How to Keep Snail from your Backyard and Rake in Lots of Cash

 Snails are common shell creatures we find in our backyards, especially during the rainy season. They are very sensitive to sunlight, dehydration and would always live in places where you have vegetation. Snails may look dispensable,but they can be a huge source of wealth.

Research has shown that this common creature could provide much needed nutrition for people living in developing countries like Nigeria, where inexpensive sources of protein are hard to come by. According to a study published in the International Journal of Food Safety, Nutrition and Public Health - snail meat may actually be superior to beef in terms of nutritional value and taste acceptability.


There are several kinds of snails all over the world. They include Achatina achatina, Achatina marginata (Nigerian specie) and Achatina fulica which is the type found in tropical Africa.


Fortunately, it is possible to breed snails from home. Are you thinking of a business you can start with low risk and stream of income attached to it, then you may consider backyard snail farming. The high volume sale recorded by snail traders, weekly in Lagos alone, is an indication that consumption rate is high which makes it a business goldmine.

About Backyard Snail Farming

One can breed or rear snails (either for home consumption or commercial purposes) from the backyard. It's all about artificial creation of a natural environment for snails to thrive. The process of farming or raising land snails specifically for human consumption is called Heliculture. Snails naturally thrive best in a good moist loamy soil, and cool vegetation.

When you have a lush green vegetable garden. (a good soil that contains 20%-40% organic matter), at home and you have particular trees such as banana, plantain,
coconut, etc that provide shade, then you can easily stock the garden with snails dividing them into pens.

What a Snail Pen Is
Farm animals are usually kept in pens so as to restrict their movement. A good snail pen enables the breeder to monitor his or her stock at all times with ease. So, a snail pen is just a single fence-in area which restricts the movement of snails and protects them. It can be built using corrugated sheet metals, fine-mesh chicken wire or woven plant material from split bamboo.
Usually, a snail pen would always be free of weeds or overgrown grasses. It must have shelter plants like plantain, coconut, banana, pineapple, pawpaw to provide shade.
The pens are constructed in various sizes depending on your land space. Depending on the size available to you, you can have: 1m x 1m, 1.5m x 1m, 5m x 5m or 10m x 5m. With a 1m x 1m pen space, you can comfortable stock 50 giant snails.

The Need to Grow Shelter Plants
What are shelter plants? They are plants that provide cool shade or serve as windbreakers in a snail pen. They are source extra food for the snails to aid quick growth. Snails can choose what to eat from any of the shelter plants. Some common shelter plants are banana tree, plantain tree, oil palm, pawpaw, coconut tree. These shelter plants overtime helps to suppress the growth of weeds and grasses in the pen. When there's excessive rain, they climb and hide under the plants.

 Reason Snails Are Highly Consumed

The very nutritious snails are big and are in high demand. Consumers (especially in highbrow areas) who know the worth go for them because they are very high in protein and low in saturated fat when compared to the regular beef. Snails are a good source of vitamin E, vitamin A, vitamin B12, Iron and excellent source of essential fatty acids.

Why Edible Snails Are Scarce
Due to continual decline through deforestation, urbanization, road construction, use of pesticides and bush burning, giant snails are gradually grinding to extinction in Nigeria. Despite the fact that snails are carted away by traders from the rural areas to towns and cities, year-in-year out, for consumption without replenishment, a lot still abound in our farms and forest. This is attributed to their reproductive potentials, and peculiar survival features. Hence, those who go into breeding snails from their backyard will not only be making money, but will be helping to preserve the existence of the snail kingdom.

How to Identify Good Snails
When looking for good snails, there are striking features you should look out for. According to a snail expert, good edible snails should fill their shells and have good strong shells which protect them from their enemies. The shell of an edible snail must not be broken or perforated. While perforations retard their growth, broken shells could lead to death.
The large snails are better and healthier and lay more eggs than smaller snails. They also sell better at the market. In addition, the large snails hatch better and the baby snails grow faster and bigger.

What Food Do Snail Eat?
Snails generally feed on fruits and vegetables. Some of which include: Pineapple, Pawpaw, Water melon, Guava, Oil palm, Coconut, Banana, Plantain, Assorted flowers and plants. They also love a plant known as bishop plant. They also feed
on pap residue. The disadvantage of flowers and plants is that they are seasonal when planted in your garden unlike banana and plantain trees which have the capacity to regenerate.

States Where You Can Find Edible Giant Snails
You can find edible snails in states like Osun, Oyo, Ekiti, Ondo, Edo, Delta, Ogun, Kwara and Kogi. Most of the snails are gotten from thick forest. The snails are then brought to the local markets for sale. However care should be taken in buying snails for rearing at the local market because such snails might have been washed or left under harsh and stressful conditions for unnecessarily long period of time and may soon die.

What is the Seasonal Period for Snail Farming in Nigeria

Snails can be available all year round. However, snail business thrives in Nigeria between the months of April and November each year. Peak months are June, July, August and September (Rainy Season). But note that lands that flood is bad for snail farming. Excessive water in the soil does not allow for reproduction or snail eggs to hatch.

Why You Should Start Your Backyard Snail Farming

Backyard snail farming business  is one of the easiest animal farming business one can engage in. The business is not saturated yet. Engaging in it means you are helping to protect the extinction of the animal from the Wild (Forest). Snail requires only a small area of land to start with. This backyard business is easy to combine with other normal schedule of activities and can easily be managed even by women and children.
There is high potential for good returns; one of the most profitable investment you can think of. As hermaphrodites, both the male and female specie of snails have capacity to reproduce periodically. Moreover, a full grown giant snail lays on the average 8 eggs every other two months and can reproduce itself at least 20 times in a season. This reproductive advantage on the long run increases the stock of the breeder.
Another interesting benefit or breeding snails is the fact that they are in high demand in high brow areas, hotels, restaurants etc. Their feeding materials are cheap and locally available. Edible snails are available all year round especially during rainy season.

Streams Of Income In The Business
Backyard snail farming is such that you can make multiple streams of income. They include:
Source young and middle aged snails and then sell after growing them for a few months for profits.

Make money from shelter trees; Food and shelter plants or trees like Coconut palm, Pawpaw grow to produce fruits overtime in a pen. Hence, you can easily make huge cash selling them.

Sale of nursery plant: You can make extra cash raising and selling nursery shelter plant to start-up snail breeders.

Warehousing: Many snail traders have the challenge of keeping or warehousing their unsold snails. You can make money by providing that warehousing service.

Consultancy service: An experienced snail farmer can provide consultancy services on snail pen construction and farm management to generate income.

Snail joint – You can decide to operate a mini boiled peppered snail or fried peppered snail joint and you can be sure to make huge cash.

Your Target Market

Individuals – It’s not uncommon to see individuals visit major markets to buy edible snails. You can target such individuals through word of mouth, fliers, advert etc.

Snail traders – Snail traders in the local market usually sell big, medium and small size snail. You make cool profit if you buy and stock the big ones and wait for when its scarce to resell back to the snail traders. You can also buy the medium size for cheap. All you need do is grow them to a bigger size at your farm and resell to the traders for better profit.

Hotels – They are in huge demand for snails. You can position yourself as a regular supplier.

Restaurants – They also patronize suppliers of quality snails’ especially Chinese restaurant. The more restaurants you supply, the bigger your profit.

Eateries – They also patronize suppliers of quality snails’ especially Chinese restaurant. The more restaurants you supply, the bigger your profit.

Barbecue operators - You can become a supplier to those who are barbecue operators

Start Up Capital

Setting up a snail pen requires initial capital for the housing unit and the foundation stock. A backyard snail farmer can start the project with at least N50, 000 at a small scale. Then with about 5 of income in the N100, 000 to N200, 000 for medium and possibly large scale.

Profit Potential
Snail farming has potentials for very good returns on investment (ROI). A unit of matured giant snail can reproduce itself under a conducive environment at least 20 times in a year. Also, a unit of giant Snail of average cost of N100 can appreciate in value to N250 (that is a margin of N 150) after 3-4months with enough feeding. If therefore you have a stock of 500 pieces to supply, (if you invested N50, 000 to stock) multiply that by N150 this will give you N75, 000 (Your profit is N25, 000)

5 Simple Steps Required to Start
The steps are:
1. Do a feasibility study of your land to ascertain the suitability of the soil. One proof of that is the growth of the shelter trees.
2. Then you do the construction/design of your snail pen with right dimension.
3. The next step is to grow your food and shelter vegetation or plant. The shelter plants are reproduced in your garden through the suckers. These are
part of the plant that grow from their roots which when planted grow to form new plants.
4. Security fencing of your pen to prevent loss or disappearance of snails.
5. Stocking of your snails

How To Export Snails

Snails are exported live, fresh, chilled, frozen, salted and dried with or without shell. On the average, 3kg of live or fresh snails are used to produce 1 kg of processed snail flesh. Nigeria does not yet have a strong culture and tradition in the export of snails. However, in recent times successful attempts are being made by Nigerians to export snails to other countries although in small quantities. Snails are usually exported either by air or by sea depending on the agreement between the buyer and seller.
Only active snails are selected for shipping. An inactive snail may be sick or dying. It's best to ship live snails, so each snail is inspected to be sure it's healthy. Snails are packed in cartons or can be canned for shipment.

The basic document required for export for snails include; bill of lading, air waybill, port health certificate, veterinary certificate, certificate of origin, commercial invoice and what is called NXP form.
What is the safest payment method? A letter of credit is an undertaking by a bank to pay an exporter the value of his goods shipped provided he conforms to the terms and conditions of the credit. This method protects both the exporter and foreign buyer under bank guarantee. Exporters are supposed to have domiciliary account with any authorized bank of their choice.

How to Make Money Through Importation with #30,000

The world is indeed a global village where you can communicate, buy and sell from around the world sitting in your bedroom.
This is the same reason why you can actually import cheap products from China, Hong-kong, United Kingdom, United states of America or Dubai starting with the sum of #30,000 and get a return on investment of an extra #20,000 -#40,000 depending on your marketing plan.

In this importation business, you don't need to go there as you can just sit in your sitting room with laptop connected to the internet and you just shop online. Before we get started on this importation business, there are few requirements you need to get started.

- Business Plan and Feasibility Studies; this is a business so you have to treat it as one. You will need to draft out a business plan detailing the product you are to specialize in. Products you can import with at least #30,000 ranges from computer accesories like mini laptops or laptops, hard disk, flash drives, phones and phone accesories like memory cards, phone casings, phone chargers, sex toys, to fashion stuffs like diapers, male and female wears, wrist watches childeren clothins and many more.
Products you can import are unlimited as there are many of them, but you are advised not to import heavy products because they will cause you more. More so, you will also need to highlight on your business plan how you intend to market your product to your target customers.

- Functional Address; You need an address to receive your product. Even if it is your house address so far it can be located by courier services like Fedex and DHL then you are good to go.

- Access To the Internet and Communication Tool; You will be making your orders via the internet so you need a laptop with internet connection to make these orders. It is advisable you din't make use of the Cyber Cafe due to security reasons like theft of credit card details or other necessary leakages. You will also need a working phone to recieve calls from customers as you may need a store or office space to operate this business.

- Activated Mastercard or Visa card; You will need a mastercard or visa card to pay online for your products, you can easily get a mastercard from Guarantee Trust Bank, just walk up to their customer care and tell them you mastercard for online shopping and they will gladly help you out and you with the process of activating the card. Other reputable banks that can help you out is Zenith bank and UBA.

Where To Shop for Products
There are so many sites providing products but i will recommend you use www.aliexpress.com and www.dhgate.com. They are the most trusted and reliable sites where you can get honest merchants.

How To Market Your Products

The main reason you are going into this business is to make profit. There are ways you can use in marketing your products without btreaking a sweat.

Web marketing; this involves you getting a functional website that is well designed displaying your products and the prices. You will also need to promote your website on the internet so you can be able to get customers. Luckily, there two ways of advertising on the internet which is the free and paid advertising. The free advertising requires lots of work from you as you will need to visit and post on forums, classified ad sites and the use of social networks like facebook. Paid advertising requires your money and you can use google adwords and Facebook.

Offline Classified ADS; Yes, this is very effective as you can advertise on dailies the guardian, vanguard, sun with less than #10,000 per box and get leads of customers patronizing your business. Just ensure you make the advert catchy and include your contact details like your phone number and website if you have one.

Through Distributors; You can call for distributors for your products and offer them a commission rate for the product you selling.
You can combine the above three forms of marketing your product for effective results as they don't cost a fortune.

You should also note that before you order for any product, you should endeavour to study the product you importing like getting to know if the product is hot in demand and if it can be affordable for the average person out there.

start a business today!!!

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How To Start and Run a Property Business Brokerage from Home

In the world we live in today, people are involved in businesses knowingly or unknowingly, someone might need a second- grade car for instance but don't know where to find one while another person somewhere wants to sell his/her second grade car but don't know how. This is where the services of a business broker come to play.

One good thing about this business is that it requires very little capital and you don't need an office space as you can run this business from your home, you can still retain your present job or business and add this as an additional source of income.

How to Run a Property Business Brokerage

The services of a business brokerage is a very viable one, you as the business broker will just look for who wants to a particular item for example a car and another person who wants to sell that same item and join them together then they pay you a commision rate of ten or twenty percent depending on your bargaining power.

When starting a property business brokerage, you must run it as a business regardless of where ever you are operating from, you have to operate as a broker and not someone who is desperate or something. Since it is a business you must draft a policy binding you and your clients. To make your clients commited and willing to do business you can draft out a form with your business name at the top in printed format for your clients to purchase at the rate of #1000 -#5000 non-refundable fee. This will make them commited.

How to Draft out a policy for your business.

Your policy is a set of rules and what to expect from your business operations on the part of your clients. Now, like everyother business, this business has risks involved like stolen properties, seller going behind your back to meet buyers or vice-versa in order not to pay the ten or twenty percent commission rate. Your policy will state clearly how you are going to do business with your clients by informing them to provide original documents of the property they want to dispose and they will not come in contact with themselves (buyer and seller) as you are the midlle man in their business transaction.

Once thy sign on this policy, you get the photocopy of it. Another you should note is issue this policy once they get your form that you will sell to them. Finally, you must make both your form and policy write up classy in a letter headed paper because this is what represents your business.

How to Get Clients and Market your Properties.

This is the lifewire of your business as without this, you are of business. Getting clients is very easy, there are three ways to get clients that I will recommend.

1. Use of Classified Ads- Classified ads are those small space ads you see on the national dailies like the Guardian and so on, just grab a copy of The Guardian to see examples of classified ads. They ads are cheap and powerful as you can get a space within the range of #5000 - #10,000 in the national dailies or journals you prefer to use. Another factor to take note of here is on the issue of the message you are sending accross, your message must be captivating and short with your contact details like your phone number and website (optional but advisable)

2. Use of Fliers, Banners, Posters - These are also powerful advertising medium but you need to be creative as to where you can find your target audience and distribute or paste your adverts in the strategic places. On the area of messaging too, your message must be short and captivating enough to bring your clients.

3. Use of the internet- Yes, the world has become a village, so you have to leverage on the internet to reach your clients. One good thing about the internet is the presense of free and paid advertising, funny enough the free adverts is very effective but will need lots of work done by you. Media you can use on the internet are social networks like facebook, twitter, Forums like Nairaland.com, trade sites like Tradekey.com, gbogbo.com and so on.

Note that you also use the above way of geting your clients to sell properties for your clients. Another factor you should take note is on the issue of proffessionalism, you will get calls from prospects please you must act proffessonal in picking up your calls by answering with your business name first, if possible get a dedicated line strictly for this business. For instance your business name is BEST PROPERTIES and you get a call from prospects, you answer like this 'Hello, Good Morning BEST Properties, how may I help you' this will rate you high in the site of your clients.

It is also advisable to have a website, this does not cost a fortune and will add a touch of professionalism to your business. Your website tells people about your business so that whenever you advertise, you include your web address people can just go there and patronize you.

Finally, you have to be creative and a good marketer as you can start this business with just #10,000 and go into a hundreds of thousands within weeks of operations.  Feel free to ask questions on our fanpage.

How to Start an Outdoor Catering Services

Like I always say, starting a business in Nigeria, Africa and the world does not require you to be a rocket scientist or to have a fat smiling account. You just need the right idea coupled with your passion and determination to succeed.

Starting an outdoor catering service is one of the business you can start on a small scale and catapult into a big business empire within the shortest period you can ever imagine. making money from outdoor catering is about getting more and more professional. The catering industry has become a multi-million naira industry popping-up with riches especially during the seasonal period. This industry is so big that the few people rolling out cash from it can hardly cope due to the high patronage.

What You Need To Start
The Outdoor Catering Service is an industry of its own. It a big industry when you want to know the clients you are doing business with. Bringing the wedding industry into the show especially during festive period, where lots of cash is flows around,this business creates  massive wealth for those who can catch the opportunity coupled with the fact that anyone can do it does whether male or female, the employed or unemployed.

Start small: As a starter you don't need much but you are advised to enroll for a catering school if you want to be successful. you can start with snacks production and supplies and gradually go into the foods.

Start without capital: You don't really need much funds because if you want to wait till when you have all the capital before you start the business then you will never start. You have to make up your mind on what you want to do and how far you want to grow.

Varied Opportunities in Outdoor Catering Business

The foods you will be asked to produce includes regular foods  like jollof rice, fried rice, coconut rice, the continental dishes like Chinese rice, soups, spaghetti, local soup and dishes such as egusi, edika-ikong, amala and the rest of the special foods. You have the barbecue series - roasted chicken, beef, goat, fish and even bush meat barbecue. You also have the angle of small chops, like samosa, sprinkles, puff-puff, steak meat, snail source, mosa, shawama, cakes, etc. You also have the drinks like chapman, cocktail drinks, lemon drinks and shrouds. And then slightly, we have interior and outdoor decorations depending on the clients.

Barbecue services
 Barbecue is a very big business. You can generate funds operating barbecue parties for thanksgiving, naming ceremonies, executive briefs, end of year parties, annual general meetings, children parties, beach parties, night joints, even evening wedding parties and bachelors' evenings. The money you make from one night can keep cash in your pocket for one month. Your clients provide virtually all you need and you make the money, but first you must know the requirements of a successful barbecue business.
Operating a Barbeque Business
You will an equipment in form of oven with charcoal underneath to roast the barbeque with a show glass at the top to make your barbeque looks attractive.

Forms of Barbeque

Chicken or turkey barbecue: In preparing chicken barbecue, you consider the ingredients for roasting the chicken based on your clients.
The chicken preparation is also very important. First you open chicken from the under; that is from the anus remove all the intestines and everything that are not needed, hence there is a need to wear a glove in order to do a good job.
Saucing the chicken: After the external and internal chicken preparation, you move to the saucing process you sauce inside to make it taste good by adding salt, pepper and curry. Don't forget you must know the proportion in details so as not to over sauce and make it lose taste.
Still in saucing process, you need to add sliced tomato, pepper and onions and  to the chicken, but this will depend on what you actually want to achieve at the end of the day, which you may see need some other special sauce. When this is done, you close up the chicken for grilling.

Fish Barbecue: The process of preparing the fish barbecue is the same method as the chicken, just that you open the fish through the throat and remove all the intestines, bones, scalps and sauce. It is also done the same way you sauce the chicken; then you grill by placing it on the fire gauze and monitoring it so it won't get burnt.
Meat barbecue: This is the one we normally know as suya, the one mallams sell everywhere. But barbecue meat is richer and healthier because it is going to be well sauced and treated too. For the laps, you break them and do it the same way others have been done.
Grilling and serving: You know that barbecue is a live event where the preparation takes place as the party is on. For the chicken, you roast it in full but you can't serve it full except for some people who use it for thanksgiving. When they have a family thanksgiving, they roast a very big turkey and put in a tray and after they have finished preparing it, the head of the family cuts his own and shares to the other people.

 Snail sauce: This is where you have already fried snail with sauce; this might be pepper, onions and tomato.

Barbecue packaging and supplies
If your clients want a barbecue delivered to their event or door steps, you have to charge per carton supplied, hence you need to know how to package the barbecue and cost them in the mini cartons.
You can decide to charge per plate, it only depends on the client and the amount he has as well you consider the client and the number or capacity of his guests.

Other Services That can be Added

The Interior decoration: You can have people that do interior decoration for you and make it a part of the package you are offering your clients. Whether the event is a wedding or naming ceremony, you will make more money with this. The interior decoration depends on what the couple wants; it could be with the cakes or drops.

Queen cakes and chops service:
These are those little cakes that go from N50 to N100 and added to chops on the serving table. They can make a mini party or office meeting sumptuous and a lot of folks can make money from this. Chops are those little things they serve either at the beginning of the programme or in between the programme and at times when people don't have a lot of food, they serve it in the beginning of the programme because it fills the stomach such that people will later not eat much.

Getting Corporate Organization as Clients
 Apart from weddings, during the ember period, there are banks and corporate organisations that organize seminars and end of year programmes or retreats; this could be an area of big profit exploits for catering services because these top class clients hardly know the cost of so many things, but they are after quality and how you package your products.In the negotiating scene,  you will ask them what they want and the kind of setting they are looking at, because the setting is part of the cost. The way you manage a canopy setting is different from the way you manage a table with four chairs because in the case of a table with four chairs, you have to get the table, and the cover; that is, you need to do a small interior decoration. You need plates and cutleries. This is different from canopy service where you just serve everybody the way they are seated.
For bankers and oil service clients,they want something they rarely eat like chicken pepper soup, snail pepper soup or goat meat pepper soup and sometimes white rice and sauce or coconut rice garnished with goat meat.
You will need to take this market very seriously because once you can do a good job it will also increase your own product-base and give you referrals. They are very wonderful referrals for your corporate catering service.
The cash to be made: “Thirdly, you ask them the amount that they are willing to spend because caterers are also planners and managers. If you have a caterer that is not honest with you, that means the caterer wants to eat you up, but if he or she can tell you that with two hundred thousand naira you can feed a hundred plus, that means you can also save some money for yourself too and not just spending elaborately. This is one of the ways to win some of your clients; do a good cost analysis for them and charge them for your service.

The opportunity depends on your negotiations with them. Don't take any client for granted and think they don't know much. They know so much just that they don't have that time. You have to package your product well and to be well exposed to so many places to source your materials cheaply.

You must package yourself and your product:   Your success in business is in the way you package yourself and your product and then your attitude because, it is not a product that we see when you came to negotiate. Your clients will not see the product until the day of the occasion; that is when you qualify as to whether the product is the best or it's just average or is nothing, So you have to really package yourself first and then your product.

Negotiating for profit: When you meet a client working in an oil firm or a banker for a catering job, try to be honest and don't be over conscious of the money you are going to make.
If your product is clean and you are clean, honest and truthful, you will definitely get customers. But if you are not straightforward, you may not get contracts on a frequent basis.

In catering business,research is of importance as you need to the latest dishes so you can be confident  learn from  experienced caterers. 
Money That Can be Made from this Business
You can make anywhere from #80,000-#250,000 per service delivery, the fact here is that once you are good, you can even be overloaded with jobs that you will not be able to meet up. The jobs can become too much to handle, that is why the opportunity is really untapped.

 Though the job could be tedious, but with good management skills, competent and well trained staff, you are in for a real deal and don't forget, you really don't need an office for this business whether you are male or female. The few male that are into this business seem to doing quite well; you can really be scared of them because they are good.

You can operate from home most of the time. You need a large cooking environment or good cooking equipment like large burner gas/stone or good firewood environment. You can use gas or mini outdoor electric cookers, especially for seminars and bankers' parties if you are serving chops, etc.

Where to Source Materials: Caterers have to go to large markets to buy and save cost and make more profit.


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Why You Need To Start a Business Today

Whenever the word 'Business' is mentioned, what comes to most people mind is the process of buying and selling, even with a similar definition of this term, many have their different point of view on the subject matter which is we rely on being employed to earn fat pay check and when we don't that kind of dream job we become disappointed.

But, come to think of it, do you that the is changing into a stage we need more than one source of income? Do you also realize that organizations around the world are downsizing just to meet up with a high profit margin? Here are few facts on you need to start up a business today:  

* More than 30 million Nigerians are jobless

* There are massive layoff/sack currently going on in every sector in Nigeria

*  More than 92% of Nigerians are poor

*   Millions of graduates may never find any job opportunity eleven years from now   

*  There are current jobs or business that maybe taken away by the new wave of technology advancement

All the above are hard facts and reasons why you must start a business  today and escape the cold hands of poverty forever, one beautiful thing is that starting a business does not require you to be a rocket scientist, starting a business just requires you to put the right thing in place, take responsibilities for failure and success, be persistent and discipline.

So start selling something today.

N.B- We will be looking at businesses you can start with a minimal capital. Just keep in touch.

The Importance of Market Research in Business

Market research is of paramount importance to starting up a business. Before we start let us look at the meaning of market research. What is a market research is the process of identifying a product or service that is yet to be offered to the public, identifying the target audience that will need your product or services, identifying your competitors and their way of doing business and planning a strategic move to be in business by satisfying your customer needs.

From the above explanation, we can see that market research is indispensable in starting a business and even being in business for the next twenty years or more. There are many reason for you as a business person to conduct market research. They are as follows-

* Identifying your target market

* Identifying the methods you will employ to bring in prospects to your business.

* Identifying ways to turn your prospect to buying customers.

* Identifying way of adding values to customers experience in your business.

* Helps to provide information for planning.

* Helps you figure out new opportunities.

* Serves a basis for product development.

All these and more are reasons you should study your market before going into business and even while in business. Coming to the action of market research for business start up or existence, there are stages and sources you need to carry out these research which includes

* Reading trade journals, business papers and checking up on classified ads on journals.

* Researching using the internet on the particular business.

* Joining and participating in online business and general forums.

* Chatting up with distributors.

* Joining groups and participating in these groups will also help.

Mind you, market research is not synonymous with business plan as this might be just a chapter of the business plan. But it is an essential chapter in a business plan. 

How To Make Money In Nigeria Repackaging and Selling Food Items

Food has always been an indispensable tool to human existence right from the time man was born. This explains why the Agricultural sector is growing in leaps and bounds. Food repackaging business is one business you can start on a small scale and become a millionaire with good marketing plan and discipline.

What is food repackaging business? Food repackaging is the process of getting foodstuff in larger quantities and bagging them in your own way, that in smaller bags with business name on it making you the producer of the foodstuff involved.

If you look around you, you will see that companies operating food business are making it big time in this industry as they are going into new lines of food productions on a frequent basis and the truth here is that you can compete with this big names by doing better than them on a low-key and shoe string budget. This is possible because people must always eat whether there is money or not.

Examples of foods you can buy in larger quantities and repackage with your own brands are Rice, beans, crayfish (grounded), pepper (grounded), palm oil, corn flour, wheat, yam flour, plantain flour, bean flour, Egusi, cashew nuts, groundnuts, ginger (grounded), garlic(grounded), cassava flour, garri and so on.

Like every other business there are things you must put in place to kick start your business which is why you must draw up a plan on getting your food repackaging business started. Things you need to get your food repackaging business started are as follows

Space: You will need a room, shop or somewhere to operate from. It must be clean and well ventilated.

Repackaging equipment: It is not advisable to repackage with your hands as it's unhygienic. So you will need to get a repackaging machine in place, you must avoid body contact with the food item being repackaged. Your repackaging machine enables you to work faster by repackaging more of your products.

The Repackaging Equipment are i. Dispenser, ii. Industrial sealing machine with table (customized), iii. Special nylon (branded) pack made strictly for this type of business iv. Weighing scale v. Chairs vi. Cartons or wooden boxes to store packaged products vii. Generator (2kva) needed to power sealing machines.

How The Repackaging Dispenser Machine Works (Production Process)

Step 1. The food item, like Garri, is poured into the fabricated dispenser (made of mild steel).

Step 2. There is a lever where you press and a mechanism will release the poured content into the nylon bag via the opening from the dispenser.

Step 3. After bagging, you put the item on a weighing scale to ensure that the right measure meant is what is contained in the pack.

Step. 4 Once this is done, then you go straight to sealing and you are set for the market.

For products like palm oil, grounded crayfish, melon(egusi), grounded garlic or ginger you need rubber plates or gallons branded in your own business name to package them. Food repackaging is one business you can start in Nigeria.

Places in Nigeria to source for foods are the northern Nigeria markets like the dawanu market of Kano, the Birnin-Kudu market of Jigawa state this is where you source for foodstuff like Rice, beans, then the southern part of Nigeria for foodstuff like garri, palm oil, cray fish and so on. Food items are gotten from different farms in Nigeria to cities like Lagos and are sold cheap. Some of the Sunday markets include: Ogba in Ikeja, Shomolu. Other markets where you can get food items cheap are Mile12, Oyingbo, Oto, Mushin etc. Also, if you have access to farmers in the villages, you can source your products cheaper.

This is one business you can start and become a millionaire with a good business plan and a workable marketing strategy.

Try to start a business today.