Welcome to Ghost Business - where business ideas go to launch 🚀 or die ☠️

Sharp Thinking

Bring a newsletter to a knife fight… This business keeps coming up. And it makes sense. Knife sharpener comes to your neighborhood (like an adult ice cream man) and sharpens your full collection of knives for a relatively low cost. The knives are finished in a short amount of time (less than an hour) and you have sharp knives ready to thinly slice those tomatoes like they do on tv.

I’ve never had the “knice cream man” (I crack myself up 😆) come to my neighborhood, I was intrigued on how this business worked and how you could get started in it.

At home services are already popular. People will come to your home to clean your pool, do your laundry, watch your animals, set up your Christmas lights, etc. 🎄 

• Convenience is everything: Even though knife sharpening might not be the hardest skill to learn, there are still skills and tools needed to sharpen up.

• A lot is a lot: Some nicer homes and businesses have a TON of knives (creepy) and simply don’t have the time to sharpen everything.

• What if I’m scared: Knives can be scary! We’ve all seen the movies or heard the horror stories, simply having a fear of knives can be enough to hire someone for help.

The butterfly(knife) effect… Turns out there may be a couple of knife guys in your neighborhood. But having a knife sharpening machine and a website may not be enough to win your knife fight. So how much could you make in this biz and how would you get started?👇

The End Goal

The sharpest tool in the shed… The final product would be a mobile sharpening set up on the go. You would have multiple roaming the richer neighborhoods and booking appointments to sharpen.

Being the sharpest knife guy has its perks. Once you saturate the residential market, you can commercial. Sharpening knives for:

• Catering companies

• Restaurants

• Bakeries

• Pet Groomers

• Barbers

Such a dull world we live in 😂 

Looking sharp… The numbers are pretty good too. The average rate is $1/inch (insert 🍆 joke here), with a $5 minimum. If you figure most house holds have 2 big chefs knives (8in) and 2 smaller knives (4in), that would come up to ~$26/household for 4 knives.

The breakdown:

• $26/house

• 40min (if you sharpen in batches, it takes ~10min per knife)

• $39/hr (if you’re doing this a bunch of residential batches)

• You end up making about ~$200/day working 4 hours when you land some businesses.

The MVP

Let’s be blunt… This is INSANELY easy to get off the ground and would take minimal work. In fact, I’ll break it down into 5 easy steps:

1. Buy a $255 knife sharpening kit

2. YouTube “How to sharpen knife with this kit”

3. Ask friends and family to sharpen their knives for free (practice)

4. Make a facebook and google sharpening business page

5. Ask friends and family to leave reviews for their free knife sharpening

Having a handful of 5 star reviews is plenty to get started and will get you inbound traffic right away.

I wish I had more to put in here for the MVP but this is so simple that I’ll spare you with any fluff language. So here’s a rabbit with sunglasses.

Scaling Up

It’s a dull world… Turns out everyone needs something sharpened. And they all live in your neighborhood. So here’s the master plan on building your sharpening empire:

1. Make 2 business accounts: Residential and Commercial

2. Call the residential one something witty: Sharpening Shenanigans

3. Call the business one something serious: Precision Sharpening

4. Have your friends and family leave reviews for the residential one and build a residential sharpening funnel through that business.

5. Do the same with the business one, reach out to local businesses and say you’ll sharpen their knives for free in exchange for a review if they loved the service.

After a few biz reviews, target local businesses with ads and flyers. But which local businesses?

• Libraries

• Lawnmower Repair Shops

• Print Shops

• Canvas Shops

• Sewing Shops

• Wood Shops

• Sheep Shearers

• Farms

• Fishing Boats

• Cheese Shops

• Machine Shops

• Restaurants

• Hair Salons

At that point, it’s all about fine tuning your ads and SEO (which you can hire someone to do)

Viability:

1 [building spaceships] 🚀 to 5 [easy peasy] 😊 

Don’t have to be sharp to do this… This is super duper easy. It would take minimal work (a couple hours) to learn how to sharpen your skills. Minimal work to land customers. Minimal work to build and scale this business.

Some people have mentioned doing a farmers market stand. I’ve seen these guys and they rarely have any customers, it’s tough because the normal people aren’t carrying their knives with them 🤷‍♂️

This ghost business is a simple reminder that it doesn’t take a lot of money, time, and skill to build a side hustle into a business. Sometimes it just takes a can-do attitude and to be aggressive with how you manage the time in your day.

(As usual each business will have it’s own setbacks, and it’s all about the execution and consistency rather than just having the idea 😉)

It’s a great day to be great!

Love, Mike

 👋