How to Replace Your 9-to-5 With an Online Business
Updated on April 2, 2026
Transcript
If you ever wanted to quit your job and replace your income with that sweet, sweet digital money of passive income that all the gurus are telling you about on YouTube and Facebook and Reddit and TikTok—oh, good news. I’m here to tell you how to do it, and also probably burst your bubble a bit. Let’s get into it.
So I got this question from an audience member: “How do I go about buying a business? Or how do I go about having an online business that allows me to leave my 9 to 5 job?”
Now, this is a very broad question. Honestly, I don’t think any blanket answer makes sense, so I’ll give you my opinion on it—the way I would do it if I was you and I was trying to escape the 9 to 5 by replacing my income with a digital business.
What I know is $5,000 to $7,000 a month in profit that I’m able to pay myself is what I would feel probably the most comfortable with to finally go out on my own, once you get your savings and all that kind of good stuff.
If you’re still in your 9 to 5, there are kind of two schools of thought. Either jump all the way into entrepreneurship, and that stress kind of carries you to the finish line—and a lot of entrepreneurs really thrive under that stress. I think that’s a bit of survivorship bias, personally, because if you look at the majority of businesses, they fail. I mean, that’s just the numbers.
Some people do thrive that way, but I would say a better way is to start working on the weekends or in the evenings, or whenever you have off time at your job, to build your online business—or to go buy one.
Now, when it comes to building or buying, I’m in favor of buying if you have the means to do so—if you have the ability to go and acquire a business. And when it comes to acquiring a business to replace your income, it’s probably not as big of a business as you think that you might need.
I just did our industry report, which you can download in the link down below or join our newsletter. If it’s not live yet, you’ll get prompted. The average sales multiple that we had hovered between like 28 and 31x of their monthly net income. So let’s say we’re at a 30x sales multiple.
For a business you acquire, you only need to acquire a $150,000 business to be making roughly around $5,000. Now, of course, that is profit and not salary going to you. That business requires reinvestment, and sometimes a lot more reinvestment depending on the business you’re going to buy. So maybe $300,000 is something you want to go to, just to pad that.
But let’s stick with $150,000 here and talk a little bit about what I recommend—the type of business I recommend for you.
If you’re going to go and buy a business while working a 9 to 5, I would recommend buying a business where you can be a little bit divorced in terms of active time to make the money.
And what I mean by that is: does this business require you to be on a sales call? If yes, that means active time to make money—to make the revenue. If the business does not require you to be active at the time that the revenue comes in, that is probably a better business for someone doing a more traditional 9 to 5.
So for example: an Amazon FBA business, an Amazon KDP business, even a faceless YouTube channel—it does not require you to be actively doing anything at the moment you make your revenue.
Now don’t get me wrong: the whole start of this video where I was bemoaning the gurus talking about passive income or replacing your 9 to 5 with an online business—I think they’re often full of shit. This is hard work. Even if you buy the business and it’s already proven, you are going to be doing work in order to maintain that investment, keep it going, and keep it profitable for you.
But that doesn’t mean you have to be there at the moment that the cash register rings. You still have to put in the work.
So I would first look at a business that does not require me to be active at the moment we make the money.
This also leads to another thing: I would look at acquiring a business that potentially I could leverage through paid media. I think organic is great. My background is SEO. I love SEO. I love content marketing—all that kind of stuff.
But I’m speaking from personal experience: you can get really burnt out doing a lot of organic content, and you just don’t have as much control as you do with paid media. Now, paid media is scary because you can spend a lot of money and ruin your wallet quite quickly if you don’t know what you’re doing.
So I would recommend learning paid media and buying a business that you can utilize and leverage paid media with. Ideally, you can do that with faceless YouTube channels too—as long as the channel itself can support some kind of business outside of just being a YouTube channel.
But those are the two main things I would be looking at.
Me personally, I probably would buy a small Amazon FBA business, because physical product businesses—as you grow them—they tend to be very capital intensive and capital hungry, versus a KDP business where you’re selling a bunch of digital books. It’s not really the same kind of capital intensity that you’re going to go through as you scale a business like that.
So I would also look for businesses that don’t require a lot of capital to scale. Ideally, digital products of some sort, or services that don’t take a lot of time—things like that I think are great.
Now, I want to also talk about another thing you can do without spending $150,000 or $300,000 to go and buy a profitable business. If you are able to do some of the active activities—like being on a sales call or whatever—then I honestly think the shortest path for you to truly leave your 9 to 5 might be not buying a business at all, but rather starting a service business.
Service businesses are fantastic, especially when you begin, because you learn a lot of different skills all at once. You learn all the pains of fulfillment: how do you be a good salesperson? How do you be a good customer support person? How do you be a good marketer? Because you’ve got to market the services.
So there’s a lot of things going on here that you must learn, but it really sets you up really well to do a lot of other interesting things.
And I promise you: you do 100 cold calls in a day, you are never going to be afraid of sales again. You might still be bad at it, you might still suck, right? But you won’t be afraid of it anymore. Trust me.
As an introvert myself who has done cold calling before, I’m speaking from experience on that.
Service businesses are pretty cool because, unlike the businesses I just recommended (which are mostly low-ticket businesses), service businesses can be very high ticket—meaning you only need a couple sales every other month. And if it’s a recurring service, you may only need a few sales every few months, because if your churn is very low, that means customers are staying and paying you over and over again.
So I have a bunch of friends that have lifestyle marketing agencies doing $5k, $15k—some doing $30k and $40k a month—and they’re pretty chill with what they have set up now.
In order for that to happen, you must become extremely good at one narrow thing. Too many people that start a service business are all over the place. And again, speaking from personal experience—because massive ADHD—you need to focus on one thing. One thing you can get really, really good at.
Ideally, that one thing you need to charge between $1,000 to $5,000 monthly, or at least one-time. So that is what I recommend if you don’t want to go buy a business.
Now, that could be tricky if you have a 9 to 5, right? Because you are literally working during business hours. If you were like me working in the oilfield, it’s even trickier, because I wasn’t just working business hours—I was working 12 to 18 hours a day, and I would sometimes get a few days off.
So this was a very hard business model for me to pull off when I was trying to. But it is possible. I’ve known people to do it. Me doing that eventually led me to working at Empire Flippers as well, so it wasn’t all a loss.
But I do think high-ticket service businesses are some of the best ways for you to truly quit your 9 to 5. Now, I think it can be very difficult if you’re working a 9 to 5 to really master that.
If you are okay with it, another suggestion you can do—and you might take a pay cut depending on what you’re doing, and it might be a very scary thing for you to do—(but this is something I actually did do) is leave your job to go work at another company that does the thing you actually want to do.
As an entrepreneur, you can learn so much from doing this, right? So I was trying to learn marketing, trying to do my own marketing. I tried to get hired by marketing agencies. I had no college education or anything like that; I was just an oilfield guy, and I could not get anywhere.
But then Empire Flippers took a chance on me, and I took a massive pay cut from leaving the oilfield to go to a completely different industry. But I knew it’s the industry I wanted to be in. I wanted to work with entrepreneurs. I thought “business broker” sounded cool as hell. This is super cool—my clients are literally the entrepreneurs now, right?
So I was over the moon, and I learned a ton about marketing, sales, leadership, all sorts of stuff. It led to me speaking all around the world because I took that pretty big risk.
I had a mortgage back in Alaska when I took that risk—taking the biggest pay cut of my life to come and take this job—but it all worked out.
Now, that might be some survivorship bias on my part. So you always have to look at it and ask yourself: if I do this, what’s the worst thing that might happen to me?
If I buy a $150,000 KDP business, what’s the absolute worst thing? Well, I could lose $150,000, right? It could go totally to the ground, whether through my own incompetence or through an Amazon update, right? So how do you feel about that? Does that feel too scary of a risk? If it does, then maybe that’s not the right path for you.
If getting on the phone and doing high-ticket sales as, say, a marketing agency owner—or some other high-ticket service that you find or want to do or know how to do—what’s the worst thing that can happen there? Well, someone might yell at me, right? I might make some money, I might make nothing. And the worst thing is I spent almost nothing.
Maybe you spent like $300 or $1,000 on someone to yell at you and be quite rude—which, hey, I have people rude to me all the time. I do cold email, right? I generate a lot of fun responses from that.
So there’s less to lose in that way if you are risk-averse, right?
The third scenario: what’s the worst thing that can happen to me if I quit my job to go work at another job doing the thing I actually want to do as an entrepreneur? Well, maybe I’m not very good at it. This was my fear, by the way.
Maybe it turns out I’m really bad at it, and I will get fired, and now I have to go find a way to get back into my old industry that I really hated, and I have to come crawling back. That was one of my big fears.
But I took the risk. I said, if that happened, how would I feel? Probably terrible. But I’m glad that I tried—glad I attempted to do the thing I wanted to do.
And this all comes back down to another reason why I think this question is so prevalent online: “How do I replace my 9 to 5 with an online business?”
I mean, the answer is simple: do something that makes money—either the same amount or more than what you were making—and save up money for a rainy day. That’s always the true answer, no matter the context, basically. Right?
But people often ask this question because they’re actually asking a much deeper and harder question to answer: what kind of risk tolerance do I have?
Because you can go and quit your 9 to 5 today, right now, if you work your ass off and you really take the risk and you really learn—working 18, 20-hour days for that first 30 days. You probably can replace your income in month one.
But most people are not going to do that because, one, it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of action-taking, really high stress, super risky.
So really, the answer to the question isn’t so much me telling you one thing you can do—such as going and buying a business from me (which you should do, right? Got to get that commission). But really: what kind of risk tolerance are you comfortable with?
So that’s the question you should really be asking: what kind of risk am I willing to take to get out of the 9 to 5? And if I take that risk, what is the worst thing that might happen? And if that thing does happen, am I okay with that? How do I feel about that?
And if you feel kind of like me—like that would suck, but it’s not the end of the world—I highly recommend you go do that thing. Because it sucking, but not being the end of the world, means you still have plenty of time to go do the next thing that might actually work.
Most entrepreneurs I’ve met—their first business was not successful. Usually they have a few failures, a bit of egg in their face the first couple times they go out there and try to do anything. So that’s completely normal.
So go and ask yourself what kind of risk you’re willing to take, and I look forward to hearing what you want to do. And if you want—if you’re comfortable with it—share it as a comment down below in this video.
Talk to you soon.
