How to Sell Your Side Hustle for $100K+ (Step-by-Step)
Updated on September 11, 2025
Transcript
In the next few minutes, I'm going to show you how you can turn a small side hustle into a six-figure payout. You're going to discover why these small businesses are the most attractive to business buyers, the exact profit multiples you should be shooting for (which could put an extra $100,000 in your pocket this year, depending on where you're at in your journey), and I'm going to top it off by telling you how you can become what I call an unofficial Empire Flippers millionaire.
Here is the lie that a lot of business gurus and generally a lot of entrepreneurs tell each other and tell themselves: that if you want to change your life, you need a million-dollar empire. To make real money, you must sell your business for at least seven figures. Well, our marketplace data—having sold well over 2,400 businesses at this point and having helped make over 88 millionaires—says something a little bit different. I believe we've probably made around 150 people a millionaire from using our marketplace. Out of those 150, about 88 of them have exited so far and became a millionaire at the moment of exit. The real number, my unofficial number, is almost double what we have on our website.
That's because you really do not need a Silicon Valley-style exit to change your life in a massively big way when it comes to selling your business. And while we're talking about that, if you want to know how you do it, you've got to ask yourself the question: why would you just sell one business when you can sell many businesses?
First off, why even sell such a small business—a business less than seven figures, probably less than $300,000? Why not just hold on to your business and allow it to grow even bigger? Well, I'll tell you why. When we are looking at businesses valued at $300,000 or less, a few interesting things happen. One, our buyer pool has a much lower barrier to entry. This means you have the biggest pool of potential buyers because not only do you have first-time acquirers looking for something small to just figure out how the whole thing works, but you also have veterans looking at your business too. A lot of times, pretty affluent and skilled entrepreneurs further along in their own journey will also go and buy these micro-assets.
And of course, because it is a smaller-priced business, this often leads to faster decisions. If you go to empireflippers.com/scoreboard—now this number changes all the time, so I'm going to give you a range—on average, it takes us between around 106 to 117 days from the moment a business goes on our marketplace to actually selling that business. That average actually falls pretty significantly: it goes from, say, that 100 to 117 days to closer to 30 to 70 days of you being on the market. Again, it's because you have a bigger buyer pool, smaller price, and faster decisions get made.
And one of the real beauties here, for all my sellers that absolutely hate the idea of creative finance, seller finance, or any earnout, is some good news: you will have much less deal complexity. This means typically a buyer will pay the full list price in cash to you, rather than having some kind of seller financing or earnout. This means you get to basically cash out on your business 100% from the moment that you sell.
All right, so what goes into, say, a $100k business or $300k business? Like I always say on this channel, entrepreneurs tend to not understand how to value a business—it makes sense that they just don't have the experience to know. So, let's break this down a bit so you can plan with your own side hustle or your own micro business you're building. What kind of profit do I need to be hitting to sell my business for, say, $100,000?
If we look at the under $300,000 segment at Empire Flippers, we're looking at sales multiples that range from, say, 19.5x to 28x of monthly net profit. At Empire Flippers, we take your last 12 months of net profit, we average it out, and then we multiply it by a multiple. Most of these businesses are going to be selling between that 19.5x to 28x of that monthly net profit. So, now we're looking at a $100,000 business at that 20x monthly profit. A $3,600 per month business might seem very small to you, or depending on where you are, might seem very big to you. Right? But to put that into context (and this wouldn't exactly work for selling the business, but it puts it in the context of this type of money), $3,600 per month—you start a marketing agency, that might be three clients. I mean, if you really know what you're doing and you target the upper end, that might not even be one client.
All right, so why are buyers buying this? I already kind of went over it a little bit, but there's a few other reasons you want to think about here. One is manageable risk. So, a $60,000 investment to buying a business, for the most part, isn't going to bankrupt someone if things go wrong. It's going to hurt for sure if it goes wrong—no one wants that to happen—but it's not going to destroy their life completely. The upside can be absolutely massive. We just recently at Empire Flippers had a buyer who bought a $180,000 Amazon FBA business from us, and 22 months later, he is now listing it with us again and his valuation is probably going to be around $1.1 million. So that's one of the big reasons why people like buying these small businesses, because the upside often is really, really good if you know what you're doing.
The other reason why buyers are interested in buying your side hustle is because of the learning opportunity for that buyer. Maybe that buyer has big dreams of buying tens of millions of dollars worth of factory assets or something. They start small by buying your Amazon FBA business or your dropshipping store or your Amazon affiliate site, right? This is a great learning opportunity where they can acquire you, and maybe they do make some mistakes. But again, it's not like they're out of the game if something goes wrong.
And then there's portfolio play. We have experienced buyers that purchase multiple small businesses every single year. They just do it for diversified income streams. Now, if you are a buyer who is just starting out, I actually don't recommend you do that. But as a seller, there are people out there who run these big portfolios—they have teams, they run like clockwork, they have tons of systems, and these are great buyers. And often, they're going to pay you all cash for your deal as well.
So, let's talk about this: What is the hundred thousand dollar blueprint to sell your side hustle? There are four main steps that you should consider.
One, you want to pick a proven model. Content sites, e-commerce stores, agencies, and simple SaaS dominate this side hustle or micro-asset market. Right? There's no reason for you to reinvent the wheel. Find a problem, learn how to solve it, learn how to get traffic—don't do anything else.
Step two: Focus on profit, not revenue. Revenue is vanity; profit is sanity. A business that is making $5,000 per month in revenue with $2,000 in profit will actually beat out the valuation of a business making $20,000 a month in revenue, but only $1,500 in profit.
Step three is you want to build to sell from day one. Clean financials, get a bookkeeper, set up QuickBooks, document your processes and all the growth potential. What is your roadmap for growth? You can give this to the buyer.
Final step on how to help you sell your side hustle is getting a professional valuation. Just like with bookkeeping, you should probably hire a professional bookkeeper to help you with that stuff. Getting this done is crucial, and the sooner you get it done—like once your business is making profit—the sooner you get your valuation done. Now you understand the range of what you need to do over the next few months to actually sell to where you want to go.
So, we can help you do that. We do it for free. You just go to empireflippers.com/sell, submit your business for sale with us, and you're under no obligation to sell with us just because you did that. But you will get a professional vetting valuation from us, which is incredibly important when it comes to knowing what your value is.
So, if you start now and you start building aggressively on your side hustle or micro asset, you can literally start your own M&A flywheel and not just be making an extra hundred thousand dollars when you exit your business, but literally walking down the road to join that unofficial number of 150 millionaires—on Greg's best guess—that Empire Flippers has made over the years.
Like what you hear? Make sure you sell with us, but also hit subscribe on the YouTube channel to help out Greg's KPIs. With that said, look forward to seeing you in the next video.
