How Much Money Can I Earn with My Own Business?

Here’s the hard truth. You can make much more money running your own business than working a normal 9-to-5 job for someone else.

Who do you think is the wealthiest person in most towns in the U.S.? The top doctor? The best lawyer? The president of the local bank?

No. It’s almost always someone who started their own business. And often it’s a simple service business — such as a trash collection service, a landscaping business, a cleaning business, a moving company… or you name it!

Let’s start with a simple, one-person service business

For many service businesses, you can charge as much as $100 an hour for your services.

So, let’s say that you sell your services for 30 hours per week, 50 weeks per year. That would be 30 x 50 x $100 = $150,000 annual income.

Suppose you work only part-time and you manage to bill let’s say 10 hours per week. That would be 10 x 50 x $100 = $50,000 annual income. Not bad for a side business.

It gets even better! If your service business is specialized or has a unique twist to it, you may be able to charge a lot more. Maybe as much as $200 an hour. If you can bill 30 hours a week at $200 an hour, that’s $300,000 a year.

Soon you may find that you have more work than you can handle yourself. Then it’s time to hire employees. Then there’s no limit to how much you can grow your business and your income.

When starting a business, you’re creating an asset for you and your family

After a few years, you may decide you want to do something else. Then you can make even more money by selling your business. If you have a good business with regular customers, you can sell it for a lot of money. For example, some larger dog walking businesses have sold for over $500,000.

With a product business, you can do even better. But there’s also more risk because you usually have more competition.

For example, I started my book publishing company in my basement apartment with just $1500 and built it up to an annual sales level of $20 million and profits of $5 million. I eventually sold it for $40 million.

Of course, you can always go work for a big corporation and try to make it to the top of the ladder. I personally know the CEOs of two Fortune 500 companies. I can tell you that neither one of them made as much money as I did with just one of my small businesses. One of these CEOs had to outperform 400,000 other employees to land the top job.

The bottom line is that if you want to make a lot of money, then you should start your own business.

By Bob Adams, Harvard MBA, serial entrepreneur, and founder of BusinessTown.

Disclaimer: The content on this page is for information purposes only and does not constitute legal, tax, or accounting advice. If you have specific questions about any of these topics, seek the counsel of a licensed professional.