Reducing municipal complaints

If you run a municipality where people complain about some common problem a lot such as traffic, sometimes you must use creative solutions. Change your traffic pattern to something completely ridiculous that no one understands. Wait a year or two then have everyone vote to see if they want to put it back to the old way. This way everyone should be happy because at least they got to choose their bad traffic patterns.

Beating do it yourselfers

Start a company as an electrician.  Make sure that all the wiring you do uses proprietary colors instead of the standard colors, then attach a "business card" to the end of each set of wires. People will have to call you for repairs because they can't figure out which wires do what.

Fund raising for college

When working a part time job at college sometimes you still need a couple extra bucks for tuition or food. Put a jar out at your job and label it something innocent like "under privileged children's fund" and put a cute picture of a kid on it. Then take your money at the end of the day because you are under privileged.

Profit

Invent a corporate holiday.  Associate all sorts of silly gifts that are tied to the holiday. Copyright the name, then sue all the major corporations for copyright infringement when they use your holiday name.

Forcing acceptance of new policies

Introduce a new set of policies that will make the public generally unhappy. Continue to offer the old policy, but make sure you deliver the old policy at an unreasonably slow rate. People will get frustrated.waiting and just accept the new policies out of frustration.

This post brought to you by the TSA. Well played holding an all hands meeting for the staff in charge of opt outs this morning. What you forgot is that business travelers don't care if they miss their flights when it is the travel organizations fault.

Starting a gym

Open a gym that guarantees weight loss after every session. Crank the heat up to 90. Have everyone weigh in before their workout. Require a minimum of an hour. Then have people weigh in after their workout. The water weight lost over the hour just by being in the heat will hit your guarantee.  All you have to do is make sure you have scales that are accurate to tenths of pounds.

Support

Design a Server product, then make simple things like clearing memory or turning on and off too complex to do through an interface.  Turn them into multiple step scripts so that people have to buy your support contracts.

Guaranteed legacy support

Develop an application that has a legacy support or compatibility layer. Release many versions of code that still rely on that layer (but don't tell anyone), then you never have to worry about actually upgrading anything.

Banking strategies

As a bank you should set up savings account type that has a high yield interest rate.  Then after a few months reduce the rate to almost nothing.  Then tell your customers that if they make multiple purchases using their check card they can get an increased interest rate.  Make sure that you only raise the interest rate enough that all it takes is one overdraft charge to cover their interest for multiple years.  The customer will think you are helping them out while you are really making more money off of them.