Buying A Side Hustle Set Me Free From My 9-5. Here’s How.
Updated on July 4, 2025
Transcript
The first goal of any intrepid entrepreneur is: How do I replace my job income so I can work full time on my business income? It's the first real milestone and often the very first challenge an entrepreneur faces when they try to start their side hustle. And it can be a big one, too, right? Replacing your job income with a side hustle is no easy feat, despite what the Internet might be telling you right now. It takes discipline, time management, and, well, all the other challenges that come with starting any business. It’s not just a side hustle, right?
But here's a little secret that most people don't talk about when it comes to creating these side hustles. If you want to replace your income very fast with a side hustle, then don't start one at all. Instead, you should just buy one that's already making money. And that's exactly what we're going to be talking about today in this video.
Let's talk a little bit about why buying a side hustle makes a lot more sense than building one, many times depending on your situation. First of all, most side hustles will fail, just like most businesses will fail. A side hustle is technically a business, right? So it's going up against all the same struggles that any business, started from scratch, faces. It's not that people aren't smart or hardworking—that's not the reason why they fail. Rather, the reason they fail is a single killer problem that faces every business from day one: product-market fit.
You see, you can build the most beautiful website, spend months perfecting your product, but if the market doesn't want what you are selling, you're doomed no matter how much time you spent on it. I've seen entrepreneurs spend well over a year coding an app, only to discover nobody actually wants it. Product-market fit, in my view, is the single hardest thing to achieve in starting a business, and is the biggest challenge—it's where most people fail. You just don't know what you don't know. You need market data in the form of actual customer feedback. But to get that, you need actual customers who are paying you real money—not just friends who tell you how great you are because they're supportive, nor those who say how cool your product idea is. The only votes that count are those that are making revenue for you. Everything else is a fugazi. This can be an incredibly difficult thing when starting something from scratch.
People starting a side hustle are in the same exact boat as people who are going full-fledged into full-time entrepreneurship—from the folks starting a side hustle like a faceless YouTube channel, all the way up to the big players with $50 million in funding building the next big software or e-commerce company. Every entrepreneur faces this challenge—except for one type of entrepreneur.
You see, there is a way to skirt around this problem, and you already know what it is. Because the person that can skirt around the problem is the entrepreneur that doesn't build a business, but rather buys a side hustle that is already profitable, already making money. When you buy a business that's profitable, you're actually buying time. The seller already spent two to five years figuring out product-market fit, enduring that entire challenge, and you get to skip that and go directly to the profit.
So, think about that. Would you rather spend two years trying to build a blog that might make you $500 a month depending on how Google’s feeling that day, or buy one tomorrow that's already generating $2,000 a month in profits with room to grow? This is the major difference here. The entire calculus of how long it takes to replace your job income goes from possibly years of building a side hustle from scratch to possibly days when you buy a business that's already making money.
Now, you might be thinking, "This sounds way too good to be true. So what's the catch?" Well, there is a catch. The catch is that most people buy the wrong businesses because they don't know what to look for. And that's where we become kind of your secret weapon.
Unlike other marketplaces, where anyone can list anything, we vet every single business that goes on Empire Flippers Marketplace. We reject roughly 94% of businesses out of the hundreds that get submitted to us every single week. And I do mean hundreds. Out of that remaining 6% or so, only a small percentage pass enough of our sniff test to ever make it live on our marketplace for buyers to look at.
Now, what does that mean for you? Well, you're not wading through garbage listings or dealing with sellers inflating their numbers because they don't understand their own value—sellers usually overprice themselves, right? Not so when they come onto the Empire Flippers marketplace. So when you deal with Empire Flippers, every business you are looking at has been professionally vetted.
And considering that we've sold over 2,400 businesses at this point, we've seen a bit of everything when it comes to how to vet a business and the intricacies that go into that business. Each listing we post shows you exactly how that business makes money, what the growth opportunities are—all kinds of good stuff. And this saves you a crazy amount of time when it comes to deal sourcing.
You'll see a lot of people kind of poo-poo on brokers, like, "Oh, the best deals are not with brokers." That's wrong, by the way. The best deals are wherever you find them. It could be with a broker, it could be off-market—but a lot of gurus will say that to sell you a course. So, just FYI, one of the things to consider when using a broker—outside of just the fact that you can tap into all this deal sourcing to find a profitable side hustle this year, even as a first-time business buyer—is that it is also an incredible safety net for you to use a brokerage like Empire Flippers.
You see, even though we get paid by the sellers of our marketplace, our actual repeat customers are not the sellers, they're the buyers. When a seller goes and sells their business, it will often take two to four years before they have another one ready to go—that’s typical, at least. But buyers, on the other hand, may end up buying from us multiple times in a single year because they're just acquiring like mad. Our repeat customers tend to be more often buyers. So what that means for you is that our incentive is to get the seller a good deal—we want the seller to be happy with the exit—but we also have the incentive to make sure you as the buyer are getting a good deal and are someone who can really run this business you are acquiring. We want you to not only have great success with the business you've acquired from us, but selfishly, we really want you to come back and buy another one. And we couldn't do that if we didn't treat our buyers the way we do.
All of this makes us the most newbie-friendly marketplace in the industry. I don't know anyone who's more newbie-friendly than us. In fact, sometimes our sellers say we're too nice to the buyers! This means we know exactly how to help you and how to help you create your own buyer criteria.
Speaking of that, let's talk a little bit about your buyer criteria. If you are going to seriously go out there and acquire a side hustle, first we need to talk about your investment range and have a real conversation here. We want to be realistic with what you can do, without leveraging your house and life savings and maxing out your credit cards. So here is a really good rule of thumb when it comes to acquiring a side hustle—or any business, up to a certain point: don't invest more than you are comfortable with losing. Business is a risky game.
Now, buying a business is way less risky than starting one in my view, and the data kind of supports me on that. But that doesn't mean there's no risk. There is always risk; business is a game of risk. So you should never go into an acquisition deal where you are afraid of losing your money.
Speaking of leverage—because I mentioned maxing out your credit cards and such—I'm not against using leverage, including taking out loans with personal guarantees to acquire a business. I think a lot of people get fearful with that type of thing, and I think the fear is a little overhyped—like, both overhyped and underhyped at the same time! Personal guarantee loans, as long as it's the right kind of business, can be a really good deal for you. So I'm not poo-pooing on that at all. I think it can be a legitimate path for you to go and acquire a side hustle, or even something bigger. But you need to be savvy enough to know when to use leverage carefully. Although leverage can be an absolutely incredible boon for you in terms of acquisition ROI and all that, every piece of a debt stack that you apply to a business makes that business inherently more vulnerable to market changes.
If you're just starting out, I recommend you really focus on the capital you already have saved up, versus doing any super fun, highly creative leverage plays with all the different ways of financing and lending out there. For most people starting out looking to buy a side hustle, you’ll probably have about $50,000 to $100,000 that you can comfortably use to invest into a side hustle. And yes, there are profitable businesses that exist in this range—they can help you replace your job income.
A very important thing here: even if you only have, say, $100,000 to put down on a business, that doesn't mean you can only look at businesses valued at $100,000. A $100,000 down payment can actually be very acceptable for businesses selling at a $200,000 valuation or even a $300,000 valuation, as long as the deal structure makes sense for them. So you can still use leverage—maybe not tied to a personal guarantee, but rather tied to seller financing, earn outs, all that kind of stuff—to get yourself into a much bigger business.
Next, on your criteria, you need to decide what kind of business model you want to acquire. Are you buying a more passive income business, or are you willing to actively manage something more hands-on? Content sites and YouTube channels can be much more passive, more hands-off, while e-commerce or service businesses usually require more of your daily attention. The more hands-off the business is, often the less potential the business has to grow. A content site is often limited by Google SEO for its traffic; a YouTube channel is limited by YouTube’s traffic potential. Those two models make most of their money typically off advertising and affiliate marketing, which is fantastic and very hands-off—you don't have to handle customer service or do any of that other stuff. But this also means you’re going to be making an overall lower amount of money versus if you own the products behind the advertisement.
Of course, you can always grow these business models so they're not just a content site or a YouTube channel, but that's a tough transformation, especially if you're just starting out and don't fully know what you’re doing. Unless you have a really good plan, I wouldn’t buy those businesses with the idea that you’re going to dramatically transform them, unless your plan is pretty solid.
Another thing is: buy what you know. If you've never done affiliate marketing in your entire life, maybe don't buy an affiliate site—especially right now with how the environment is, with Google changing all the rules. Maybe that's not a good place to buy your first business. You should stick to what you ideally already understand and something you are willing to learn very deeply. If you understand the niche well, then it may make sense to buy an affiliate site or even an e-commerce store without direct experience. The key is asking yourself: What do you know? What can you do with the business you're looking to acquire? I like to think of it as: what industries am I interested in, what current skills do I have, and what kind of lifestyle do I want with my acquisition?
Another part of your criteria here is defining your growth strategy. No business should be acquired and then ignored—that is a foolish thing to do, in my view, because if you do that, there’s a good chance the business will die on you. So you want a good growth strategy before you go out and buy a side hustle. Are you looking to buy, hold, and collect cash flow? You can do it that way, but that's a certain type of business you'll have to buy. Or are you looking to grow a business and flip it? Depending on whether you want to hold and collect the cash flow, or grow it to flip for two or three times what you paid in a couple years, that’s going to change what you’re looking for.
If you want to collect cash flow and really build up your nest egg that way, then the business you’re looking at might be priced at a premium multiple; you acquire something that is more stable. But because you’re acquiring it at a premium multiple and it's more stable, there's often less upside for growth—the business has already hit a lot of its growth metrics. Versus if you’re looking to flip something, you might go after businesses that have more problems and are not at a premium multiple. The reason is because there's stuff you need to fix under the hood. That would be a totally different type of business.
If you are brand new to businesses, my number one advice for you when it comes to buying a side hustle is: don't buy something you're going to flip. Buy something you can hold and grow, because that gives you a much wider range of businesses you can buy that don't have as many problems. Yes, you will probably spend more money, but the money that you spend is also going to have a much higher chance of return for you if you don’t have the skills to fix a business with big problems.
That leads to my final point here: set your minimum requirements of what the business should have already. I typically recommend not buying anything with less than 24 months of operational history. Ideally, it should be stable or growing revenue year over year, and ideally, diversified traffic sources. As the industry continues to expand and mature, I think having multiple traffic sources is way, way, way safer than just relying on one.
Now, if your plan is, "You know what, Greg, I'm going to buy a side hustle and flip it and grow it at an exponential rate to sell it," that’s great. But I still wouldn't recommend buying something that's declining—declining businesses year over year—except in specific cases, like right after the pandemic when everyone started going outside again and web traffic crashed. I wouldn't recommend buying a falling knife unless you're someone who knows how to fix it. And if you are going to buy a declining business, make sure you know how to fix it, and that you value the business based on what the revenue is today—not what it used to be.
For example, a buddy of mine is looking to sell his agency, which had crazy big numbers during the pandemic. He was getting customers left and right. Now, that business has fallen pretty dramatically from where it used to be, but it's still a really good business. However, you would never want to value a business like that based on its previous revenue. Now it's been about two or three years, and it's stabilized. So its valuation is really over the last 12 or 24 months, where it's been stable. All that crazy growth he had years ago is no longer part of the company's valuation.
So there are ways you can buy these businesses. Just make sure if you are going to buy a declining business, you know how to fix it, and the valuation you give that business doesn't include what the revenue used to be, but reflects what the revenue is today.
And there you have it! That's all you really need to go out and buy a profitable side hustle. Buy something you want to learn about, ideally something you already know a little about, and something that is stable or growing in terms of revenue, and has over 24 months of operational data. Even if you only have $100,000, you can put that as a down payment. Instead of paying $300,000 all up front, maybe you put $100,000 down with another payment in three months or whatever the deal is, and you can get yourself into a $300K business that might be making you $8,000 to $10,000 a month in profit before debt service. These are all different ways you can go about acquiring a side hustle.
If you’re wondering where to find all these things, the answer is very easy. Just go to empireflippers.com/marketplace, register as a buyer, verify your identity, and you can start looking at profitable side hustles today to go out and acquire—which is way less stressful than trying to build one from scratch.
