Support
Your Wanderlust
Imagination
and a sense of adventure have always been the best travel companions.
Both of these qualities can add an additional bonus to your travels: they
can help you earn money as you go. After all, being a traveler and being
an entrepreneur are very similar activities. As thousands of people have
already discovered, a portable business can be an ideal way to support
your wanderlust — making regular travel an integral part of your
enterprise.
Creating a
small business that you can run virtually anyplace takes a bit of preplanning
and initiative, but once you've considered the possibilities, you're bound
to find one that suits your talents, skills and travel plans. Here are
some of the winning ways others have used to feed their wanderlust and
bank account at the same time.
An
import/export business. Mary Green and Stanley Gillmar started
their importing business by bringing back items from their travels, then
inviting friends in for slides of their trip and the chance to purchase
things they had brought back. Eventually, they built a wholesale importing
business and had several clients for whom they shopped around the world.
A student of mine has used this same method with great success, starting
with importing peasant art that she fell in love with during a trip to
China. Once she saw the possibilities, she began incorporating shopping
on every foreign adventure with the intention of reselling her merchandise
back home.
Carrying goods
with you in the hopes of reselling them at your destination is another
possibility, of course. If you are traveling to Eastern Europe, for instance,
you could load up on thrift store jeans before you go, which are easy
to sell abroad.
Green and
Gillmar offer these guidelines to would-be importers: "Simply stated,
they are: 1) buy what you like, 2) buy within your own specialty, 3) buy
what you won't mind reselling, and 4) don't be afraid to buy." They
also advise novice importers to start small and build slowly.
One woman
who followed this advice now shops the world on her frequent trips and
holds a once-a-year World Bazaar, a kind of exotic garage sale where she
resells her treasures to local customers who eagerly await this event.
The U.S. Customs
Office has a number of useful publications you can get for free, including
Know
Before You Go — Custom Hints for Returning Residents. Certain
items are prohibited entry by law, including narcotics, lottery tickets,
obscene publications, fireworks, dangerous toys and switchblade knives.
Sell
homemade jewelry or handicrafts. If handicrafts are a specialty
of yours, consider the possibility of expanding your market abroad —
or to other parts of the country as you travel. Street markets and fairs
are popular all over the world. While many foreign countries are relaxed
about merchants casually setting up shop any old place, it makes sense
to know local regulations before you start selling. You'll also have to
decide if you're going to carry an inventory with you or if you can produce
what you're going to sell as you go. Obviously, if handmade furniture
is your craft, you'd have different logistical considerations than a jewelry
maker would have.
One young
woman who had successfully sold her handmade earrings at home found herself
short of funds while in Egypt. She located the necessary supplies, whipped
up a batch of earrings, and plunked herself down in the midst of the local
street market, where she quickly sold every pair.
A word of
caution: if this idea appeals to you, be sure to try it out at home first
and make sure your handicrafts are saleable.
Start
a tour business. Specialty tours offer unlimited opportunities
for creating a niche. Align yourself with a good travel agency that can
handle the details of your trip, such as booking travel and hotels. Your
responsibility will be marketing the tour and escorting it. While you
wouldn't want to compete with a large tour company and offer a generic
tour of Europe, for instance, you could do very well by designing a trip
aimed at a targeted audience.
After Linda
Leamer started teaching classes in adult education on how to serve a proper
English afternoon tea, she realized that there was an opportunity for
her to expand her business and get a free trip to England. Her Teatime
Tours of England are now an annual event and are so popular that many
people return year after year.
If you have
insight and experience into a part of the world that you love, organizing
a business around that locale might be a logical match. You could offer
Landscape Painting in Tuscany classes, for instance, and appeal to those
who love art and Italy. The key to making this work is to build your tour
around expertise that you already have.
Busking.
If you can play an instrument, sing, tap dance, juggle or act, you may
be able to earn money as a street performer. (This is more in the area
of pocket change, not a full-blown profit center.) On a trip to England,
storyteller Daniel Kertzner set up shop outside Covent Garden, where he
earned a respectable amount of money for a few hours' work. To do this,
you need the tools of your trade, a favorable climate and an audience.
Regulations about street performing vary from country to country, but
in general you will be tolerated if you aren't causing harm or blocking
traffic.
Offer
a personal service. Personal service businesses are wonderfully
transportable. If you have acquired skills as a computer programmer, plumber,
gardener or accountant, you can easily create an instant business abroad.
If you plan to stay in one place for an extended period of time, you can
offer your services through classified ads in local papers, through flyers
pinned up on community bulletin boards, or through making contact with
potential clients. Almost any experience you have doing domestic or professional
work can be converted into your own temporary service agency. Keep a list
of potential ideas by recalling the skills and experiences you have that
you could market in creative ways. And if you've successfully run a service
business at home, reopening it in a new location should be fairly simple
— even if you may need to use a slightly different approach to marketing
or, perhaps, scaling down your menu of services.
Be
a travel writer and/or photographer. Norman Ford has been a professional
travel writer for years, living and working in many locations. He suggests
writing from abroad for your local newspaper as one source of income.
"So great is the demand for foreign reporting by smaller magazines
and newspapers that any American who can sell nonfiction should be able
to go overseas and set himself up in his own territory with a good chance
of success."
While competition
can be stiff for marketing travel articles and photos, there are opportunities
in smaller publications for beginners. A traveling friend of mine has
earned nearly $10,000 reselling his article on trekking through Nepal
to dozens of American newspapers. Pack your camera or laptop computer
and look for saleable ideas wherever you go. You might create your own
niche by thinking about the kind of information you had difficulty finding
for yourself about your destination — and then researching it upon
your arrival.
Tutor
or teach. Bob Walling, who has lived and worked in several spots
around the globe, points out that people everywhere are eager to learn
our language. "You could land in a city today, put an ad in tomorrow's
paper offering your services, and be in business immediately," he
says. You don't have to be a certified teacher in order to do this, but
you should take some English as a Second Language material with you if
you plan to tutor. Call your state Literacy Board for information on obtaining
basic teaching.
Adult education
centers might also welcome a visiting teacher — or you could create
and promote your own classes and seminars. Different programs have varying
requirements, but opportunities abound for so many kinds of classes, from
fitness to improving relationships to developing leadership skills, that
your knowledge and experience may be easily turned into a teaching opportunity.
Although creating
a portable business may seem risky or frightening if you've never been
self-employed before, keep in mind that you'll probably feel more confident
in a strange environment, where nobody knows you, than you would at home.
With a bit of before-you-go research and an idea or two that you like,
the odds are in your favor for creating a business that will not only
bring you income, but will have you meeting more people than you would
have if you were simply a tourist.
Even better,
once you've mastered running a portable business, you'll find you've given
yourself a wonderful gift — a passport that makes it possible for
you to travel as often and as far as you'd like.
There's
more where this came from.
Order Winning Ways now!
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