Something I don’t think we talk about enough is how much complexity we’re willing to take on just to make more money.
You can build a land business that does a handful of deals each year, makes decent money, and doesn’t require a huge amount of your time. Or you can try to scale it into something much bigger, with employees, systems, more marketing, more deals, and a lot more moving parts.
Obviously, there’s more profit potential with the second option. But there’s also more stress and overhead and responsibility.
And I wonder how many people who are trying to scale would actually be happier keeping things small.
If you had to choose between making $100K a year with very little stress or $300K a year running a much more demanding business, which would you choose? Has anyone here actually scaled up and then decided to scale back down just to simplify their life?
I love keeping things small. Big teams and big deals bring bigger problems. It really just depends what you want tho. I’m fine with a good 6-figure income and a biz I can manage myself. I’m also obsessed with things getting done right, which makes it harder for me to offload jobs to humans who constantly mess things up.
Matt, I’d take the $100K low-stress version without much hesitation — at least for where I am right now. The $300K number sounds better until you count the overhead, payroll, and the hours spent managing people and systems instead of actually doing deals.
What Amy said about offloading rings true for me too. If you like things done a certain way, scaling usually means either letting go of that control or spending your time fixing other people’s work, which defeats the point.
I think the useful test is whether the extra profit is worth the extra headaches after costs — not just the top-line number. A smaller business you actually enjoy running beats a bigger one that owns your calendar.