The worst businesses to open

The worst businesses in 2026 to open. People want to know the good ones, but what do you want to stay away from? So you might want to bookmark this one, just in case you make any crazy decisions over Christmas. So just so you know my credentials, so myself and my company, we grow businesses. So we need to know what's right or wrong. And without further ado, the first business to not open in 2026 is drop shipping. Now, it's a double-edged sword this one because there is a great way of doing it at the moment which I'll tell you at the end. But the traditional drop shipping store on Google, it's done. But there is amazing ways to do it now. If you can sell TikTok live and sell other people's products, you don't have to stock anything. You just take massive commissions. So there is a silver lining into that one. But just some data on it, it's down by 10% drop shipping globally and the costs have risen by 30 to 40% for stock. So that type of drop shipping is out. The next one is hair and beauty clinics. We've had a boom and there's lots of really established hair and beauty clinics now over the last few years. Opening one now will feel tough, especially the beauty industry because there's so many good competitors now that have become established and skilled with really advanced treatments. And I think for anyone new, it's going to be hard. But if you are opening one, try and be innovative, try and do something that no one else is doing. Yeah, don't follow the curve. You must be innovative if you're opening in a salon of some sort in 2026. Number three, food trucks and cafes. The COVID boom, everyone got it into it. Deliveroo and Just Eat boom, same again. Everyone got into it. People are going to start cooking from home. Surely the supermarket prices will come down at some point, which will drive the traffic away. I do believe takeaways have been in a massive bubble for a while. Can it get bigger the industry? Who knows. But the cost of food is going up, so it's very, very hard to compete. And when the cost of takeaways go up so much, people do start turning away. So food trucks and cafes are no. This one hurts me a little bit, but a social media agency. People and businesses need to learn this themselves, and I think we're starting to turn a corner now where people have to learn how to do their own social media in order to grow. People like buying from people, not like graphics and designs. So if you think that you can make a few Canvases and send them to someone and charge them every month for it, it's not happening. Unless the social media is like super niched, like it's like based around research, traffic, data, hooks, things like that, then you're going to have a chance. But the generic old school social media kind of agency, it's a no. There's some good companies out there, but there's a lot to compete with now. The average social media agency would charge like thousands per month, but the average has dropped to like a couple of hundred pounds. So it's a really fast drop for a lot of work. Another one, SEO. This also had a massive boom. Now, this also has a silver lining because of the things like Chat GPT and these AI models that are starting to push businesses now. But your old school SEO content writing is it's it's becoming hard. And I don't think it's a good time to start that. If you want to do it, then push into the other platforms that are starting to push businesses like Chat GPT. Try and figure out how to get companies listed there. Finally, just a content creator. If you want to make money just making content and nothing else, it's going to be harder in 2026. There is ways around it, so you've got things like lives, which are fantastic and and stuff like that. But just the general creator fund, I think it's going to be quite hard because there's a lot of creators now. So if you have a plan behind why you're creating content, you can make good money and a good business doing that. If you just want to monetize that content that you're making, yeah, just as a content creator on the platforms unlike a creator fund, it's going to be a lot harder than it's ever been in 2026 because you have to layer your offers as you go, which will make your funnels much more complex and things like that. Having said that, the lives are brilliant, okay? So if you can get used to that, yeah, that's going to boom and I think that it's a really, really good platform. So if you can do lives with something really valuable, yeah, comedy, entertainment, even advice, whatever, then you're going to be onto a winner with lives. So I think you could push that, but just the standard content creation, images, short videos, it's going to be a lot harder. So you could use the content to then push them to lives, yeah, and monetize it that way. But the old way of doing it, it's just yeah, you just need to think a little bit more into that. So there are my tips of what not to do in 2026.