain points to streamline your deliveries.
Also, having access to a pool of owner drivers who you can rely on at these times will help.
III. Covid-19 Safety Protocols
This has become an important part of the delivery cycle which could impact positively or negatively on your perceived level of service.
If your drivers, or you, are careless with the parcel handover by neglecting Covid-19 protocols, it could cost you a customer.
This would be a disaster, especially if you’re doing everything else right.
However, if you’re really careful with maintaining high levels of the pandemic protocols it could stand you in high esteem with your clients and help grow your business.
Lastly, whilst this is one of those untapped business opportunities in South Africa, it can be stressful but extremely lucrative too.
5. Web Hosting Business – Home Based
Whilst it may sound like this one’s only for those techie type of people, this isn’t like that at all.
Not only do you not require any technical skills to start a web hosting business with a reseller account, but it’s also a lucrative and easy to set up business opportunity.
Moreover, some of the main benefits of starting a reseller web hosting business are these;
- Almost zero start up costs – just a computer and a reseller web hosting account is all that’s needed
- Earning potential is unlimited
- No technical knowledge or experience is required
- You can start today
You’ll need to find the best web hosting for startups, like this one I use, so that you can provide a quality service with all the bells and whistles that businesses require in the digital era.
Furthermore, you don’t need to know how to set up servers or anything like that.
Most importantly, it must come with white label functionality so that you can promote the service as your own.
Even the support your reseller web hosting company provides should appear to be coming from your hosting business, like my provider does.
This is all handled by the parent host who should provide you with white label capability and support for your customers as well.
Go here to get your step-by-step guide to setting up your own reseller web hosting business »
5 More Untapped Business Opportunities In South Africa
- You can make money online with Google with the following…
- Getting a remote Google job or career
- Doing Google opinion surveys for rewards
- Create and sell apps on the Google Play Store
- And more…
- Another quick-to-start untapped business opportunity in South Africa is flipping domain names for profit.
You might even be lucky and hit the motherload by snapping up a cheapie and selling it for millions. - It may sound like it, but you don’t need any tech skills to start a web hosting business with a reseller account – lucrative and easy to set up.
- Become a virtual assistant which would entail managing your client’s schedule or working remotely on your client’s projects without requiring any face-to-face interaction.
This is the ideal opportunity for a work-at-home mom, who has experience of being a PA. - If you’re not into the online business thing, these 12 small business ideas & opportunities could mostly be done from home with almost no start up capital needed.
Last Word On Untapped Business Opportunities In South Africa
The great thing about these untapped business opportunities in South Africa is that you can start most of them from home without having to risk a huge capital investment.
Furthermore, despite these business opportunities having the potential to make loads of money, without the right entrepreneurial mindset you may struggle to survive when the going gets tough.
Lastly, if you have the following entrepreneurial traits, there’s no doubt that you’ll be a roaring success no matter which of these untapped business opportunities in South Africa you choose.
- Motivation – don’t procrastinate, take action to achieve the desired outcome.
- Vision – visualise & plan where you’re going with the business
- Creativity.
- Persuasiveness.
- Versatility.
- Risk Tolerance.
- Flexibility.
- Decisiveness.