Editor’s note: This article was first published in June 2010. Its picture of promising sectors, such as security, tourism, solar energy and internet businesses, reflects that time.
A business is profitable when it meets an existing demand in the market, or even one that hasn’t appeared yet because people are unaware of the product or service we can provide. Obviously, no consumer asks for something they don’t know exists.
That’s why you need to know exactly what both future individual customers and local businesses need.
In every country there’s still demand for services for both private homes and businesses, so here are the first two sets of business ideas related to those services:
As for security, Argentina and Mexico are clearly two very beautiful countries that attract plenty of tourists, which creates new business opportunities waiting to be exploited.
You could set up a security business, whether in simple alarm systems or more complex security systems; offer pick-up and drop-off services for foreign clients, making yourself known among companies; or provide advice and escort services for tourists so they stay out of the most troubled areas. We covered some ideas in a previous article, 10 business ideas with no investment.
As for tourism, with the right approach you can find ways to tap into the wide variety of businesses that leisure and tourism offer, since they’re two major sources of income in these countries:
See also: How to sink a business in 4 steps: lessons from El Corte Inglés
Argentina and Mexico, like most Central and South American countries, enjoy plenty of sunshine and wide expanses of land, so we shouldn’t rule out businesses related to renewable energy and, above all, solar energy, which have a good chance of giving rise to many different kinds of business.
Nor should we rule out the whole range of businesses opened up by new technologies, especially in the internet age, when any product can be sold anywhere in the world and we have powerful business systems that can be set up with ease.
If you already have a business idea and think it could succeed, be sure to read up on the mindset an entrepreneur needs and, above all, the requirements a business owner must meet, which we’ve covered in previous articles.
Remember that every idea must come with proper development and a good business plan, a strategy, know-how for running a marketing campaign, and so on.
We recently wrote about how a product that anyone could have made became a success thanks to good strategies: the case of the inversion table.
Further reading
Featured image: Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
