It’s over
That’s it’s. I can’t do it I’m failing miserably and spiraling. I have 3 babies at home, a +3hr commute into work, I own 3 rental properties 4 hours away. And I am a genius so I decided to buy a business with 4 employees that makes not great money for the additional stress. I brought this on myself slowly over the last 5 years like the frog dying from the heat turning up. On top of that my area is so HCOL I can’t even afford to buy a house. It’s so frustrating to work so hard for this. And on top of it I am actually considering buying another business this one the owner is selling for less than 1 year income (not suss at all) My own worst enemy. I’m close to breaking honestly
Have you considered upscaling your team to help reduce your workload?
It doesn’t make enough money to do that. It’s a volume based business and we are a little over break even. I wouldn’t mind breaking even if I can hire some people to help but a lot falls on me. If I can get someone to help with AP AR that would be huge. Would need to be part time and low pay. It’s hard to price the items that we sell so half the battle is figuring out pricing. Which I can fix with excel. I just don’t have the energy right now
Look into hiring an intern. Offer them minimum wage for remote part time work. If you already know what the process would be to fix it then Im sure youd be able to explain it to a motivated college kid with a couple years of accounting classes under their belt
Why are you buying another business? Could you back out of that? Do your rental properties generate meaningful income or kind of just break even? If so, would it be profitable to sell them or some of them? Does the business you own have growth potential? Is there a path to maybe running it full time and growing it?
The opportunity came across my desk and I guess I’m a deal junkie. I can definitely back out right now it’s still early on in the process, a guy who makes deliveries for me works at the business during the week and tried to buy it himself but didn’t have enough money and so he told me about it. The rental properties CF about 160k a year with limited work(I have a 50% partner). The business has potential but currently takes up so much time and comes with so much headache it’s killing me . I need a partner that’s there everyday pushing to get things done. I was viewing these side businesses as my ticket out but if it implodes I’m stuck forever. The easiest answer is to just to more real estate but I’m thinking about relocating and prefer not to be a POS that does nothing but remote manage property 1,000 miles away.
What’s ur take home income on the rental properties if their cash flowing 160k
If you’re cash flowing $160k on the properties, hire a property manager. Clearly worth the stress relief.
As for your businesses, hire interns to assist with the excel building.
Damn, man, that’s a brutal load to carry. You’re juggling a ton—family, a crazy commute, rentals hours away, a business that’s not pulling its weight, and now you’re eyeing another one? No wonder you feel like you’re drowning. The first thing is, take a breath. You’re clearly ambitious, but it sounds like you’re spreading yourself so thin that nothing is actually working for you—just draining you. You need to triage. What’s actually making you money? What’s killing you with stress but not giving enough return? Something has to give before you break. And that new business? If it’s selling for less than a year’s income, there’s a reason. Either the owner’s desperate or it’s a ticking time bomb. Do you really need another problem right now? You built all this over five years, and yeah, it’s coming to a head, but you’re not powerless. Start cutting the dead weight and get back to a place where you can actually breathe. You got this far—doesn’t mean you have to burn out now.
This was written using ChatGPT. The dashes are a giveaway.
Definitely, no one uses m-dashes. You'd have to like manually copy and paste it, the standard dash on a keyboard is a hyphen.
Sounds like you are shooting yourself in the head. Without knowing more than a paragraph about you, I'm going to make some assumptions. You know why you're suffering yet continue to pile things on. Your priorities seem to be work/business > health (mental) and possibly family. I'm a big fan of Stephen Covey's abundance mentality, that is that there's enough opportunities to go around for everybody. Take a break, convert some of your active investments (rentals) into passive ones (mutual funds/indices), set your mental and get life systems set up (family night, date night, church), and then go back out to chase deals.
I’ll check that book out thanks. It’s a catch 22 because I’m doing this so that I can do it full time and spend more time with my family but if the wheels fall off before that materializes then I’m in a hard place
Have you thought about picking one of your "side hustle" and focusing on only that? Rentals can be very demanding and a business that's barely breaking even (and potentially buying another) are in very different lanes which makes it hard to optimize and switch mental hats.
If you get to the point where you need to quit your job so that you can focus on your side hustle and scale it to a certain level of income so that you can replace your job, you're just replacing one job with another. I get the desire to want to scale a side hustle to be able to spend more time with family, and you definitely need to determine what level of income you'd need to replace in order to quit your job (likely taking an overall lifestyle cut in the process), but you also don't want to continually chase some vague future where you might be able to live off a side hustle and spend some % increase in time with your family vs. spending some more time with your partner & kids now. A side business is not passive, and neither are rentals (despite what the gurus say), so be realistic with yourself about how much more "time" you'll be gaining by being an entrepreneur when you're likely going to be working more hours, but with greater flexibility. Not saying you give up all side hustles entirely, but it sounds like your life is out of balance and you need to be realistic with yourself and your own mental health about what an appropriate amount of balance you need to be able to keep yourself and your family happy.
Why would you ever live 3 hours away from your work?
Just setting yourself up to fail.
Round trip 3 hours
I don't know why you would ever live 1 hour away from where you work, let alone 1.5.
A 3 hour round trip is 15 hours a week. 750 hours a year if you take two weeks of vacation. That is a full month of your life, every single year, spent COMMUTING to work, not even working.
OK, and? All you have to do is be a little less greedy, a little less aggressive, and all your problems go away. Why should anyone be sympathetic?
Why are you living in a HCOL area when that's 3 hours away from where you work? Why do you insist on constantly imperiling your children's future in favor of stroking your own ego and buying businesses you can't afford and don't know how to run? You can't buy a house because you are incapable of saving money, not because of the cost of living, so stop hiding behind that excuse.
"I'm a deal junkie" is not an excuse or a reasonable call for pity. The guy who spends every dollar he makes on lottery tickets is a "deal junkie" too.
hard truths
3 hours round trip. Everything I own is debt free with 60% of my NW in cash/securities. So money isn’t the issue. By afford a house I mean fathom paying what people are asking.
Also the assumptions you’ve made are wild. It’s like you’re using your imagination to think of someone you despise.
You must be new here, this is Ozy's specialty / greatest skill
Ah, so you can afford a house you just think you deserve it at a lower price than the market prices. Gotcha!
Which assumption did I make that was so wild? The one where I took your statement about a 3 hour commute and repeated it? Or the ones where you yourself said you're buying businesses with suspicious financials, or where you own a business which isn't making you enough money to compensate you for the stress of running it?
It's almost as if you posted this long list of ways in which you are shooting yourself in the foot, expected people to pour sympathy all over you, and then got the shocked Pikachu face when someone bothered to point out the obvious - that by your own admission, you are making decisions which are harming yourself and your family for no actual return. Just stop making bad decisions! You aren't an addict or a "junkie" you are just a bad judge of value.
From what I understand you’re still trying to break into the buy side lol.
Well if that's the best analysis you can do, I suppose it isn't surprising you've been abjectly failing at most of your business enterprises. I make absolutely no secret of what I do, so either you're so incompetent you don't know that development and especially acquisitions is literally the act of "buying" something, or you're so lazy that you decided to call me out without doing a smidgen of work. As I said, either way, it explains your inability to successfully run a business, since you can't hide your incompetence or laziness when no one is there to run cover for you or pick up your slack
It's wild to me that you came on here, unprompted, to explain about how you've created all these (easily solved) problems for yourself and your family, and then decided to get all huffy when you weren't universally showered with love and support and instead had someone point out that yeah, your problems are of your own making, have easy solutions, and that the excuses you're giving for yourself ("I'm a deal junkie!") are such obvious attempts to pat yourself on the back in the guise of mild self-criticism that you may as well have not bothered, and just said "positive feedback only, please."
You don't want advice or counsel. You want someone to tell you you're amazing without doing anything to earn it.
I didn't want to be the one to say it, so I stopped commenting, but Ozy's points are very on point. When I first read your post, my immediate thought was also "these problems are all self-inflicted," which is why I asked if you could back out of the deal to acquire a new business or sell some of the real estate. Ultimately if you've spread yourself too thin to run anything well, then nothing is going to do well. As a business owner, you need to learn which opportunities are most worth your time and effort and allocate your time and effort accordingly.
I had a heart to heart with my business partner about a similar issue that you are having - you have to get better at valuing your time. I made this mistake a ton earlier in my career...I'd look at an opportunity and say, oh wow, this is a good deal. And then I'd do it, and even if it worked out exactly how I thought it would, I ended up regretting that I got involved. I signed up for a deal where in the base case scenario, I invested $25K and will make $50K. And it's not a ton of work week-to-week (on average, probably five hours), but once I started to think about my time on a per hour, I'll be lucky if I make $50/hr. And I promised myself I will never sign up for a deal like that again. Give yourself a non-negotiable per hour cost of your time (mine is a minimum $250/hr) and then do the math for each deal based on a conservative time allocation. So if a deal/opportunity will take ten hours a week of your time, that opportunity needs to bring in $130,000/yr (and if it's an investment, you need to back into a per hour with a hypothetical/actual sale). Suddenly the no brainer opportunity doesn't look so good. Or you need to start to leverage other people's time, but it sounds like the business doesn't generate enough to do that.
If you don't value your time appropriately, you will be miserable over the long run because you are spending many many hours a week on a job that pays like shit.
Appreciate the feedback
As someone with two kids, juggling businesses/multiple investments, I'll tell you the hard truth. Being a "deal junkie" is not an excuse. I get it because I was sort of like this way too. But you have to sort of learn to be "less ambitious". I took my kids to Disney two years ago and I didn't notice it but I was either on my phone or laptop most of the time. In fact, I spent 75% of the time inside the parks on my phone (screen time tracker told me). Its when I realized this is not the right way to live. What's the point of earning if you can't enjoy it? Someone I was very close to took their own life last year. This was a person who earned a ton, built incredible properties, and seemed like he had it all including a great family. If you're hardwired to think this way, it will not work out well for you. Take a step back and enjoy life. Even billionaires are miserable in this world.
That’s chilling. You push so hard to try and build something just to realize you’ve been tearing it down…
If you’re still “considering” then this sounds like a weird brag.
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