Tried and True Business Ideas Turn a classic business idea into your next big moneymaker.

There's a simple reason some businesses tend to always do well. People love food and convenience, so burger joints and pizza delivery will always be in style. There's always a market for back-to-school products and Christmas tree decorations, too, so retailers have a tried-and-true formula for those seasons. And when it comes to college guys, it's a good bet that they'll always love a good swimsuit calendar.

That's exactly what entrepreneurs Ben Leis and David Freedman were banking on. The two childhood friends came up with a concierge business for sports professionals while Leis was at the University of Miami and Freedman was at Arizona State University in Tempe, but during the planning phase, they decided the business would be too much to handle. Looking for a simpler idea, the pair holed up in Freedman's house, brainstormed and landed on the idea of a swimsuit calendar featuring the girls next door: Arizona State University students. Eight weeks later, they'd formed StudentBody Marketing and already had the Tempe12 calendar out. "It was extremely fast," says Leis. "Eight months later, we had our second calendar out."

That type of immediate recognition is one of the benefits of a tried-and-true business idea--there's no need to explain the concept to potential customers, as people are generally pretty familiar with these classic ideas. "Because they're tried and true, a market for that type of product or solution has been demonstrated somewhere along the line," says Sherry Hoskinson, director of the McGuire Entrepreneurship Program in the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "It might be that the original product or service wasn't timely. And by coming along and assessing the new needs or the new [demographic, an entrepreneur is] perking it up to meet a newly validated need." The benefits of such an approach are many: Since you're learning from past incarnations, you can likely avoid common missteps, and your initial investments tend to be lower than a start-from-scratch type of business.