The Perfect 3MM Business

Let’s take a quick look at the sort of businesses we want vs what we don’t want. The goal of these businesses is to generate extra cash that we can then invest for our long-term goal of one million dollars. We think of our businesses as highly efficient machines that turn liabilities into assets.

These are just examples so you can get a sense of what to look for as you choose your own side business. We’ll get to the full side-business list soon.

For us, the perfect business:

• Takes very little time to maintain.
• Takes very little work.
• Allows us to work wherever we want.
• Allows us to work whenever we want.
• Must be able to consistently earn at least $600 per month after all expenses. (This is simply the amount we need to invest each month to reach $1 million by retirement, your amount will be different.)

As of this writing, we have three active (and one passive) income streams. The blog you are currently reading, an online retail store, and our primary jobs as high school teachers. Passive income comes to us from investments we’ve made with profits from our active income streams. More on that in a minute.

How Do Our Businesses Stack Up?

The Blog

As far as we are concerned this is the perfect business model for the independent entrepreneur. The cost of entry is low (we started ours for around $200 dollars). You are in control of everything, which gives you an incredible amount of freedom. And the amount you can earn, while largely dependent on niche, is life-changing.

• Takes very little time / work: There was a good bit of upfront time invested into building the blog, but it all fit within our three-month limit. Our ongoing time commitment is a few hours per week.
  
• Allows us to work wherever we want: THIS. This is the greatest part of blogging. Wherever my Chromebook goes, the blog goes, too.
  
  • *Quick note: With the Covid-19 outbreak, this part of the equation has really been a life-saver. While our friends and loved ones are facing furloughs and layoffs, we are still here, writing through it all. We have to admit that we did not fully appreciate the remote nature of either of our businesses until the pandemic. We are truly thankful.
    
• Allows us to work whenever we want: With planning, YES. I just write a few blog posts ahead and schedule them to go live. No one even notices that I’m missing.
  
• Can it earn $600 per month after expenses? Handily. But it will take time. One of the best parts of blogging is the low overhead. This blog, at the time of this writing (we do expect these numbers to increase) costs under ten dollars a month to maintain. That means almost all income is captured and invested. Just remember, this isn’t a start-today-earn-tomorrow-business. There is upfront work, and then time. Time for google to crawl your content, time for your posts to rank, time for people to discover you.

The Store

Because we sell in a niche market, and because we don’t need a slew of competition, we will keep the exact nature of our store to ourselves. But we will share all the details you need to find your own 3MM path.

Part of our business strategy uses third-party markets (like you find on Amazon, Walmart, or Best Buy) and because Amazon is hands down the best of them to start a small business in, we’ll focus on that.

Our Amazon storefront:

• Takes very little time / work to maintain: We now work 4 days per month. We usually work less than 4 hours on each of these days (More in the run-up to the holiday rush). In the beginning, we worked more intensely. We still worked about four hours per day, but for more days. Researching product niches was the hardest part, but we soon developed a system that made (and makes) it go very quickly.
  
• Allows us to work wherever we want: Nope. We pack and ship inventory. Hard to do that from a coffee shop. We can run the entire business from a 10ft x 10ft section of our basement, though. But only having to work one day per week mitigates this for us.
  
• Allows us to work whenever we want: With planning, YES. You can have Amazon handle your warehousing, shipping, and customer service (for a fee, of course). If we want to travel, or if the school year is about to start back up, we just order a few months extra inventory from our suppliers and let Amazon deal with it while we teach. There is a unique joy in looking at your seller account and find that while you were getting paid for teaching, you were also getting paid for selling.
  
• Must be able to consistently earn at least $600 per month after all expenses: We reached this goal within two months, and could have reached it sooner, but we had to figure everything out for ourselves. And we had no money to invest in expansion. This could definately become full-time income for anyone willing to put in the time to learn.

So there you have it, our two perfect businesses. Will they be your perfect businesses? Maybe. Maybe not. The point is, you now know the kind of business we’re looking for. Namely businesses that are:

1. Cheap and easy to start
2. Cheap and easy to run
3. Create investable profits

But wait, knowing what to look for is one thing. Know what to avoid is something else entirely.

Business We Don’t Want

First, I want to make something clear. Whatever business you choose, the most important thing is that you enjoy doing it. For this whole plan to work, you have to be in it for the long haul. And if you don’t fall in love with your business, you won’t be in it for the long haul.

You might be tempted to try a small business because it seems sexy or exciting or it in some way stokes your ego. This is a major red flag. Starting a business because it’s sexy is the same as starting a business for someone else. Don’t do this for other people. Do it for yourself.

So what kind of businesses should we avoid?

• Anything that is only about status.
• Anything that is not 100% what we want to do.
• Anything that does not bring us a sense of fulfillment.
• Anything that has high-startup costs.
• Anything that would require large amounts of debt.
• Anything that would require you to sell your soul or do anything that doesn’t fit with your personal moral code. (As you go down this path, you will realize that you can make much more money by being dishonest or manipulative. If you’re okay with that, this isn’t your site.)
• Anything that would require a lot of time to operate (remember we want this to start as a side gig. We don’t want to quit our jobs until we know we will be fine)
• Anything that has a limited potential for growth. Making $600 per month now is great. Still making $600 per month in five years is not.

A Common Side Gig To Avoid

Here’s an example that we have seen pop up on a thousand ‘side-hustle’ sites. It’s everything we don’t want in our business. While it might technically work with the 3MM strategy to get you to $1 million, doing so would be like pulling teeth. For the next thirty years. Each and every day. So what is this fantastically bad side-hustle?

Dog Walking.

Why do we hate it? It’s not because we hate dogs.

• Does it take very little time / work to maintain? You have to be there, actually doing the dog walking for hours at a time.
  
• Does it allow us to work wherever we want: You go where the dogs are.
  
• Does it allow us to work whenever we want: Not if you want paid. Because your income is directly tied to your levels of energy and time, you are essentially trading freedom for dollars.
  
• Can you consistently earn at least $600 per month after all expenses: Absolutely! AND you can use this money to invest your way to $1 million. BUT trading your freedom today for $1 million in the future is a BAD DEAL. We want freedom today AND $1 million in the future!

So yes, dog walking can make you a millionaire. But to do so we would have to give up hours and hours of our lives. Remember the point of starting a small business is to work less not more; to have more freedom.

The Wrap Up

There you have it, Two examples of the sort of business we want to build and one example of what we need to avoid.

If there is anything you take away from this article let it be this: Do something you enjoy. There are so many enjoyable ways to make an extra $600 per month, it just doesn’t make sense chase after one of the bad ways.

We’re going to maintain a list of all the 3MM ideas we’ve either tried, or vetted in our Big List of Side-Gigs. You’re welcome to check it out any time you want, but please read through the whole strategy before you make any commitments. We want you to have a clear picture of the future in mind before start building you business.

Up next, let’s talk about the whole Investing 3MM-Style side to this plan. After all, you need to know what to do with those dollars that will soon be coming in. Without proper investing, you might become a millionaire, but you won’t build passive, multi-generational wealth without it.