$10k Challenge: Make Money with Your Own Sign-in-the-Yard Business

Here's another idea for those of you playing along with my quest to raise an additional $10k this year in income -- extra income outside my regular job. (The numbers I ran show that making this amount and socking it away year after year can yield quite a sizeable next egg.) What's the idea? Developing your own sign-in-the-yard business. Here's the whole story:

The other day I'm biking through a neighboring sub-division and I see this yard full of big smiley-face signs along with a sign that states "Smile! It's Kelly's first birthday!" There must have been 20 signs in the yard -- hard to miss for sure. Also in the yard was a smaller sign for the company that left the signs -- Flamingo Dave's.

Flamingo Dave's basically let's people rent signs and plastic yard ornaments and have them placed in other people's yards. These are to celebrate a birthday, graduation, or some other sort of special event (see various themes here). For an idea of what it looks like when in a yard, see these pictures.

Now it seems that a yard full of signs/flamingoes doesn't come cheap. Dave charges a minimum of $59 for a signing, but prices can get way up there if you really want to make it a big deal.

Ok, so get this:

1. There's not much cost to the business (a website and a small investment in some signs and a few flamingoes.)

2. You make a decent amount of money on each client.

3. Every time you do someone's yard it's a quite visible advertisement for your company.

4. Getting out the word-of-mouth ought to be easy -- simply do a few of these for free at some high-profile homes or businesses.

5. If you could do a couple a week, you could end up netting a few thousand dollars a year! Not bad at all!!!!!

Comments

[Rich Schmidt]

Sounds great... but I imagine there are a lot of ongoing replacement costs for the signs/flamingoes that get swiped, stomped, or otherwise vandalized.

BTW, anyone considering this might want to visit www.flamingoed.com to see if there's already someone working in your area. It's a directory of people doing this by state. Looks like there's someone covering my county already... though I've never seen one of their displays up...

[Dave]

I can see zoning changes already

[FamilyFinanceBlog]

It sounds like a good idea, but every time I think about starting a new business, it seems like I come up with ideas that are about unnecessary consumption. And the environmentalist half of me never likes those ideas. At least in this case, though, you would be re-using the stuff, which is a lot better than what most people do (order from Oriental Trading Company and then throw it away.)

[emily]

If you're environmentally-minded, why not play that up? Conduct environment audits to reduce water or electricity costs - around here it's water, so tanks, type of irrigation, water-saving showerheads etc. Or suggest adding timer to heaters, better insulation and sealing off a room to reduce heating bills. As well as the savings on bills, sometimes you can get rebates from electricity companies, state or federal governments - QLD had free water tanks for several months - to add on to your value as an advisor.