How to Sell a Bottle of Water for Forty-Five Bucks and Other Kooky but Brilliant Business Ideas

Business ideas that prove we live in an abundant Universe.

My dad had a stroke almost 2 years ago.

Thankfully he didn’t die and was not left disabled, a little difference in the way that he speaks and that is about it. We just poke fun at him now, cos that’s what we do in my family.

His Doctor recommended that he stop drinking for about 12 months and so he did. My dad was never a big drinker anyway but he did enjoy the odd glass of scotch or brandy with a nice cigar or an ice-cold beer on a hot day after working outdoors in the yard.

Since he stopped drinking alcoholic beverages he began to dip his toes into the world of non-alcoholic beer and wine.

He’s a fan. He’s been won over.

Bravo non-alcoholic world, you convinced a man that used to brew his own beer, make his own wine from scratch (Shiraz), and distill his own Țuică (Romanian spirits) to not only drink non-alcoholic beverages but to enjoy them, buy them in bulk and tell everyone he knows about them.

At any moment he will have at least 2 different kinds of non-alcoholic beer in his fridge and usually 1 or 2 types of non-alcoholic wine lying around.

I'll admit that even I don't mind the odd NA brew. He’s managed to convince me too.

Being just a week and a bit away from Christmas and the new year, I thought it’d be nice to buy him something he had not tried before.

I noted that I’d never seen him drinking non-alcoholic spirits like scotch whiskey, bourbon, or brandy.

I wondered if they even made something like that and what it would taste like.

A couple of taps and clicks later and I find out that not only does non-alcoholic whiskey exist, but there are many different brands, flavors styles, and types of spirits.

All non-friggin-alcoholic! How does that even work!?

Gin, Vodka, Brandy, Whiskey, Scotch Whiskey, Bourbon, Rum, and more!

And here is the most amazing part.

They’re not cheap!

One Australian brand I found called Lyre’s (no pun intended) costs $45 per bottle!!! Don’t believe me, take a look for yourself!

So, here I am now, thinking to myself that they must be using a special distilled mountain water from Antarctica, perhaps they mix it with ancient and mysterious herbs and spices to give it that distinct whiskey warmth and punch to the back of the throat that only whiskey does, or maybe they age it in old wine or whiskey barrels to give it the same flavor and color as whiskey?

Nope, nope and more nope.

All it appears to be is flavored and colored water! No offense Lyer’s.

You can read the ingredients list. It’s there. They’re not hiding anything.

I am not taking a dig at the company or its process, no, in fact, I think it is brilliant, and of course, there is likely more to their process than what my uninitiated brain can comprehend.

The point is that there is a market for this kind of thing and it’s not as if they are duping anyone. They are telling you exactly what it is and what is in it!

If people want to buy $45 non-alcoholic whiskey made with water, agave nectar, sugar, and colors — let them!

Jesus turned water into wine, Lyre’s turns water into money!

Money, Money All Around

The world is magical. It’s just that most people don’t see it.

Ever since I was a kid I have been lucky enough to have an abundance mindset. And I didn’t grow up rich or even well-off.

My parents crossed the Danube river in the middle of the night, my dad almost froze to death, they were escaping communism. They flew to Australia with only the clothes on their back, a pillow each, and a set of knives and forks because I guess they thought that was all they needed and it turned out it was.

We grew up in the outer suburbs, we played in the streets, having water fights and bike races, when my grandma couldn’t babysit us, my parents just sent us to the library or arcade while they worked crazy shifts in plastic and cable factories, and guess what?

My 2 brothers and I loved it!

I grew up looking at the grass, the sun, clouds, and rainbows and being mesmerized by how abundant life was. Lift any random rock and there is an entire ecosystem living under it, worms, spiders, slugs, and ants, and that's not even mentioning the microbiology we cannot see with the naked eye!

You reading this now, you are lucky enough to have eyes to read or ears to hear with. Think about how awesome that is for a moment. You could have been a slug!

You are using a device, a machine that was built using the very basic of minerals, chemicals, and compounds that our Earth provides, people in a faraway land put it all together following the designs of other people a lot smarter than you and I, they then worked out how to send this very information across time and space through undersea cables and the air so that I can Google expensive, almost seemingly magical water that I can buy my dad for Christmas!

Amazing!

Keep reading. I'm going to give you another two insane examples, just like the one above, of how people have made money from nothing.

Free Fish!?

Meet Keith Bell, a fisherman from my state of Victoria.

Keith isn’t just any old fisherman, he's a specialist fisherman.

Keith is also somewhat of a wizard.

Whether he knows that or not, I don’t know. But I do.

You see, Keith figured out from a very young age that a particular type of pest species of fish that we had introduced here in Australia, has value and he’s transformed that value into one of Australia’s largest specialist fishing export companies in the country.

Started in 1984, K&C Fisheries has become the largest common carp harvesting and processing company in the Southern Hemisphere.

That fish?

Common carp.

Keith harvests the stuff by the tonne, and for free!

His company K&C Fisheries exports it to parts of Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. K&C Fisheries has also recently set up operations in the US state of Minnesota.

The carp that Keith harvests and exports around the world as well as domestically is used in 11 different products, from leather to caviar as reported by The Weekly Times.

But let's back up here for a sec. Carp are a pest. I am not sure if I have made that point succinctly enough.

Carp are known to be a destructive species of fish due to their bottom-feeding behavior where they stir up and muddy the water.

They out-populate and out-feed the resident fish.

Not only do they have an insatiable appetite to go along with their messy and aggressive feeding habits but a female carp can produce 300,000 eggs in just 1 spawning event, they also have the potential to produce 1 million eggs over the breeding season.

Carp are large. They can grow to be a meter (39 inches) in length and weigh as much as 60kg (132 lbs), with most fish weighing a couple of kgs each. This large size, combined with their eating and breeding habit makes them the wild pigs of the fish world.

And yet we throw them away!

An article from Bank Angler states that we throw away 2 million tonnes of carp each year!

I’ve heard of a win/win scenario before, but when you take in the above, and what Keith is able to do, this is a triple-win.

The environment and local native fish species benefit from having the carp removed from the waterways, Keith and co. benefit for obvious business reasons of turning the pest into a profit-generating venture, and customers that enjoy the fish or its by-products benefit too!

That is ingenious and phenomenal. Well done Keith!

Now I am tempted to make a Jesus and fish comment! I won't.

Lost Dog Ventures

A third and final example of how money is everywhere you look.

I have told this story before. I can’t quite recall where I posted it so I’ll try to be brief in case it's out there somewhere in full.

Some years back I owned a yellow Labrador called Oskar.

Being a dog, he had a good nose. Being a lab, he had an even better nose.

I used to play hide and sniff type games with him where I’d let him smell an object, I’d hide the object and let him find it, exclaiming “good boy” and rubbing him on the head when he’d find the thing( cigarette packets, socks, tennis balls, cheese slices, etc.).

Oskar always found the thing.

My parents had a dog too. A Chihuahua cross named Tyson, like Mike Tyson.

Mike Tyson the Chihuahua was an escape artist. Ever since he was a pup, he knew how to escape and he’d go on these solo adventures all day. When I say he knew how to escape, I don’t mean that we stupidly or lazily left the gate open and he walked out.

No.

I mean he would hide under one of the cars in the garage, wait for the automatic garage door to open, and then just as it was being closed by the person that was either coming or going, a foot away from shutting, he would dart out under it and zoom, he’d be gone.

Another trick he had, was that he would hide between the back garden shed and the bush that was growing next to it, knowing he was hidden from view, he would do the same when someone entered or left the back gate. He’d wait for the gate to be almost shut and boom, he’d be off like a lightning bolt.

Tyson lived to be about 17 years old and he did this his entire life.

He’d be gone anywhere from a couple of hours to half the day at most. He always came back, usually hungry, thirsty, and tired.

Well, one day my mum called me to say that Tyson had been gone a day and a half and she was worried.

I don’t know how it came to me but it did, I thought that I could use Oskar my lab to try and track him.

I went round to my mum's place, grabbed one of Tyson's blankets so that we could use it as a scent to track, and off we went.

Oskar pulled me up a footpath, left, right, left, right, through a park, across a field, and to a construction site.

There was Tyson, out the front with what I assume was his girlfriend, a white fluffy little thing.

We found him in under 10 minutes.

From then on, whenever Tyson got out, Oskar and I went to find him, and we found him every single time.

One day I was out walking Oskar and I saw a lost dog sign pinned to a wooden post. That’s when it hit me. This was a viable service.

If the Police and search & rescue teams can use dogs to find bad guys or missing people, why can’t I use mine to track lost dogs, a bit like Ace Ventura the Pet Detective?!

I bought an ebook on dog tracking, watched a bunch of videos, read a handful of articles, and initiated a training program for Oskar and me.

Some weeks later when I felt Oskar was ready I started to ring the phone numbers on lost dog signs and I also put an ad up on a local pet forum.

I called it Australian K-9 Search Unit.

The phone started to ring.

I had 5 jobs just like that, without even trying.

4 out of 5 dogs were found.

I charged $100 per hour.

Interestingly we didn’t find the dogs on the day of the search, but we always found them after. Without getting into dog behaviors e.g. they can go really far, really fast. We always provided a map and a report of where we thought the dog was and all 4 of my clients reported within 24–48 hours that the dog was found almost exactly where we said we believed that it was.

I gave up on that venture just as fast as I started it because my body is not designed to run around after whippets and dalmatians all day. My knees hurt too much.

Want the idea? Have it, it's yours.

Because the point of this story, and these examples is that ideas are everywhere, I have too many ideas. Business ideas, inventions, service offerings, products, and more. The world is magical and abundant.

Money is everywhere.

Get out of the mindset of scarcity and enter the mindset of abundance.

Look around you right now and mentally pinpoint things that prove an abundant environment and Universe.

I have a water bottle right next to me, water is life!

I can see fully bloomed trees outside (I'm in Australia).

There’s a bug zapper sitting outside that we left on because there are too many flies and mosquitos this time of year due to the spring rains, that bug zapper has an electrical current running through it and it's damn cheap no matter what they are saying about energy prices right now.

Energy is everywhere and it can be harvested from sunlight, wind, water power, or even dead dinosaurs!

What do you see? Tell me in the comments. Don’t be shy.

I was inspired to write this after reading the story behind UGG. The American fashion company known for its sheepskin boots. The company was founded in 1978 by Aussie surfer Brian Smith after he realized his warm sheepskin boots were not something that was available in the US.

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