With this business idea you will offer a service to repaint and rejuvenate doors for homeowners, property owners, and business owners.
Unfortunately, just cleaning the doors cannot always bring them back to life, as it should. This is when the doors need sanding down and repainting.
Even if the door happens to be glass, it may need repairing, replacing, or improvements.
Most people will agree that taking care of a house or business door can give a building a real serious face-lift, and add to the curb appeal.
The door of a building is much like the eyes of a face.
First impressions can be very lasting, and as good business ideas go, starting a service that will appeal to a great variety of people that would benefit from some improvements to their doors could be a great way to add an extra income stream and could prove to be a fun occupation.
Making a large selection of new doors available to your customers is a wise decision also, just in case they decide that it might be a better decision to replace the existing door or doors.
In order to assure your future customers of your abilities to provide good service you should start by working on your own doors and then be sure to take before and after pictures.
This way your customers can see the type of work you have achieved before.
Be sure and always take good quality, before-and-after pictures to start-off your portfolio that you can always whip out and show future customers.
If you are good with computers, you might also offer a service in which you can take a good picture of the door or doors needing work.
Then work with the photo and change the colors of the doors on the photo, or the type of door, so that they can see how it looks before it is actually changed.
This can help your customers decide on the improvements that they would like you to make.
This type of business would do well on the Internet, but you could also start-off slowly and build your business with time.
You could actually go look for doors that need help and start with these possible customers first by offering your services, this will be a great way to build your customer base and start good word of mouth buzz about your business.
As your business grows, you will be building confidence in your skills with your new customers.
A great place to drum up business would be with realtors and home sellers.
Make sure you have professional brochures and business cards and place them with realty offices in your area.
You could also drive around looking for homes for sale that have doors that need your help and leave your brochure with the owner.
Make sure you have information in your brochure about the importance of curb appeal and an appealing front door in facilitating the sale of a house, and quote any statistics you can find that support these facts.
Your initial investment will be in your tools needed to fix and beautify the various doors you work on.
These can sometimes be very costly so you may want to keep your eyes open for estate sales and garage sales for some of them.
eBay is also a great source of used tools. You will want to have a good sanding machine to save wear and tear on your hands.
If you own a digital camera and computer this can help also if you can take pictures and show your customers what their building will look like after working on their doors.
You should be able to use a simple art program to accomplish the preview of changes.
If you don't have this skill it would be worth while to take the time to learn, if it is something you don't want to do, you could check around with your friends, especially younger ones, you might be able to pay them a small amount of money per door to do it for you.
Just include the cost in what you charge your customers.
When it comes to replacing customers' doors, this would be a great venue for offering new doors you could sell them.
You will probably be able to make a large profit on new doors also, make sure that you find wholesale companies that are willing to provide doors to you at a wholesale price.
Then you will just need to hang the new doors and give your customer's building a face-lift.
And it would be easy to expand this idea to offering new door hardware, and other fixtures that impact the impression around the front door such as address numbers and light fixtures.
Your business could be a total front door and entry curb appeal service that would really be in demand.
And because you would be offering a niche service, you would be seen as more of an expert and be able to offer quicker service to homeowners and business people since usually carpenters are just too busy to offer small scale services such as this.
You should even get your business card to carpenters and home decorating professionals in your area to increase your exposure.
