The Rise Of The Million Dollar, One-Person Business

Are they mostly B2B? Or do they sell directly to retail consumers?

The details behind the article show a less appealing reality than what we might hope for. Yeoman capitalism hasn't killed off VC-istan just yet. A lot of these $1M/year businesses are for, say, independent real estate brokers. Yes, there are people who get very rich in that game. There are others who fail horribly. I think we're quite a way from a society where talented people can find their way to, if not $1M per year, a reasonable approximation of their actual worth to society. (Fuck, I'd be happy with a regular upper-middle-class income if freed from subordination and its attendant mind-rot.)

Let's stop talking about revenues and figures of "$1 million per year" (because there are a variety of context factors-- geography, profit vs. revenue-- that make us question what that really means) and instead talk about growth. This is where it gets interesting. We can look at the growth/risk spectrum between gambler's ruin (take all nonnegative-expectancy risks; thus take over the world economy or die) and non-participation (take no risks; no growth above the risk-free rate-- minus management fees, of course). Most business activity is between those two extremes, but the very middle of that spectrum is underfunded and undersubscribed.

If you want to push for 150-percent-annual-growth-or-sudden-death outcomes like a sociopath gambling with others' money, ambitions, careers and dreams, then there are VCs will fund you, your pathological gambling, and (in most cases) your shitty personality cult. (That's the high-risk, high-growth route.)

If you want to work for some horrible, authoritarian corporation doing shit-ass-boring mediocre work and growing your salary at 7% per year (mostly, a reward for getting older because you're so disconnected from the real work that no one knows what you're worth) then... good news, that is available too. (That's the low-risk, low-growth route... except the long-term existential risks are pretty disgusting because a career of mediocrity, coupled with age, makes one untouchable. See: what fucking academia does to those who don't make it.)

What no one is talking about is the mid-risk/mid-growth range... 20 to 40 percent annual growth with some volatility, but not likely to ruin lives en masse. (You might have a thin year, but your average outcome is strong if you work hard, have the talent, and do the right thing. You just need discipline in your strong years.) The problem is that no one is funding that region of the spectrum. But that's the natural home for technology, research, science, as well as the yeoman capitalism that most of us would find much more rewarding (and scalable, and beneficial to society) than this VC-istan, Hollywood-for-ugly-people, bullshit.

You can get jobs at stagnant corporations and jobs (probably not founder jobs, unless you have the connections to partake in Stanford Welfare, but jobs with "equity") in the high-risk VC-istan space. No one seems to have any clue how to fund the mid-risk/mid-growth space, but that's where the future actually lives. See: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/gervais-macle...

Most of the people I know doing this are involved heavily in local commerce. Think real estate, insurance, construction, and skilled labor companies (plumbing, A/C repair, landscaping).

In the 1980s we had a time when people in finance could bring their companies millions of dollars without creating much palpable value. We certainly have a new bread of Masters of the Universe.

From what I understand the main purpose is liability shielding. Each property is run as its own LLC, and management is done via a centralized management company. If a person gets injured on the property, the liability effectively gets capped at the liquidation value of the building.