The Flea Market

Projected Profit: $240,000 per month (minus parking lot rental fee)


This is an idea for that entrepreneur who is skilled in organizing events.

The flea market will consist of a vacant parking lot, park, or public area. Propose to the person who owns the lot a monthly payout or percentage of the profit, in exchange for using the lot. For example, offer the owner $300 a weekend to use the lot. For the flea market, it's more cost-effective at first to offer a percentage because if you don't make as much as you planned, you don't lose any money.


You're going to want to advertise this event months in advance. In the advertisements for the flea market, be sure to include a price per booth. We suggest at first to charge $20 a booth until the flea market is well-known. Then you can raise prices to as much as $200 or more a booth (per weekend). If you had 300 booths renting at $200, that would be $60,000 in one weekend ( $240,000 in a month).


It's best to run your advertisements for the flea market in a local paper, public events, and online. The more people that know about the flea market, the more vendors will want to come.

This is a low cost, high payout event but can be time-consuming at first. It's recommended that after the flea market is up and running, you can hire employees to take over management responsibilities, and still be making a hefty profit.

However, the flea market will also be hard to work at first. Since you are most likely inexperienced in running a big event, you're likely going to want to have multiple partners. It's also great to have bilingual partners for the flea market, because many of your vendors won't speak english very well. Also, the flea market will attract many ethnic groups to due to the great prices and diverse products your vendors will provide.

On the other hand though, the flea market is well worth the work because of the great payout. The opportunity to make money is high, and though the flea market will be overwhelming at first, the profits will be amazing.