Got some extra time you want to turn into extra cash? Look around at the kinds of chores people need done in the spring and summer, around the yard and around the house, and see what opportunities present themselves.



A case in point is washing windows. Charging 1 or 2 per normal sized window can be the road to entrepreneurship for you. Start out going door to door with a pamphlet or a business card these can be printed at home for modest costs (and there are places online where you can print up business cards for reasonable costs as well.)





You’ll strike out more often than you make a hit, but a response rate of 2-4% isn’t bad initially. As you do the work, if you do a good job at it, you’ll find that you get customer referrals, and repeat business, and eventually, you’ll have enough work that you’ll need to bring in some friends.



To make the most of this opportunity, you’ll want to advertise. Consider classified ads in the local paper; if there’s a local weekly alternative paper, they usually have a good price rate for classifieds, and you can get some seasonal surges of business, in particular around the ends of semesters in college towns, and "student moving days". If you live in an area with a lot of apartment complexes, chat up the apartment complex owners and neighbours; post your flyer with your telephone number in the washroom; nearly everyone who moves out of an apartment and wants to get their security deposit back will pay a bit of money to help clean up the mess of their tenancy.



You can expand this business from just doing windows to cleaning the interior of a house. The "bucket of soapy water and a sponge" model also works for cleaning up interior walls and wallpaper. Nearly any kind of job that can be solved with chemicals, rubber gloves and a bit of elbow grease is amenable to the small entrepreneurial spirit, and can give you a nice spot of extra cash.



The trick to making this business work is realizing that it IS a business. You’ll need to factor in revenues versus advertising expenses, and try to build up a regular clientele of repeat customers, to form the backbone of your enterprise. Once it’s growing, you can expand your business take on people to help expand your operation with more cleaners, take on some office help to manage finances and handle advertising.



All in all, starting a small business is a fairly simple thing to do find a need to be met, and meet it, charging enough to be worth the work you’re doing. In 7 days you will either be one week closer to owning your own business, or just 7 days older, which would you prefer?