Free Business Idea: Start A Museum

Museums are the cornerstone of any tourist economy. Fresh travellers will cast about two or three glances around Reykjavík’s gas station architecture before they ask themselves what’s next. Hot dog in hand, wind in face, their thoughts begin to circle life’s existential questions. If they have children in tow they will usually, at this point, begin screaming. Something needs to fill the expanding void. The traveller’s eye desperately scans the hollow streets for warm and welcoming inside spaces.

This is where museums come in. There are museums for everyone. Art museums await the sophisticate’s gaze. The old-thing museum has some old brooches and mud for the old-things lover. The penis museum limply awaits the giggling hordes. For all this and more, tourist and human alike happily hand over good money, money that could be going into your pocket, dear impoverished reader.

But there’s stiff competition. Iceland is possibly the per-capita champion of museums, as with so much else. For example, the town of Akureyri contains a mere 20,000 souls and at least 13 museums. Some towns are defined by their museums: the most notable thing about Hólmavík, if we’re being entirely honest, is their Museum of Witchcraft, which has managed to harness the ancient money-making qualities of necropants in a new and unexpected way.

All this museuming means that a good part of Iceland’s population is employed as object dusters and about-millers. This is good for the economy, but it highlights one of the main obstacles in turning a museum into a money-making machine: staff are a burden on any business’s bottom line. So keep a close eye on them and keep them productively occupied at all times. One way to do this would be to include a gift shop. Visitors will have had their appetites whetted by seeing so many nice things. We’re not often confronted by carefully arranged objects that are not for sale. This disturbs the consumer, and when they finally encounter the gift shop it’s as if a load has been lifted. They buy, buy, buy, whatever the cost.

Aside from ticket sales and the shop you should try to score money from the government. This is crucial for the museum scheme to work. This isn’t available to every museum. I haven’t checked, but I don’t believe the penis museum gets grants from the government, unfortunately. The trick is to be aligned with some stated government aim. I suggest you make worried noises about climate change, but there are many options. Once you have that government money, the key thing will be to disguise how you extract it from the museum. You can only pay yourself a market-rate salary without annoying funding bodies (those socialist rascals!), but you can, and should, supply your friends and family with cushy jobs and lucrative contracts. That money has a way of coming back around.