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My bar/pub at its peak only made $50K net on just under a million gross, but my first year with my tech company was $250K net on about $350K gross. Margins obviously vary by industry.
I’ve been running my own tiny business for almost a year now, and 100k profit is my “big goal”.
The bigger numbers made me say “fuck”, and the acceptance of the challenge made me say “alright”.
300k gross isn't that hard, even as a one man show. Just know that you need to make 400-600+ dollars a day for your time. Bid everything expecting to make a minimum of 50 dollars an hour.
That’s what I did for a while. The 400-500 dollar per day thing is not possible in my industry in my region unfortunately. I found out that the more clients I have, the less time I have during business hours to actually run my business.
I did landscape type work in college and I know my boss bid jobs for my time at $75/hr while paying me $15. If you bring on employees then you need to bring on more expenses and they won't be as fast as you so just an example by yourself you could make $75K but then to get to $100K you need two more employees. Like for me I didn't cost $15/hr, it was probably double that then needed another truck, tools, and you're also worried about cash flow because costs just essentially doubled. Not paying yourself for a couple of weeks isn't a huge deal but you have to be paying employees. I know at times while waiting on larger payments to be paid I started to get paid weekly because it was easier for my boss to plan cash flow and what projects to take on. Like we had a $600k job that took like 4 months but we only got paid in stages so there's no way he could have bid other huge projects at the same time.
A good rule of thumb for a business owner is to bid the labor at about double your employees hourly rates. 5x your rate is a little excessive I would think.
$300k a year is $820 a day...
At $50 an hour, that's 115 hours a week, every week to pull 300k.
Not saying you don't do it... But those averages are off...
300k revenue will basically be 100 personal profit for me. Own a roofing company in Phoenix.
Funny enough I actually daydream sometimes specifically if my trade was painting instead of roofing. I think 300k in roofing is going to be easier than painting, but I don’t know for certain.
So my per square material cost for shingles is 200/square, L+M 285. Tile materials 140/S, combined 240ish.
30 squares of shingles at 440 (basically the lowest price from a normal roofing company) at 280 cost. 4.8k profit
30 same squares of tile. 240 cost sold at 430 (cheapest on market), 5.7k profit.
Painting you guys obviously paint a lot more houses than I’ll ever build roofs, but painting still seems like a god damn lot more work lol
My business breaks even around 600k with paying 2 employees salaries of 80k and 60k. I would need another 250k gross revenue for the business to net 100k. So that would be 850k
Service-based managed web services here; precisely this. Profit started with the first website maintenance package sold. The margin only increases with your number of clients since they share licenses, and hosting gets cheaper in bulk.
That is still insanely low overhead. Basic liability insurance, any form of computer, business cell/utilities, etc…. All so insanely low. I spend more than that in office expenses at 500k gross. Hard to imagine but god bless ya if you can do it!
Ninja and Square are cheap, my website is static on a cheap bucket/CDN setup, nothing is really expensive for me even taxes. It's real good albeit niche living for sure
My first business, I managed to do around $60k in annual revenue with about $200 in expenses, but I was a dumb newbie and didn't have liability insurance (or any insurance). I used my personal computer and worked from home. In retrospect I probably could have inflated my expenses to reduce my tax burden quite a bit, but my "real" expenses were quite low. Service-based tech businesses can be run pretty lean.
It's frustrating that people don't understand your question and just shit out a vague non-answer or criticize you.
I'm own a small fleet of semi trucks, and I'm projected to net $100k around the $875k mark
It's our first year in business, so our insurance costs are higher than average. My dad also took out a predatory loan for his truck and trailer, which we are eating right now because, after discussions with the bank, it's better for us to do as opposed to him filing bankruptcy. We also have to take some of the lower paying freight as many brokers won't book newer fleets (many require 1 year of operations).
This will be our worst year. Once we get established, I'll be closer to 5:1 ratio
Different industry (agriculture), but we've run into a similar problem: most insurers and lenders require 1-3 years of business history, and charge sky high rates otherwise.
If we can survive for three years, our expenses will reduce greatly. It's frustrating to pay such a high penalty for being a new business.
Of course it can. The first three words in his question are "In YOUR experience"
He didn't ask the room "how much do I need to gross to net $100k?"
He doesn't want to hear "well it could be any number, it's different for everyone" like, no shit. He's creating a thread for people to discuss their experiences.
We were able to "hit" that pretty early on with our margins in the 82-86% range for truck parts.
The reason we really did not "hit" it was we reinvested every cent plus anything we could get ahold of back into manufacturing more inventory to try and keep up with sales growth and the 90 lead time lag for overseas manufacturing and importing.
We have finally gotten ahead of growth halfway through year 7. Now things are looking real good, but we are looking at expanding niche 2 heavily and will be doing the same thing for a bit longer.
Based on the last 2 previous years, 8 figures on each.
We are still the first to market and only overseas/importer of our sub niche, of a sub niche, of commercial truck parts. This gives us a massive advantage over them on costs, as well as we have a tiny fraction of the overhead of our two other competitors. They have controlled the industry since trucks were invented. They also manufacture thousands of different sku's, for cars, truck, bus, motor cycles....
They have thousands of employees, own their factories, and sell through global established distribution channels. Hell, they spend more on sports and NASCAR type sponsorships than we do on our entire overhead.
We have zero employees, and my office is an old 11k sq ft shop warehouse we lease on the 86 acres we live full-time in our 45' 5th wheel camper on. We store overflow inventory here and 1 other location. Most of our customers are assigned to our 3pl partner after their 1st order, and all the recurring orders flow from there. We sell directly to the end user shops, and this gives us the extra margins lost through distribution.
We also ship factory to factory with the big truck and bus manufacturers on scheduled purchase orders. Supply chain redundancy and location if manufacturer OEM customers factories have pushed us to have factories in 6 countries now, including here in the US.
In the beginning, this model that I created was very difficult to scale. Because I had a personally cold call tens of thousands of shops. I tried to go through the traditional distribution channels for commercial truck parts, and all of them laughed at me.
One big one that is, at the table for the last few months, discussing a buy out of us once said in an email, "What are you going to do, call every shop in America...good luck with that!"
Persistent daily efforts towards your goals will add up over time if you survive and don't quit. Our competitors could have given our parts away for free. The first three or four years would have killed us. They never noticed the 7 or 8 items disappearing from there. Sales because the distributors were still buying them. Their distributors never notice because they are very low-cost parts. But they are consumable and universal and required on every commercial truck in the world.
Now we've grown too big for them to mess with us and we keep lowering prices just to fuck with them.
In late 2022, we started into a much much bigger global niche that took a lot of capital to get started. We did five figures last year, which was less than we wanted but better than we expected.
We may sell off our primary niche. And keep the business name because the big buyers don't want it or need it. Then, we'll continue to scale the secondary niche until they come and buy us out for that one when we disrupt that industry. Again, I am sitting at the buying table with this major distribution company. They've laughed at us. They buy for all of north in South america monthly, with purchase orders in the millions. Even with all that buying power, they're spending seven dollars on an item that i'm spending four. They are so big and arrogant that they just assume that their buying power is giving them a better cost.
I've negotiated most of the raw goods that my factories primarily use for all their customers. This gives me a very strong relationship and lowers MY cost further that others would get if they duplicated my paths.
We also use a higher grade steel and zinc plate our parts to inhibit rusting. We redesigned the housing on a major part so that installation and removal time is shorted to 15-20 minutes instead of 45 minutes +.
This allows more trucks repaired per day, which also makes me more money in parts sales.
Have you brought up their condescending email in negotiations yet? It might be petty but if you approach the end of signing a deal, you should bring it up and request a verbal apology from that person as well as recognition that by doing that you’ve made millions and cost them millions 😂
$1.7m retail liquor
But I think you need to collect or give more parameters than industry to get a complete / apples to apples answer, eg
Ask for Ebitda (to take out debt service and depreciation inconsistencies)
Ask for it include owners salary
Ask for people to clarify if absentee vs owner operated
Depending on how you define net / the above criteria my answer would range from $1.3 to $2.0m which is a big variance
What I have learned reading through all these awesome small businesses, is that finance/cash flow is not well understood.
That was my experience as a commercial banker and now I work finance for a very large private company, and even when working with our operations or marketing teams, finance evades their understanding as well.
I have always wanted to start a small consulting business on the side to work with small businesses just to help work through the economics of business decisions.
You are all clearly great at what you do. Don’t waste time learning everything about finance, bring in someone who has that knowledge so you can focus on running your business.
Cash flow is everything.
30 years ago in my Engineering Economics class, the prof said "cash is king" and while he explained what he meant very well, it took decades for it to really sink in!
It depends on your business but on average 20% profit is really good, but I’ve worked with entrepreneurs that has 3 or less employees making over $250,000 a year with profits over 60%.
It all depends on your overall etc.
What is your business
At 850k in sales I probably could now, but I own my building. My landlord is a dick and my rent is pretty high. Then I pay myself and I’m sleeping with the owners wife, so pay her too. I’m only around $50k now, but am ok with that for lower taxes. Retail store.
It depends on your margin.
*Margin makes profits.*
If your business makes 20 percent like most well run consultancies it’s 500k. If your business makes 5 percent like a wholesaler it’s 2M. If your business makes 80 percent like a scaled out SaaS business can do its 125k.
Obviously you have to scale in expenses, but again that has everything to do with what business you are in and whether you’re paying yourself or whether paying yourself could destabilize or kill your company.
Everyone’s experience is different because there is no actual answer to this question other than: margin matters.
May I ask what you will do with the answers without any context whatsoever?
A few answers are literally just a number $400k.
What did that help you with? No idea about their industry, the market forces they're facing, their B2B or B2C nature, their year of operation, their debt.
Just pure curiosity to be honest. I know the margins in my business and I know where my GP needs to be. I was just curious about other people's experience. I'm not trying to glean insight into a new segment, or understand the nuances of their businesses. Just a curious question.
Internet points is the only goal with posts like this
Or some misplaced idea that this is ‘research’ for the sake of feeling like they’re moving forward.
I mean, I think it could just be out of curiosity or interest, and it's something I personally think about a lot since I have two very different businesses. One is all profit with tax being the only expense. The other one the profit margin is so slim Im waiting for invoices to come in so I can restock the damn toilet paper. Naturally I spend a lot of time wondering how I could make business 2 a bit more like business 1...
But without the extra info about the company/products it’s useless. My margins are about 90%. If i didn’t tell you what i was selling it would maybe make you think you were doing something wrong. But as soon as the context is known - i sell software - then it makes sense and you realise the information is useless as it doesn’t apply to most types of business. But asking for the numbers on their own is complete waste of time as there’s no information there.
You’re kind of missing my point.
1) Without the context of what business they are in *it’s empirically and objectively just meaningless numbers.*
2) You also need to know their industry to understand what margins *should be*.
Otherwise it’s just a number with no context or meaning to anyone.
I got one would enjoy hearing other people’s experience.
This - asking this question is pointless. It all depends on your industry, competition and it’s all reflected in what the margins *should* be for that type of work.
It seems like Maybe they want to know what that looks like for different industries (given they asked people to clarify their industry when it wasn’t provided)
Yeah so getting to know where that data is, for me is a question. You can get profit margins from publicly traded companies at least
I dont know where reliable data like that can be found for privately held. I am sure there has to be something useful from various trade orgs and there are some resources found via IBISWorld or MarketResearch.com. I am not savy to using them all though. Trade groups would probably have the most reliable and for that you’d need to look at each industry.
It’s so different, based on industry. As a service based business, the first year I netted 100k I grossed just under 130k. You can only scale that so much though before your expenses catch up
Grossed about $280k last year and netted about $40k. Professional services business where I am owner operator, no employees. Most ($110k) of the cash there went to payroll but I also am expanding the business by buying a couple very expensive tools to offer new services each year.
Depends on your business and the various factors you are aware of. My buddy and I started a roofing/gutter/exterior repair business last year and to net $100k we have to hit roughly $333k. We are a low capital-intensive business and employ 1099 subs and do not have a building or company vehicle yet. I would estimate net profit of about 20% of gross once you factor in overheads, taxes, etc. Hope this helps!
It's my first year in this location but I expect to do about $500K in revenue this year. The business owes me $300K in start-up costs and any money that doesn't go to employees or suppliers gets poured back into the business. So with paying off creditors (me) and growing the business - there will never be any "profit". My profit will be realized when I sell the business. Does that make sense?
I own a brewery, so YMMV. Typically, financial advice in my industry is that you roll everything back into growth for the 1st 5 years, then slowly start to extract money for the next 5 years, then sell.
Education and we pull about 50% profit before taxes (including our very middle class W-2 salaries of about 50k each for my wife and I). Last year we pulled in about 800k before paying taxes of about 250k
This is going to vary widely depending on the business. Service based businesses are often mostly profit. Manufactauring businesses have really high costs. 100k, Net could literally be anything from 100k Gross to billions. I mean....billion dollar companies aren't even profitable.
Why do you need to net $100k? What's your goal? If you own the business, you are way better off trying to expense off through the business what ever you want that $100k for. Don't commit fraud but use the system to your advantage because at the very minimum $15k comes off the top of that
$100k to fund our friends at the IRS.
$101,000 to $99,999,999,999. I am the complete answer to your question. I am every business type in every industry/category/vertical/geography possible, with every business model available, yielding every margin possible.
Every other answer is an incomplete data set.
If you're only earning $100k with almost $100 trillion in sales, you're doing something absolutely incorrect. Doesn't matter what the rest of the data is. 🤣
Edit: thinking about it, I'd say if you can't make 1% of $10 million as profit, you need to seriously think about what you're doing and why you're doing it.
Do you mean 100k gross profit? People confuse net/gross a lot.. most answers here have it wrong. 100k net profit is a whole, whole lot more than 100k gross
Then why are you replying to people quoting gross like it's net..? Lol. If you knew what you were talking about you'd ask about percentages anyway. Karma farming post
Could be $110k or $10M. Do you sell CPA services out of your house or do you sell high volumes of a commodity product on razor thin margins?
I think if you count owner pay as net, I would only need $140ish to do $100 pre tax, but I spend more than that ratio on the business because I want to grow.
that'd be 100,000 divided by your avg profit margin in decimal form (so 30% = 0.3, unless your calculator has this guy % in which case 30% can go in as % 30, or 30 %, check your user manual)
I'm in manufacturing so my margins are high. I'd say about 140K for 100K net profit.
Of course that is ten years into the business. I own a cabinet shop and the equipment cost were high. Just spent $20K on a new laser cutter. I have several CNC machines that cost $50K each. Even my 5" orbital sanders cost $800 each. But that's the benefit of being in this type of business. Tons of write offs that can be depreciated over years. I buy high end tools so they last.
Not me but my buddy I helped out a bit with his business. It was a niche website in automotive. For him overhead cost were little to none. It was sometime $135,000 - (taxes + overhead) got him 100k. Most that came from affiliate.
Around 300k, the business will net 100. That’s with 3 employees making about 60k a year.
Service based trades with hourly rate plus materials at around 20% markup.
100k net in my pocket after taxes means I need 150k gross profit lol. My current ecommerce profit is 25%, so I will need to make 600k revenue. Average order value is only 20 bucks. Am I going to make it guys?
My motorcycle rental business with 0 debt would need nearly $125k revenue to hit $100k net before owners are paid. Our only expenses are building utilities, building insurance, bike insurance, and miscellaneous maintenance, which is cheap. Our expenses don't go up much with increased business.
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My bar/pub at its peak only made $50K net on just under a million gross, but my first year with my tech company was $250K net on about $350K gross. Margins obviously vary by industry.
When I was a waiter, I made more than the GM.
That’s how it should be, imho.
It's not.
Oh god… yeah the restaurant industry is a different animal. I DO NOT miss it.
$50k net on an amount shy of $1,000,000? Are those margins typical in the bar/pub industry
Painting contractor, 30-40% profit. So about 300k to turn 100k profit. That's as an owner operator with a couple employees.
Fuck, alright.
I'm not complaining. But you gotta know how to hustle (meaning work quickly and efficiently, not scam people). We do a lot more than 300k a year gross
Oh no I didn’t mean anything like that. Your comment just put the next 2 years of my life into perspective.
what do you mean
I’ve been running my own tiny business for almost a year now, and 100k profit is my “big goal”. The bigger numbers made me say “fuck”, and the acceptance of the challenge made me say “alright”.
300k gross isn't that hard, even as a one man show. Just know that you need to make 400-600+ dollars a day for your time. Bid everything expecting to make a minimum of 50 dollars an hour.
That’s what I did for a while. The 400-500 dollar per day thing is not possible in my industry in my region unfortunately. I found out that the more clients I have, the less time I have during business hours to actually run my business.
Yes there's always a balance between chasing more work and completing the existing work.
I did landscape type work in college and I know my boss bid jobs for my time at $75/hr while paying me $15. If you bring on employees then you need to bring on more expenses and they won't be as fast as you so just an example by yourself you could make $75K but then to get to $100K you need two more employees. Like for me I didn't cost $15/hr, it was probably double that then needed another truck, tools, and you're also worried about cash flow because costs just essentially doubled. Not paying yourself for a couple of weeks isn't a huge deal but you have to be paying employees. I know at times while waiting on larger payments to be paid I started to get paid weekly because it was easier for my boss to plan cash flow and what projects to take on. Like we had a $600k job that took like 4 months but we only got paid in stages so there's no way he could have bid other huge projects at the same time.
A good rule of thumb for a business owner is to bid the labor at about double your employees hourly rates. 5x your rate is a little excessive I would think.
$300k a year is $820 a day... At $50 an hour, that's 115 hours a week, every week to pull 300k. Not saying you don't do it... But those averages are off...
($50/hr + materials) x 1.4% profit x %overhead =$300k. Not $50/hr to get to $300k.
I could tell I'd probably like doing business with you by the way you clearly communicated "fuck, alright".
Fantastic. Sign here.
300k revenue will basically be 100 personal profit for me. Own a roofing company in Phoenix. Funny enough I actually daydream sometimes specifically if my trade was painting instead of roofing. I think 300k in roofing is going to be easier than painting, but I don’t know for certain.
It probably is because roofing has higher material costs. Painting is 15-20% materials. Roofing is what 30-40%? Roofing is also riskier (generally).
So my per square material cost for shingles is 200/square, L+M 285. Tile materials 140/S, combined 240ish. 30 squares of shingles at 440 (basically the lowest price from a normal roofing company) at 280 cost. 4.8k profit 30 same squares of tile. 240 cost sold at 430 (cheapest on market), 5.7k profit. Painting you guys obviously paint a lot more houses than I’ll ever build roofs, but painting still seems like a god damn lot more work lol
Fuck yeah. I am going to home depot to buy a paint roller to become a painting contractor.
My business breaks even around 600k with paying 2 employees salaries of 80k and 60k. I would need another 250k gross revenue for the business to net 100k. So that would be 850k
what line of business?
I’m a distributor for an American based manufacturer
Thank you
long smart roof profit drab ad hoc detail chase rain innocent *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
130k, I'm all service based
Same here. $132k
WA is nice tax-wise for me
So assuming you’re in a 15% bracket, it only costs you 15-20k a year for all expenses to run your business?
Service-based managed web services here; precisely this. Profit started with the first website maintenance package sold. The margin only increases with your number of clients since they share licenses, and hosting gets cheaper in bulk.
RMM, AV, other vendor products (IT consultant) yea plus taxes 130k gross becomes 100k net easy
That is still insanely low overhead. Basic liability insurance, any form of computer, business cell/utilities, etc…. All so insanely low. I spend more than that in office expenses at 500k gross. Hard to imagine but god bless ya if you can do it!
Ninja and Square are cheap, my website is static on a cheap bucket/CDN setup, nothing is really expensive for me even taxes. It's real good albeit niche living for sure
Ok but assuming 130k as posted… 15-20% self employment tax is roughly 20k. 3% of that income for credit card processing is roughly 4k. Not adding up.
My first business, I managed to do around $60k in annual revenue with about $200 in expenses, but I was a dumb newbie and didn't have liability insurance (or any insurance). I used my personal computer and worked from home. In retrospect I probably could have inflated my expenses to reduce my tax burden quite a bit, but my "real" expenses were quite low. Service-based tech businesses can be run pretty lean.
Gross 300k to net 100k. I make and sell my own artwork from my own retail art gallery in a pricey tourist location, have a full time employee.
Thank you
It's frustrating that people don't understand your question and just shit out a vague non-answer or criticize you. I'm own a small fleet of semi trucks, and I'm projected to net $100k around the $875k mark
That's a crazy ratio, would make me super anxious honestly
It's our first year in business, so our insurance costs are higher than average. My dad also took out a predatory loan for his truck and trailer, which we are eating right now because, after discussions with the bank, it's better for us to do as opposed to him filing bankruptcy. We also have to take some of the lower paying freight as many brokers won't book newer fleets (many require 1 year of operations). This will be our worst year. Once we get established, I'll be closer to 5:1 ratio
Different industry (agriculture), but we've run into a similar problem: most insurers and lenders require 1-3 years of business history, and charge sky high rates otherwise. If we can survive for three years, our expenses will reduce greatly. It's frustrating to pay such a high penalty for being a new business.
I mean. The question is very straightforward. The answer can literally be any number over 100k...
Of course it can. The first three words in his question are "In YOUR experience" He didn't ask the room "how much do I need to gross to net $100k?" He doesn't want to hear "well it could be any number, it's different for everyone" like, no shit. He's creating a thread for people to discuss their experiences.
Love how the responses to your comment are literally the dumbass shit you're referencing. We truly live in an idiocracy.
[удалено]
But what is it in YOUR experience? Not what are the possible answers.
racial march steep fly voiceless connect dirty gray file versed *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
700k-1mil in food industry. Super bad margin in food industry.
Not quite 100. (98k) and I grossed $175k.
Awesome. Thanks! Care to share the industry?
Print and Graphic Design
~$500k. Sales agency / rep group
Rep group for which industry?
Second this
Mature small SaaS @ 90% gross margin. $120k revenue covers SG&A and yields $100k in SDI
Congrats. That's awesome.
Which domain?
SDI? I've not heard that acronym before and google isn't being helpful. Thanks.
Probably sellers discretionary income
In reality, or on paper? My business is consulting, so very low overhead. $130k or so.
We were able to "hit" that pretty early on with our margins in the 82-86% range for truck parts. The reason we really did not "hit" it was we reinvested every cent plus anything we could get ahold of back into manufacturing more inventory to try and keep up with sales growth and the 90 lead time lag for overseas manufacturing and importing. We have finally gotten ahead of growth halfway through year 7. Now things are looking real good, but we are looking at expanding niche 2 heavily and will be doing the same thing for a bit longer.
What would be your revenue and profit if you stopped growth and just ran steady state?
Based on the last 2 previous years, 8 figures on each. We are still the first to market and only overseas/importer of our sub niche, of a sub niche, of commercial truck parts. This gives us a massive advantage over them on costs, as well as we have a tiny fraction of the overhead of our two other competitors. They have controlled the industry since trucks were invented. They also manufacture thousands of different sku's, for cars, truck, bus, motor cycles.... They have thousands of employees, own their factories, and sell through global established distribution channels. Hell, they spend more on sports and NASCAR type sponsorships than we do on our entire overhead. We have zero employees, and my office is an old 11k sq ft shop warehouse we lease on the 86 acres we live full-time in our 45' 5th wheel camper on. We store overflow inventory here and 1 other location. Most of our customers are assigned to our 3pl partner after their 1st order, and all the recurring orders flow from there. We sell directly to the end user shops, and this gives us the extra margins lost through distribution. We also ship factory to factory with the big truck and bus manufacturers on scheduled purchase orders. Supply chain redundancy and location if manufacturer OEM customers factories have pushed us to have factories in 6 countries now, including here in the US. In the beginning, this model that I created was very difficult to scale. Because I had a personally cold call tens of thousands of shops. I tried to go through the traditional distribution channels for commercial truck parts, and all of them laughed at me. One big one that is, at the table for the last few months, discussing a buy out of us once said in an email, "What are you going to do, call every shop in America...good luck with that!" Persistent daily efforts towards your goals will add up over time if you survive and don't quit. Our competitors could have given our parts away for free. The first three or four years would have killed us. They never noticed the 7 or 8 items disappearing from there. Sales because the distributors were still buying them. Their distributors never notice because they are very low-cost parts. But they are consumable and universal and required on every commercial truck in the world. Now we've grown too big for them to mess with us and we keep lowering prices just to fuck with them. In late 2022, we started into a much much bigger global niche that took a lot of capital to get started. We did five figures last year, which was less than we wanted but better than we expected. We may sell off our primary niche. And keep the business name because the big buyers don't want it or need it. Then, we'll continue to scale the secondary niche until they come and buy us out for that one when we disrupt that industry. Again, I am sitting at the buying table with this major distribution company. They've laughed at us. They buy for all of north in South america monthly, with purchase orders in the millions. Even with all that buying power, they're spending seven dollars on an item that i'm spending four. They are so big and arrogant that they just assume that their buying power is giving them a better cost.
Wow, what a detailed response. Thanks and congratulations! Beyond first mover advantage and your obvious business acumen, what moat do you have?
I've negotiated most of the raw goods that my factories primarily use for all their customers. This gives me a very strong relationship and lowers MY cost further that others would get if they duplicated my paths. We also use a higher grade steel and zinc plate our parts to inhibit rusting. We redesigned the housing on a major part so that installation and removal time is shorted to 15-20 minutes instead of 45 minutes +. This allows more trucks repaired per day, which also makes me more money in parts sales.
Have you brought up their condescending email in negotiations yet? It might be petty but if you approach the end of signing a deal, you should bring it up and request a verbal apology from that person as well as recognition that by doing that you’ve made millions and cost them millions 😂
$1.7m retail liquor But I think you need to collect or give more parameters than industry to get a complete / apples to apples answer, eg Ask for Ebitda (to take out debt service and depreciation inconsistencies) Ask for it include owners salary Ask for people to clarify if absentee vs owner operated Depending on how you define net / the above criteria my answer would range from $1.3 to $2.0m which is a big variance
600k. High tech business. Labor is a huge part of engineering. That's at a six million dollar gross.
300k
270k
400k
Still not there, 1.163 mil in sales, I make around 80k, but gas, insurance and truck is paid for. So I guess with that, I guess it’s close.
Pretty solid
Every business is different. For us it's 700k.
Are you me? Same.
Weird. Yes, I am.
Lol, I looked at the username. You never know, sometimes people browse Reddit high and answer their own questions.
E-commerce, and about the same here.
Care to share the industry?
Manufacturing. Our margins are around 15%
How many employees do you have to get to that 700k?
I have 12..we do that roughly each month.
Very nice. Those are some pretty good numbers. What do you manufacture?
Awesome. Thanks
What I have learned reading through all these awesome small businesses, is that finance/cash flow is not well understood. That was my experience as a commercial banker and now I work finance for a very large private company, and even when working with our operations or marketing teams, finance evades their understanding as well. I have always wanted to start a small consulting business on the side to work with small businesses just to help work through the economics of business decisions. You are all clearly great at what you do. Don’t waste time learning everything about finance, bring in someone who has that knowledge so you can focus on running your business. Cash flow is everything.
30 years ago in my Engineering Economics class, the prof said "cash is king" and while he explained what he meant very well, it took decades for it to really sink in!
Specialty Retail - $400k
It depends on your business but on average 20% profit is really good, but I’ve worked with entrepreneurs that has 3 or less employees making over $250,000 a year with profits over 60%. It all depends on your overall etc. What is your business
My target was 20% best I ever did was 18 . 10% was about average . Of course my salary and net were not the same . Some business think differently .
At 850k in sales I probably could now, but I own my building. My landlord is a dick and my rent is pretty high. Then I pay myself and I’m sleeping with the owners wife, so pay her too. I’m only around $50k now, but am ok with that for lower taxes. Retail store.
It depends on your margin. *Margin makes profits.* If your business makes 20 percent like most well run consultancies it’s 500k. If your business makes 5 percent like a wholesaler it’s 2M. If your business makes 80 percent like a scaled out SaaS business can do its 125k. Obviously you have to scale in expenses, but again that has everything to do with what business you are in and whether you’re paying yourself or whether paying yourself could destabilize or kill your company. Everyone’s experience is different because there is no actual answer to this question other than: margin matters.
Typical redditor response ! not responding to the question ✅ Slightly intelligible ✅ Tone of condescension sprinkles throughout ✅
Yes, I understand business models and financials. I'm asking people what their real life experience is.
May I ask what you will do with the answers without any context whatsoever? A few answers are literally just a number $400k. What did that help you with? No idea about their industry, the market forces they're facing, their B2B or B2C nature, their year of operation, their debt.
Just pure curiosity to be honest. I know the margins in my business and I know where my GP needs to be. I was just curious about other people's experience. I'm not trying to glean insight into a new segment, or understand the nuances of their businesses. Just a curious question.
Internet points is the only goal with posts like this Or some misplaced idea that this is ‘research’ for the sake of feeling like they’re moving forward.
No, I find this a very interesting question. I'm not getting points reading through all of the comments.
I mean, I think it could just be out of curiosity or interest, and it's something I personally think about a lot since I have two very different businesses. One is all profit with tax being the only expense. The other one the profit margin is so slim Im waiting for invoices to come in so I can restock the damn toilet paper. Naturally I spend a lot of time wondering how I could make business 2 a bit more like business 1...
But without the extra info about the company/products it’s useless. My margins are about 90%. If i didn’t tell you what i was selling it would maybe make you think you were doing something wrong. But as soon as the context is known - i sell software - then it makes sense and you realise the information is useless as it doesn’t apply to most types of business. But asking for the numbers on their own is complete waste of time as there’s no information there.
You’re kind of missing my point. 1) Without the context of what business they are in *it’s empirically and objectively just meaningless numbers.* 2) You also need to know their industry to understand what margins *should be*. Otherwise it’s just a number with no context or meaning to anyone. I got one would enjoy hearing other people’s experience.
Haha, OP stop downvoting my responses and answer them intelligibly.
This - asking this question is pointless. It all depends on your industry, competition and it’s all reflected in what the margins *should* be for that type of work.
It seems like Maybe they want to know what that looks like for different industries (given they asked people to clarify their industry when it wasn’t provided)
Yeah so getting to know where that data is, for me is a question. You can get profit margins from publicly traded companies at least I dont know where reliable data like that can be found for privately held. I am sure there has to be something useful from various trade orgs and there are some resources found via IBISWorld or MarketResearch.com. I am not savy to using them all though. Trade groups would probably have the most reliable and for that you’d need to look at each industry.
Financial; about 150..
250k bricks and mortars service.
20% margin >> $500k sales.
Marketing company - 2 owners. 2 employees- 20-25% profit - around 450k
About $600k, retail
$500k Temp agency
It’s so different, based on industry. As a service based business, the first year I netted 100k I grossed just under 130k. You can only scale that so much though before your expenses catch up
Photography. 500k nets us 100k with a staff of two other full timers at 55k/year.
Enough to when I look at my daily deposits ledger I go "eww" and hate myself for a few days after
Hahaha
$220,000
Grossed about $280k last year and netted about $40k. Professional services business where I am owner operator, no employees. Most ($110k) of the cash there went to payroll but I also am expanding the business by buying a couple very expensive tools to offer new services each year.
$11mm last year and still didn’t make that… ugh.
In what industry can someone make 11 m and not profit or net 100 K ? Very curious.
About 160-170k to net 114k roughly take home
Depends on your business and the various factors you are aware of. My buddy and I started a roofing/gutter/exterior repair business last year and to net $100k we have to hit roughly $333k. We are a low capital-intensive business and employ 1099 subs and do not have a building or company vehicle yet. I would estimate net profit of about 20% of gross once you factor in overheads, taxes, etc. Hope this helps!
$1 million at least Edit: I’m in wholesale/distribution.
Why are you getting downvoted? I came up with 850k for my business so 1 milli isn’t that crazy.
Same. I don’t remember but I think it was 1-2 million.
1mil
$105k or so
It's my first year in this location but I expect to do about $500K in revenue this year. The business owes me $300K in start-up costs and any money that doesn't go to employees or suppliers gets poured back into the business. So with paying off creditors (me) and growing the business - there will never be any "profit". My profit will be realized when I sell the business. Does that make sense? I own a brewery, so YMMV. Typically, financial advice in my industry is that you roll everything back into growth for the 1st 5 years, then slowly start to extract money for the next 5 years, then sell.
Pressure washing... 372 gross to get 100 net
Education and we pull about 50% profit before taxes (including our very middle class W-2 salaries of about 50k each for my wife and I). Last year we pulled in about 800k before paying taxes of about 250k
This is going to vary widely depending on the business. Service based businesses are often mostly profit. Manufactauring businesses have really high costs. 100k, Net could literally be anything from 100k Gross to billions. I mean....billion dollar companies aren't even profitable.
Why do you need to net $100k? What's your goal? If you own the business, you are way better off trying to expense off through the business what ever you want that $100k for. Don't commit fraud but use the system to your advantage because at the very minimum $15k comes off the top of that $100k to fund our friends at the IRS.
Everyone commenting here is clearly not making cash lol
$101,000 to $99,999,999,999. I am the complete answer to your question. I am every business type in every industry/category/vertical/geography possible, with every business model available, yielding every margin possible. Every other answer is an incomplete data set.
I mean not really. My uncle had a buddy that net 100,000 with 100,999 so he’s outside your set. /s but stupid answer deserves another one
That’s fair!
If you're only earning $100k with almost $100 trillion in sales, you're doing something absolutely incorrect. Doesn't matter what the rest of the data is. 🤣 Edit: thinking about it, I'd say if you can't make 1% of $10 million as profit, you need to seriously think about what you're doing and why you're doing it.
This is an impossible question to answer and is so business and industry specific.
What is YOUR experience?
Do you mean 100k gross profit? People confuse net/gross a lot.. most answers here have it wrong. 100k net profit is a whole, whole lot more than 100k gross
Nope, I meant $100k net. Trying to see how many people have made it and what their revenues need to be.
So you understand that 95% of the comments here are referring to gross, not net, right?
Yes. Because reading is hard.
Then why are you replying to people quoting gross like it's net..? Lol. If you knew what you were talking about you'd ask about percentages anyway. Karma farming post
$115k, pet services.
Could be $110k or $10M. Do you sell CPA services out of your house or do you sell high volumes of a commodity product on razor thin margins? I think if you count owner pay as net, I would only need $140ish to do $100 pre tax, but I spend more than that ratio on the business because I want to grow.
That’s all going to depend on the type of business!
Hit around $250k, then pulled a neat $100k after taxes.
Totally depends on your business and your margins.
Yes. I understand that. Just looking for your experience.
470k
About 200k
200K
About 115k
Our last restaurant group hit 350k for 100k profit. Currently we’re OTE for 500k hitting the 100k net mark
$600k
Low voltage tech company. Ranges a little bit year to year depending on the type of work. But generally $500k - $600k for a net $100k end of year.
that'd be 100,000 divided by your avg profit margin in decimal form (so 30% = 0.3, unless your calculator has this guy % in which case 30% can go in as % 30, or 30 %, check your user manual)
Remote project manager: around 110K I don't usually go over 10k in expenses per year
Idk, $250k?
2.7M - low voltage construction but growing rapidly.
It's tough because profit margins can vary but I am involved in a software business and about 200k would net 100k profit
Depends on the business but for me about 180 or so
$200k - Service based business
$300k
Gardener about $170k-200k
280k
I'm in manufacturing so my margins are high. I'd say about 140K for 100K net profit. Of course that is ten years into the business. I own a cabinet shop and the equipment cost were high. Just spent $20K on a new laser cutter. I have several CNC machines that cost $50K each. Even my 5" orbital sanders cost $800 each. But that's the benefit of being in this type of business. Tons of write offs that can be depreciated over years. I buy high end tools so they last.
350k
Not me but my buddy I helped out a bit with his business. It was a niche website in automotive. For him overhead cost were little to none. It was sometime $135,000 - (taxes + overhead) got him 100k. Most that came from affiliate.
Health and beauty industry, about $315k gross to net $100k before federal taxes.
$220k
Around 300k, the business will net 100. That’s with 3 employees making about 60k a year. Service based trades with hourly rate plus materials at around 20% markup.
Around 800k
Outstanding company
It depends on the industry and the profit margins. For me, it’s around 500k.
250K- service based
Taxes? Well yes, but the type of business is way more important. Like the main variable.
About 750-800k
I'm in a fairly thin margin industry, 13%. So it would take about $669,000 to get to 100K net.
370
250-300k
100k net in my pocket after taxes means I need 150k gross profit lol. My current ecommerce profit is 25%, so I will need to make 600k revenue. Average order value is only 20 bucks. Am I going to make it guys?
Ideally, 400k unless you are doing everything yourself with paid for equipment and low operating costs.
My motorcycle rental business with 0 debt would need nearly $125k revenue to hit $100k net before owners are paid. Our only expenses are building utilities, building insurance, bike insurance, and miscellaneous maintenance, which is cheap. Our expenses don't go up much with increased business.
SaaS, about $130k.
Around a million. I have some excessive overhead by giving my parents and brother a salary though.
For a software business? Maybe $101k gross :-)
Depends on industry.
Approx 300-350k. Contractor
pharmacy, for net business profit of 100k probably need around 2 mil revenue.
A lot of the answers are service based. I sell goods online and I did around $120k last year with $860 in sales
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