You can get as wild as your imagination allows—from grungy laundromats to drag show clubs.
The Sims 4 Businesses & Hobbies expansion has opened its doors to pretty much any kind of small business venture you can dream up. It’s perfect for my Build Mode brain that loves to spend four hours designing a place and then never playing it. That’s the hard part though: coming up with ideas for small businesses in The Sims 4.
You can stick to some obvious picks like the pottery shop and tattoo parlor that the expansion’s new skills are angled towards or some of the funnier ones like a cat cafe that it encourages if you’ve got the Cats & Dogs expansion. But the small business system is so permissive that your imagination really is the limit.
If your creativity cortex isn’t booting up, I’m here to help jumpstart your inspo needs with some freebie ideas for fun small businesses and how to set them up in Businesses & Hobbies.
Speakeasy bar
Making a speakeasy is, in fact, very easy. It’s the first thing I made with the expansion and isn’t really functionally different from just a regular coffee shop or bar. You’ll just want to build it in a secret basement or back room for maximum prohibition vibes. Some of the bars that came in the Lovestruck expansion are perfect for that era of architecture, by the way.
You can adjust the business activities to things like dancing and have DJing as employee tasks if you want more of an underground club vibe. The important bit is to just make sure your customers are going to drink and any employees are going to serve.
Note also that you can only have one small business on your lot open at once. That’s a bummer for some setups you might have envisioned, but for a speakeasy it means you can have one sim run a legit business by day and then another sim open their secret bar by night after it closes, which is a fun storytelling hook.
Daycare
Running a daycare small business in The Sims 4 sort of works. You just have to suspend your disbelief and use your imagination a bit. It doesn’t function as a way for your other sims to actually pay for childcare so really it’s just a way for your small business owner to care for kids (or cats) all day while getting paid.
Remember to untick the “caregiver stays at business” and toggle the “criteria required” on with your customer age preference so that parents will drop their kids off and pick them up later.
You can add even more business activities specific to the age group you want as well, like playing voidcritters or doing puzzles if you want to have a preschool-style kids daycare instead of infants.
Laundromat
Running a laundromat and saving up is a total rags to riches player’s dream small business. You’ll need the Laundry Day stuff pack, which will let you toss a bunch of stackable washer and dryer units into a room. Pair with some of the cracked walls and ratty furniture from the For Rent expansion if you really want to grunge it up.
You can earn money from “services” when customers use your laundry machines but this type of business is a bit easier to run if you set the entrance fees to “hourly” to mimic how a laundrette user would be paying up on fixed intervals for machines. Just make sure your employees are ready to clean up washing machine leaks and fix busted appliances.
Comedy club
At last Johnny Zest can live out his dream as a comedian. You can start things off small in a garage space and then move on up to build a separate comedy club venue if you want. Remember: all the cool comedy clubs have brick walls.
In theory you can leave entrance fees disabled and just make money off drinks if you hire a bartender employee to serve customers while your talent wows them on stage. I’d recommend going with a one-time entrance fee like the cover charge or ticket price at most comedy clubs. Oh, and make sure to make a small platform ‘room’ for your stage so you can mark it as “employees only” to keep customers from walking right through the performance.
For a little extra fun you could turn this into a drag cabaret instead if you set up an employee uniform inspired by your favorite Drag Race stars and have them either perform standup comedy or musical numbers.
Internet cafe
Another fun throwback business idea is the old internet cafe. Set up a space with tons of chunky desktop computers and charge your customers an hourly rate to sit around playing Blicblock. Your small business owner almost doesn’t need to do anything at all to make this place a success other than greet customers every once in a while.
If you want to step it up into something more involved though, you could run a tabletop gaming shop instead of an internet cafe where customers pay a one-time entry fee to play table games and also buy MySims trophies you’ve collected.
Petting zoo
Running a petting zoo can work for anyone who has the Cats & Dogs expansion but is even better if you have the Cottage Living expansion with cows and llamas. Charge a one time entry fee to become a master of agritourism as sims visit just to hang out with your livestock.
If you want to expand the operation into even more suburbanite farm activities you can have garden plots available for customers to “tend and harvest garden” or even “look for frogs” in ponds on the lot.
Host club
This is a weird one but hear me out: The Yakuza series fan in me loves the idea of running a host/hostess club where employees chat with and entertain their customers, and maybe flirt a little bit too. It’s finally the perfect job for Don Lothario. Just make sure you’re targeting wealthy customers if you really want to nail the style.
Charge a one-time entry fee as cover and then make the rest of your money on drink sales. Just make sure to also set up an employee uniform so that your staff comes dressed in glamor to entertain. You’ll probably want to hire separate employees to be bartenders so your hosts can stay focused on clients.
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