Boy, I don’t know if I can safely answer that question for you Frank. It really depends on your innate skill set. Are you a numbers guy? People person? Risk taker? Details oriented? Hard working?

There’s a ton of owner run businesses that do great if you’re just willing to put your head down and work at it consistently. I own two franchises. One of them is barely breaking even (due to the minimum wage laws here) while the other one is doing fantastic. Food service is tough work but if you can make your employees happy, know how to not to waste money and be willing to toil away, you should be able to make low six-figures as an owner-operator depending on your area.

As far as yogurt goes, it’s a tough biz, but it’s consolidating in most parts as the fad is over. That means weak hands are folding and strong hands stay in. I almost decided to get into the yogurt biz because 3 shops on the same main area were ALL closing down. I figured I could pay 2 to close and buy the other one and make life incredibly difficult for a new person if they tried to come into the area. But, the reality is that it’s not a business that’s growing and only one that will ‘maintain’ so to speak.

End of the day, whatever you do, you should have some type of vested interest or expertise in. Like you said, the day spa has no appeal for you, so it’s a job. Even if you end up working 80 hours making sandwiches or selling yo-yos online, if you have a natural love of it, it will make life infinitely easier in all aspects.

Hi Frank,

That’s a great question and unfortunately without personally knowing you, there’s not a really good answer that I could give. What I can say, is the smaller and more boot strapped your ecommerce is, the more of a hands-on, technical or adventurous person you need to be. For example, a small store will have revenues under $300,00 per year. It’s safe to say unless your cost of goods are extremely low, that will make you a 60k as an owner with 20% net profit. This means no other employees, difficulty hiring coders and essentially doing everything yourself, aka buying yourself a job. If you don’t have technical skills or how to find those that can build it for you, then it would be a challenging curve.

Now, if you have deeper pockets, you can hire good developers and build a team that can go around and specialize in their respective areas. But that takes skill in and of itself and usually requires some previous business experience as well as capital.

No matter what, don’t believe any sites that sell an absentee business related to ecommerce. They simply don’t exist. Ecommerce is highly competitive and unless you can bring a core competency to the table that your competitors don’t, then it’s only a matter of time before someone else eclipses you.