Recession busters
Recently we decided to take the kids to the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan and we encountered parking hell.
Since I’m a native New Yorker, I pride myself on never having to pay for parking and lately we’re trying to be more budget conscious, but on this particular weekend my frugalness caused a big fight with the hubby.
I was circling the neighborhoods near the museum looking for someone who was pulling out of a primo spot, and my husband kept insisting I just pull into a parking lot. He had to go to the bathroom but I just couldn’t bring myself to drop $40 plus for a lot.
Turns out, a young entrepreneur’s recession-busting idea could have saved us all some grief.
Ben Sann, 20, runs
BestParking.com. It allows customers to scan the parking lot prices in four major cities and figure out which ones have the best deals.
Sann just won the distinction of one of the top ten home-based businesses in the “recession buster” category in
a contest conducted by small business website StartupNation and Microsoft Office Live Small Business.
(Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)
You know things are bad when contests start including a “recession” category.
But I digress.
Sann’s business has been booming despite the bad times. His sales this year have already hit nearly $250,000. And unique visitors to his site are up 80 percent in the last three months.
So far his service tracks parking rates in New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Washington DC. But his plan is to expand it to San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles in 2009.
So why is he doing well in a recession?
“Parking companies are struggling and need to find ways to boost revenues,” explains Sann, so they sign up to provide rates via his service.
“And consumers are coming to us because of the recession,” he adds.
Of the ten recession-busting firms that made the top ten, there were a few things these entrepreneurs had in common, says Rich Sloan, cofounder of StartupNation.
“They all leveraged the value of the web for their businesses and many used online marketing techniques,” he says. “They were also very focused on caretaking their customers, addressing concerns of customers and going the extra mile for them.”
Here’s a link to the other busters. For all of you small firms out there struggling, Sloan suggests some things you can do that successful companies are adopting right about now.
Do what you can do deflate your fixed costs, including looking at your business more as specific projects that have to be done. So that would mean you hire more contractors to do individual jobs instead of having to pay lots regular salaries when times get tough.
Sann has two full-time programmers on staff, one full-time rate input person, and part time rate collectors in each city. Other than that it’s just he and his dad who run the show.
The idea for the service came to him after watching a Seinfeld episode where George had trouble finding a parking space.
This kind of how-do-you-solve-a-problem thinking is what separates great entrepreneurs from the rest of us.
There I was driving around New York City, having a screaming match with my husband because I just wouldn’t park the car already, and all I came out of that with was a headache and angry husband.
Do you all have any great recession-proof business ideas, or marital advice?
