During the summer months, every large city in America is filled with hundreds of festivals. If you are an entrepreneur looking to get into a retail business, these festivals can be an inexpensive way to test out your products to see if it will really attract a large enough customer base to warrant a year around business. But remember when you are writing your business plan; you have avoided a lot of the costs of a permanent location by having a festival business.

You pay a small fee to the festival and have not encountered rent and utilities, which are some of the high expenses for a fixed location. You have also not had to do much in the way of advertising. The festival had done advertising and has a client base that will show up. You only need to have an attractive booth to entice the customers over to your location. Make sure your signage looks professional and is viewable from major traffic centers for the festival.

But many people get into festival sales as their business instead of a trial for their business. With a number of calls you will find a listing of the festivals in a newspaper calendar or an on-line calendar of the festivals for the year. You will see that you can find festivals going 30 weeks in some of the northern climates up to every week of the year in some of the moderate climates. You can work as much or as little as you want or whatever season you want to work by starting a festival business.

There is a lot of work in these businesses that everyone should consider. With a store, you just open the door each morning. But with a festival business, you will have to unload and set up your merchandise every morning and put it away every night. Make sure all of your display methods are bought with this in mind. Items on wheel that you can move along a rough terrain are great. Make sure you have an adequate vehicle to carry all of you set up and merchandise and that you have an easy way of loading and unloading it.

Unsure if you want to get into this business? Go to a festival in your area. During some of the slack time, ask some of the booth owners a lot of questions about their business. Also you may fine one that is willing to hire your for a nominal fee or as a volunteer to help them with the next weekend’s festival. Work a few festivals unloading and setting up each morning with the owner to make sure your really want to do that many weekends during the year.

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This new weekly column, 101 New Business Ideas for Retirees, is compiled specially for GetEntrepreneurial.com readers by Stan Spector. View all articles in this column by Stan Spector.

Stan Spector is the author of “Baby Boomers’ Official Guide to Retirement Income - Over 100 Part-time or Seasonal Businesses for the New Retiree”. The book's website can be found at StanSpector.com.

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