Two years ago I read an interesting book called the Wealthy Barber. It is quite an interesting read but I would like to talk about the wealthy barber I know. My Barber! We have written about a lot of Investment opportunities in Zimbabwe, mostly on a micro level and we have tried to expose opportunities that are mostly exploitable on a micro level. I didn’t know that a Barber makes this much money until I had a chat with my Barber as I got my haircut.

This is just going to be an out of the gut talk. My Barber makes more than $1,500.00 in net profit per month. Isn’t it amazing? I did the numbers and they added up well. The charge per haircut is $5 but I chose to be conservative and reduced it to $3.00 per haircut. When it was my turn to get a haircut he told me how busy it had been that day and how he had not even had his lunch. I was probably the 40^th person that day and it was 4pm yet he closes around 7pm. That means he had made $200 that day. If I use the conservative figure (because some come only for a shave and pay $3.00) and assume all haircuts are $3.00, it means he made $120.00 from 8-4 which is way too much than what most salaried employees earn. I know you can put up a valued argument that this was the back to school week.

I raised that point with him and he said on average he does about 20 haircuts a day at an average price of $5.00 a cut. I pulled the figure down to 15 haircuts a day at $3.00 and it meant he makes an average of $45.00 a day which is $315 a week and amazingly $1,260.00 per month. His rental which is $150 which I overstated to $200 to be conservative brings down his income to $1,060.00. In essence, what this means is in a bad month my barber earns an average of $1,000.00 and if you do the math, in a good month he will be way above $1,500.00. I set down with a young man who wanted to raise $3,000.00 for his project and had come to ZimInvestors to be connected with the Investing world.

The Investors we have on our list would all tell him that this deal is too small for them. I showed him that if he invested about $200.00 in the hair business, in three months he would have the money he needed. I believe this article will go a long way into showing many Zimbabweans out there that ideas are everywhere and opportunities are usually hiding in the most unlikely places and in this case in your hair. And as always, to your continued success.