Non-essential businesses are essential for our wellbeing and a thriving community

Non-essential businesses are the key to a thriving community. We’re talking about businesses that engage our minds and bodies, make us happy, and allow us to indulge our passions.

Non-essential businesses are quite often set up as passion projects or because someone has seen what they think is a gap in the market. They operate on tight margins, can have high initial costs for facilities and equipment, cannot justify high prices and are seen as a luxury item not a necessity.

What makes this such a disappointing reality is that these are the businesses that allow community members to indulge their passions, find new ones and help them to balance their lives, and increase their wellbeing, but they generally cannot justify the cost.

The biggest problem for these businesses is that we treat them like any other business, so they suffer from the same barriers to entry, but because of the tight margins they operate on the risk factor shoots through the roof making most sane people decide they’re not viable businesses.

Reduce the risk and increase sustainability

Reducing risk and increasing sustainability are the keys to having a wider variety of non-essential businesses servicing a community and taking care of its wellbeing. We have to think of these businesses as being in the business of wellbeing and protect and support them accordingly.

There are solutions to achieving this, and we’re going to outline a few of them.

It’s a side-business not a profession

People who open non-essential businesses generally do it as a profession. They quite often go it alone, and turn their passion into their job. For a lot of us that’s our dream opportunity, and for some of us we can make it work. For the vast majority, turning our passion into our business creates the worst result, we end up hating our passion because it’s now our revenue stream as well. If your passion becomes a chore or requirement, your wellbeing takes a nosedive.

Non-essential businesses should not be our professions, we need to separate what makes us money from what makes us happy and keep them separate. Running these businesses as side-businesses and not using them as the main source of income is healthier for us.

Cooperatives are our friends

Who can afford to run a side-business? Not many of us, nor do we have the time to do it if we have a full-time job. Even worse, if we all try and open a kayak-rental business and fight over the profits we all lose. That’s a huge amount of wasted capital that we’ve all lost.

Cooperatives spread the cost over multiple owners therefore sharing the burden and reducing the initial start-up capital each of us needs to invest. We end up with 3 strong kayak-rental businesses each with 4 owners sharing the cost, instead of 12 struggling kayak-rental businesses fighting for the scraps of the small seasonal market.

Throughout our lifetimes our circumstances change, often beyond our control and it can have a huge impact on our abilities to do things. One of the safe-guards of cooperatives is the increased ease of a change of ownership. With a single owner, either they sell the business or it closes. With multiple owners it means that if the circumstances for one of them changes, the business can continue to operate as usual while a replacement is found. It’s sustainable.

Removing barriers to market entry

It is integral to the survival of our non-essential businesses that we remove as many barriers to entry as we can. As a community we need these businesses to exist so that we can balance our lives and improve our wellbeing.

Access to in depth and useful data at low-to-no cost is an essential starting point. Time and again non-essential businesses spring up with the best intentions, but they struggle because they don’t have access to ready data that can help them make informed decisions before they spend their start-up capital.

Providing structured and coordinated support for potential new business owners as well as currently operating businesses is a must. An organisation that guides them through the process instead of prodding them through it is needed. A community-wide non-essential business incubator can provide this solution.

No matter what we do some businesses inevitably fail and they often leave a wealth of equipment that they can’t get rid of just sitting in storage. A coordinated effort for requisition and repurposing of perfectly good equipment is a no-brainer, but we don’t do it.

Providing high-quality services at cut-rate prices to ease margins

If we asked our current non-essential business owners how their marketing is getting on they’d say, “It could be so much better, but I just haven’t got the time or the money to really do it.”

There are services that all businesses need, from marketing right across the board to administration. Small non-essential businesses on tight margins cannot justify the cost of subcontracting these services out to third parties so they have to juggle them all themselves.

Technology platforms exist to try and offer these services but they are businesses in their own right and need to think about their own costs. Even worse, they’re not localised so they provide generic services across the board without being able to understand the differences between places and their individual needs.

These services can be provided by a local enterprise at cut-rate prices to ease the tight margins our non-essential businesses have.

Incentivising engagement

We all know that a balanced lifestyle is better for us, and yet we still spend the majority of our time at work and home. It’s not enough to ‘educate’ ourselves about the need for more engagement and happiness, we have to incentivise it.

It’s the old carrot and stick methodology. The carrot needs to be the activities outside of the house with other people, the stick is staying at home. We can incentivise these activities in a number of ways, and they’re surprisingly easy to do, but we’re not doing it.

Increasing our disposable incomes

The biggest hurdle for non-essential businesses is convincing customers to spend their money. Spending our money at a kayak-rental business will not put food on the table. We see them as luxuries, so they’re always the first things to go when we have to budget.

Bringing their costs down is one thing, but we’ve got to look at the job opportunities available to residents of the BCP. Poole and Christchurch aside, when you look at Bournemouth, a huge number of the employed population work in tourism and adult social care. These are both low-paying industries, so our workers don’t have a disposable income to spend even if they wanted to.

More higher-paying job opportunities for locals in a variety of sectors will increase their disposable incomes and allow them to indulge in their passions without feeling guilty about it.

Modern economics and business practices tell us that survival of the fittest is healthy, because it breeds strong resilient businesses. They are more sustainable during times of economic hardship and can flourish in growth periods.

We don’t disagree with this, but we need a slight alteration to our perception. We currently use this mentality for all businesses, regardless of what product or service they provide. It’s a sink or swim mentality that just doesn’t make sense for our friends trying to make a living from kayak-rental businesses, or culinary schools, dance studios, beach volleyball, private tutors and so on.

We have to look at these businesses differently and recognise that they are essential to our wellbeing. They give us health, happiness, engagement and a community spirit that we need just as much as the money our jobs give us to pay our never-ending bills.

These businesses don’t need to be the next Apple or Tesla. They don’t need to dominate the market and take over the world they just need to exist. As a community we need to know that whenever we feel the urge to go and rent a kayak for the afternoon there’s a place we can go, and we can afford to do it.