Want to start a family business but aren’t sure what you should do? Don’t worry, we have you covered!

Starting a small business is one of the most rewarding things you can do. It’s also one of the hardest things you can do. Starting a small business with the help of your family is a great way to make things easier while also making sure that you spend some time with your loved ones.  

Choosing the right business to start with your family can be hard. You need to think long and hard about what kind of business would be most viable for your family to run. The personalities of your family members, your family’s budget for the overhead of the business… you have to take all of that into account. 

Here’s 10 family business ideas to give you some inspiration on what you and your family could do.

1. A family restaurant. 

Does your family have a love of cooking? Do you and your family get compliments from your friends about how great everything that you make tastes? Then you should consider starting a family restaurant that serves all of your family’s prized dishes and drinks.  

There are many ways that you can start a small, family restaurant. You could go the completely traditional route and buy or rent a location just for your restaurant. You could also just rent out a stall at a food court in a shopping complex. But nowadays, a popular option for opening a family restaurant is to open and run a food truck business.

Starting any kind of restaurant requires quite a bit of upfront investment. So if you think you can’t afford to rent a location and all the equipment that you need to run a restaurant, you can consider running a catering business instead. With a catering business, you can do all the cooking from home and just deliver the food straight to wherever it needs to be.

Check out our article on The KISS Principle And Investing.

2. Family bakery. 

Maybe your family isn’t the greatest at cooking… maybe you’re all really good at baking. Opening a bakery that you and your family run together is another good idea as far as opening a small business goes. Baking and selling bread or cookies with their kids is a fairly common dream for a lot of parents.

Opening and running a bakery is pretty similar to doing the same with a restaurant. You rent out or buy a location to set up shop, get all the equipment necessary then make and sell your food. In this case, the food is baked goods like cake, bread and cookies. 

Also, like opening and running a restaurant, there’s quite a bit of start-up capital needed to start a full-fledged bakery. If you and your family don’t have the cash for that, don’t worry, the internet can help. Many families start side-businesses these days with them advertising their cakes and pastries online then baking them on-demand as needed by their customers. This is a great way to test the waters with your baking business without risking a lot of upfront capital.

3. Family eBay or Amazon store.  

Here’s a simple idea for a small business. Start selling things on eBay or Amazon. What will you sell? Anything you can make a profit on, that’s what.

Let’s give you an example, maybe you see some toys on sale at a Walmart or Target at a discount for $10. You check online and these toys regularly sell for about $20 to $25 for one on eBay. You buy a bunch of those toys on discount and put them for sale on your eBay page. When they sell off, you make about $10 profit per sale. 

Congratulations, you just made a profit doing something called retail arbitrage. You may also recognise this business model as flipping.

The great thing about this kind of eBay or Amazon business is that you can invest as much as you can or want. Only have $100 to buy and flip items this month? Don’t worry you can just buy a bunch of small items that will hopefully double your money that month. You have $1000 to spare? Just scale up the number of items you buy or buy things that have a higher value!  

Your family can pitch in for the business in a variety of ways. For example, you could handle sourcing and buying the products you’ll sell while your brother handles the packaging as well as shipping of the products. Maybe your son could help keep stock and make sure that your inventory is organised neatly. 

4. Family print on demand. 

Is your family extremely artistic? Do you and your family want to start making a living off of the art you make? Do you guys want to do it with minimal overhead? 

Then you guys should try running a print on demand (POD) business! You guys make the design and sell the design on things like t-shirts or mugs. Then when a customer buys something, a third-party company will handle making the product with your design on it for you.

Running a print on demand business is pretty simple. Here’s a basic summary of what you do: 

1. Make your design.
2. Put your design online for potential customers to look at. 
3. Sell the design as an art print, a t-shirt or maybe even a notebook cover. 
4. Get a POD business to print the product for you. 
5. Pocket the profit you make.   

There’s more to it than the above but that’s basically it. The profit you take is the price you set for your product minus the price that the POD provider charges. 

The beauty of this type of business is the minimal start-up costs and work involved since you’re working with a POD provider. The downside of this business is that profits can be pretty low and it can be quite difficult to get people to even look at your designs to begin with.  

5. Family cleaning business. 

People hate when things look dirty and smell bad. If you and your family can clean things up nicely, you guys can make a decent amount of money. A family cleaning business can be a lot of things but for the purpose of this article, we’ll focus on two types of cleaning businesses. 

The first type of cleaning business we suggest is a laundry business. Owning a coin laundromat is a good family business to start if you have a decent amount of starting capital and have a decent location where you can put it. If you don’t have the cash to open a fully-fledged laundromat, you can also offer laundry and dry-cleaning services from your house. Doing this will require much less starting capital but will take much longer for you to see big profits. 

The second type of cleaning business that would be great as a family business is a power-washing business. You and your family can power-wash the dirt and grime off of people’s houses for a good amount of money. If you can get contracts on office buildings, you can make even more money than that. Starting a power-washing business is relatively simple and affordable but your main hurdle will be getting customers in the first place.

6. Family pet care. 

Does your family love animals? Are you all good at handling and calming down excited dogs? Do cats not want to scratch and bite you every second of every day? Then you should try opening a family pet care business.  

A family pet care business can be anything that you and your family want it to be. Do you want to offer pet grooming services to poodles? You want to offer baby-sitting… pet-sitting services for pet owners that can’t be around often? Do you want to be a dog-walker for people who can’t take their dogs out as often as they’d like? 

You can do any or all of those with your pet care business if you want to! 

PS: A good way to get some extra income with any pet care business is to sell animal food that keeps well and doesn’t go bad for a long time. For example, dog kibble or canned cat food.

7. Family errand running.

Almost everyone hates running errands. They cut into your day, are typically monotonous and just feel like a waste of time. That’s where errand running services come in and where your family can make some money. 

You and your family can be literal errand boys or runners for people or businesses. Also, you can fetch parcels for businesses or pick up groceries for office workers that just don’t have the time for it. You can handle all the tasks that other people don’t want to do for money. 

The pay for running errands is a bit low but the overhead as well as the startup capital needed is small. You basically just need to have the runners which will be your family members, some form of reliable transportation like your own car and a way to advertise your services. If you have those three things, you’re pretty much good to go!

8. Family mystery boxes. 

Have you been on YouTube recently? Then you probably know what mystery boxes are. They’re basically boxes you buy that have random items that you might or might not like inside them. The fun of them is that you never exactly know what you’re going to get even if you buy specifically themed mystery boxes. 

How do you start a mystery box business? Source the items you want to put inside your mystery boxes and list your mystery boxes online on eBay, Amazon or whatever site you want. That’s basically it. 

Admittedly, mystery box sales have cooled down a bit since their peak but there always seems to be a market for them. You’re jumping on a trend that’s on a downturn right now and might not make a comeback if you start a mystery box business. 

Check out our article on How You Can Be Laser-Focused.

9. Family repair services. 

Are you and your family good at handling repairs around the house? Can you fix toilets, leaking ceilings and broken roof tiles? If you and your family are good at making things work properly then you should start a handyman or fix-it service. 

There’s a bunch of advantages to offering repair services as a handyman. One of them is that you can choose to only take jobs that you’re comfortable with doing. If you’re not confident that you can do a complicated plumbing job, you can decline to do it and then refer your customer to someone else who can handle it. You can also set your own hours and only offer repair services when you’re free like at night or on the weekends. 

Opening a family handyman business is great because the more family members that choose to work with you, the more jobs you can do. You have more manpower than if you were working alone and you have a more diverse skill set to offer potential customers since your family members probably each have different skills to offer.  For example, you might be good at roofing while your brother might be good at demolishing old walls with a sledgehammer. 

10. Family property rental business. 

This one is probably the end-goal and dream business for a lot of families. Having a property rental business can keep a family rich for literal generations if it’s done properly. But it’s also extremely hard to set up since having a property rental business requires a lot of capital and resources to get going. Even getting your hands on one property to rent out is a Herculean task for most people.

That being said, a property rental business is quite suited to be a family business. This is because if you have a bunch of people like your family members to chip in for the funds to buy properties, you can get your hands on and rent out properties much quicker than if you were doing it solo. Most people choose to rent out their properties as either long-term rentals or Airbnb vacation rentals.

Another thing is that if your family has a property rental business, you can give out jobs to your family relatively easily if they’re going through a tough time and are unemployed. The most famous example is setting up a family member as a building’s property manager or building super.  

Closing 

There you go! 10 business ideas that you and your family can start together!   

You need to carefully think about what your family would be good at doing and what kind of business would be best for all of you. You need to figure out how much money you can afford to spend to get your family business off the ground. And you need to make sure that everyone you want working in the family business is actually onboard with it and isn’t just being forced into it.
Starting a business is no small feat but the potential rewards are incredible. There are people who would recommend against doing business with your direct family because arguments and fights that involve business or money are usually ugly. That being said, there’s a lot of joy to be had when building something like a business with your loved ones.