Skip to main content

Starting a passion business

One theme of mine is that if we buy less stuff we can work less. But what to do with all the extra free hours?

Some people choose to start a business, or more specifically, a social enterprise. These are businesses that have a social outcome as their main goal. If they make some money along the way, that's good - but it's not the main purpose.

I recently attended a webinar of social start-ups pitching their enterprise. One of these is Fruit Butcher.

The Fruit Butcher?

Elliot Carter calls himself a Fruit Butcher. After an animal safari in Africa, he and his wife decided to go vegetarian for a month but found the options limited.

A fruit wholesaler by trade, Elliot realised he could use his fruit knowledge to provide tasty vegetarian options for people who want a great meat alternative.

Here's his pitch video:

Jackfruit's back, alright

While Elliot's got plans for a range of plant-based alternatives the first is a pork-like product that's made from jackfruit.


At the moment he's selling jackfruit burgers at markets in my city (my wife and I enjoyed a couple). He's also selling pre-prepared jackfruit take-home packs to use in home cooking.

In short

Starting a business may not be for you, but it shows what someone can do with a bunch of free time. Changing the world for the better, having the opportunity to follow an interest or passion and potentially making some money while doing it. Sounds good to me.

More examples?

In coming weeks I intend to feature a couple more great initiatives from the event. It's another great reason to subscribe to my monthly updates.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

5 Reasons why we hoard - and they're wrong

"Less is More" is one of the catch-cries of downsizing. Often the fewer things we have the more we value them. So it's a great title for a book that's basically a manual for how to de-clutter your home. The introductory chapter of Less is More: How to De-clutter Your Life gives some great insights into why we find it so hard to reduce our stuff. Here are 5 of them - the last one is one of the biggest for me. 1. The cost of holding on. We were raised by our parents and grandparents and in their day items were expensive and space was cheap. It made sense in those days to hold onto stuff just in case you ever needed it. But today housing is expensive and items are cheap. It's hard to change a habit, but now we save much more by downsizing. 2. Keeping it in the family. For some reason we prefer to give things to those close to us. Again this was viable in the days of big families and lots of children to receive hand-me-downs. But these days we have smaller fa...

20 unplugged ideas

May 1-7 is Screen-Free Week . It's about spending time away from the screen and more time with each other - or doing things we love. It's a great chance to break the work-tired-watchTV-ads-shop-work cycle. This list of twenty alternative ideas is great for screen-free week. It's also a great reminder of things we could enjoy if we're shopping and spending less - and maybe working less and enjoying life more.

Will robots take your job?

The future could be very different. It's one reason I started this blog. What will technology mean for jobs? For incomes? For society? So I was excited to find Will Robots Take Your Job? at my local library. What does the book say? There's always been technological change and we've always found jobs. As the more laborious jobs were taken by machines, we took on higher skilled jobs, moving further up the "skill ladder". The main question is whether this time is different. Will the "skill ladder" continue to have higher rungs for humans to move on to? Will these rungs appear as quickly as the current rungs disappear? Either way we're headed for significant disruption. Either large-scale re-training of our workforce or massive unemployment. The author despairs that our leaders seem not to talk about this - and worse still, not have a plan for it. Farmers or horses? In 1870 about 75% of Americans worked in agriculture and used 25 million hors...