r/SellMyBusiness

What would this online business be worth?

5-year established online business with approximately $168,000 in historical revenue and currently generating approximately $1,100/month with minimal ongoing management.

Highlights:

• 5 years established
• ~$168,000 historical revenue
• ~$1,100/month current revenue
• Less than 2 hours of work per week
• Music/streaming-related
• Largely passive
• No music industry experience required
• Revenue could be increased with additional time and marketing
• Assets and accounts transferred
• Training and onboarding included
• Historical revenue documentation available

Included are social channels with over 70,000 followers.

Looking for advice with my current situation, I’m 28 started landscape business senior year in highschool so about 10 years ago. I expanded from 0 to 750k revenue this year. 80 percent large commercial accounts with contract 1-3 year terms and 20 percent residential no contracts. I’m located near Orlando FL.

Cash flow is about $320k paid my self $220k last year and $100k profit.
About 120k in equipment and have no debt on the business side.
2 full time crews, 4 employees plus myself.
I run the business out of my house.(live on a couple of acres with a shop in the back yard for all the equipment)

I’m conflicted on keep expending or just selling it all.
Main reason I would like to sell is that I’m done with the area I live in, my town used to be a small town of 20k people back in 2016 to now having over 85k people, seems to be happening everywhere in Florida for the most part. I never wanted to live in a populated area where everyone hates their lives because of traffic etc.

My wife and I fell in love with Montana and are really considering moving there, my main concern is having the funds to do it as I would have to find a job there and I only have a high school diploma. She is 100% disabled through the VA so she gets a little over $4k per month. We have horses so we’d need a property with a couple acres in Montana like we do here in Florida.

Do I sell now for let’s say $500k - $600k or try to grow to a point where I could get a million for the business.

With $250k in equity in my home and $500k from sale we could buy a house cash in Montana and live off of the $4000 my wife makes until I can either get a job or start another business in MT from the ground up, if I grew it to $1.5 million and potentially sell for $1m I could do the same but have a $250k+ safety net.

What would you do??

Hi, I have a kids' shoe business hosted on Shopify. With hardly any sales each month. I am wondering if it's still a possibility to sell the assets of the business (the inventory, branding, website etc) even with no meaningful sales. Any advice? Thank you

Hi All

Throwaway account.

Just looking for some value advice on my small e-commerce business started in 2023. I am considering selling my two Shopify websites and stock based in the UK. They both generate around £1500-£1800 in total per month. I have over 50 reviews averaging around 4.6 stars. Around 18% of customers return every month.

I think the business has potential to grow as I have just started a good blog to funnel customers and my tik tok videos are doing well.

I sell mainly in the UK but deliver all over the world.

I just do not have the time to continue as I work and am just about to start a PhD. Wife also works a demanding job and we have three kids.

Google ads around £300 pm, distributor costs are £250 pm. I was thinking around £40k for the business plus £4k for stock?

Any thoughts?

Hey guys, hopefully someone will have some advice on how to approach things in my situation.

Bought a bakery with my wife 5 years ago. It was running for almost 20 years and we used to buy bread from the same bakery so we knew it was good quality. We had no business experience and basically came from the street and bought it to have new challenges and to be our own boses.

Long story short, it was failing business but we had no idea at the time. The previous owner was an ass so he was losing customers in the shop, the wholesale business wasn't that great and they've had around 20-25 wholesale customers.

We paid £85k for everything. Bakehouse, shop, van and all equipment + stock.

During those years I've spent £100k so our total is about £180k spent for everything.

Since we took over we grew so fast that I couldn't believe it to be honest.

We supply holiday camps, cafes, restaurants, village shops, catering businesses, food vans etc.

At the moment we have 65 active wholesale customers. Some all year rounds and some only during the summer season.

Had to move to bigger premises, bought 2 transit vans instead of 1 little ford connect that was scrapped.

We did fairly well without any experience, but...

Kids came along and my wife left me on my own to run it. I'm a one man show with the help of the bakehouse manager. Had to employ 2 extra employees because I couldn't be everywhere at the same time. Had to cover the shop, drivers and bakehouse as well.

The idea was for my wife to run the shop and myself do deliveries and do baking as well.

2 extra people had costed us about £120-150k in 5 years which is a bunmer. It was supposed to be our profits or bakery improvements.

Now we are down to only 8 employees from 13. It took a while to find reliable staff and we are running pretty well with minimal human power.

We do about £450-500k in revenue per year and almost half of it goes to wages, VAT etc. Rest are expenses and debt consolidation ( explanation coming)

Wholesale does £30-40k and the shop £8-12k per month depending on the season.

My biggest worry is that we are thinking of selling it and leaving the UK next year.

For the last 4 years we haven't made a profit because :

1. Paid a lot of wages

2. Expansion. Cost about £20-30k

3. Van engine gone bust. Bought another one. £9k

4. Quite a few wholesale customers are being late with the payments. Every month they have £10-15k outstanding. Thus had to take a loan to pay wages and now are stuck in the cycle.

Only now 5 years later I can see the light at the end of the tunnel but haven't got much time left to clear everything and to show some profit to potential buyers.

It stresses the hell out of my knowing that we still have the potential to attract more wholesale customers and increase our revenue even with the same staff. And I won't be able to clear all the debt until after the sale.

There are only 2 bakeries that size in our region and I'm fairly certain that we control about 60% of the customers.

It would be a perfect business opportunity for a couple to reduce overhead even more but what are the chances?

Another option is to offer it to our competitors and let them control 100% of the market.

Any advice or pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Maybe just looking for someone to calm me down or tell the harsh truth that the last 5 years was a very expensive experience.

**Restaurant owners who stepped away from operations, how did you do it?**

I own a long-standing family restaurant in Southern California that I took over from my parents a few years ago. Business is doing alright, I’ve got a team and systems in place, but I’m at a point where I don’t really want to keep investing all my time and energy into growth.

Simply put, I’m not that passionate about restaurants.
However, I don’t really want to sell the whole thing either. It holds sentimental value to me. Ideally I’d keep some equity and find someone who actually wants to operate and grow the business. Whether that means they buy into it, earn equity over time, buy a majority stake, etc.

For anyone who’s done something similar, how did you structure it and where did you find the right person?

Did you find an experienced operator/GM? Promote someone internally? Find someone who wanted to become an owner?

Also curious what you’d do differently if you had to do it again.

Just trying to learn from people who’ve been through it before. Appreciate any advice.

We were looking at a SaaS business that was for sale. Clean Stripe dashboard steady ~18k MRR, growing month ever month, On paper, so solid.

The revenue was 10000% real, real money moving, actual charges, actual cards, anyone would proceed and sign,

the thing that gave it away was the traffic,

We cross-referenced the stripe revenue against Google analytics using a tool that reads directly from source (Stripe/Google Analytics) not exported CSV/Excel file. and it showed that there is no enough organic traffic to support that 18k MRR.

For that it would need couple hundreds of customers. the math didn't work, There weren't enough humans visiting the site to plausibly be paying that much.

What was happening: the "customers were largely the seller's own cards (and a few friends). cycled through Stripe to manufacture an MRR, curved that looked like growth.

The lesson: revenue being real is Stripe does not mean the business is real, Real costumers leave a footprint. traffic, session, usage, ...

don't just verify the revenue, always verify that there is enough humans to explain it.

After 7+ years decided to leave a startup I co-founded. Reasons: we were going nowhere, lack of strong leadership, internal disputes and burnout. Felt a relieve I have not felt in those 7+ years and, therefore, I think it was one of the best decisions of my life. The problem is that I am stuck with a significant amount of shares and cannot liquidate them. My concern is that company might go bankrupt sometime in 6 months and I will be left with nothing. I am looking for smart ways to sell my vested shares. The issue is that no current investor is interested as I have a feeling they also do not believe in company’s success. There is an upcoming investment round but I doubt the new investor will want to buy my part.
What can I do in this situation?

I am curious if anyone could send some ideas and /or examples of what is best to do. I have seen people close down their boutique (sell the assets / fixtures) and I have seen people actually sell the boutique. I am about to retire and move out of state and not exactly sure what to do