If you’re trying to decide what field to go into, you can do a lot worse than look at where expansion and growth is taking place. Here are the top 10 fastest growing franchise companies in the United States, together with the markets in which they operate:

Top 10 fastest growing franchises

1. Subway – Fast Food
2. Dunkin’ Donuts – Fast Food
3. Cruise Planners – Travel Agency
4. Jimmy John’s Gourmet Sandwiches – Fast Food
5. Vanguard Cleaning Systems – Commercial Cleaning
6. Great Clips – Hair Salon
7. Taco Bell – Fast Food
8. Bricks 4 Kidz – Legoengineering classes, camps, parties
9. McDonald’s – Fast Food
10.Sport Clips – Men’s sports-theme hair salon

What do we see…food, travel, cleaning and personal grooming. Hardly rocket science is it?

A new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York sends a worrying message to anyone over 30. Your first 10 years in the labour market are likely shape your lifetime earning potential.

Across the board, the bulk of earnings growth happens during the first decade,” wrote economists Fatih Guvenen, Fatih Karahan, Serdar Ozkan and Jae Song, who studied the career paths of about 5 million workers over nearly 40 years. Earnings for most, stagnate after the first 10 years of a career.

So if you’re past thirty, and your career  hasn’t progressed to where you think it should be, the chances are that it will never end up where you’d like. The solution, seems pretty clear – strike out on your own and there are no age restrictions on progress. Many entrepreneurs achieve financial success in their middle and later years. Age is no barrier when you do it yourself.

One of the first businesses I started back in the late 1980’s was a computer dating agency. It’s to my eternal regret that I didn’t stick with it through to the internet dating age, where numerous fortunes have been made. And it’s not just the agencies that are raking it in. There are now a whole range of ‘dating coaches’ who have set up in business to help people (mainly men) get success with online dating.

Scott Valdez founded Virtual Dating Assistants in the United States in 2009. It now employs 35 people, 15 of whom are writers. They write profiles and even take over the whole communication process for,  what I’d assume are,  ‘personality-challenged’ clients. The average client spends $2,000 with the company.

Is this a business idea you could copy? If you have an affinity with people and some decent writing skills, there’s no reason why not. Dating isn’t going away any time soon!

If you are in the hair or beauty business and you’d like to get a head start on the competition this year,  then maybe you should look at a new trend that’s booming in the United States.

As the name suggests pixelated hair is a patterning system that makes the hair look pixelated. The technique was developed by a company based in Madrid and  was first showcased in Minneapolis late last year. 2015 is likely to be the year of pixelated hair so if you’re in the business why not investigate how to get involved and get a share of profits?

I’ve  just read about a 15-year-old American high school girl called Noa Mintz who is making over half a million dollars a year from a babysitting agency called Nannies By Noa. It has grown to 290 clients in just three years with Mintz charging a flat fee of five dollars for babysitters and then 15% of the  initial salary  of nannies. She now has 25 full-time nannies and 50 babysitters working an average of 15 hours a week and has now made enough money to hire a full-time chief executive to run the company while she goes to school.

The success of Noa’s business shows that there’s money to be made from the most mundane of services.  If a 15 year old can do it while still at school why not you? Perhaps it’s time for you to look at what other  boring but in-demand services you could build a fortune from.