News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Cleaning restaurant floor for $1000 per night by dsfyu404ed on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @08:58AM (#18920844)
There's tons of businesses that "print money" as one or two man LLCs but they don't scale well beyond that point. There's several overhead jumps as your company grows to a point where you have to pay someone else to do something because you can no longer do it yourself (hiring your first few employees, company gets so big you need to get someone to do HR/payroll stuff, company owns so much stuff you need to hire someone to specifically maintain the equipment, etc, etc). Sure you can scale but then some other smaller business with lower margins comes along and out-competes you. For businesses where the cost of entry is low this happens fast.

It also is worth mentioning that owning a small business is not nearly as good of a work/life balance as being an employee. Expect to work 40hr week managing the business directly and then another 20-40 doing all the behind the scenes stuff that the business needs in order to run. Obviously conditions vary a lot based on what you do and the local economy.

Re:Cleaning restaurant floor for $1000 per night by jeletonskelly on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @09:02AM (#18920879)
Yeah, our 2-man devops consulting business was printing money until we tried to scale up. Consulting needs a constant stream of new clients so you need a sales guy, then you need to carry a bench so you can start working on new contracts ASAP, then you need benefits and salaries to attract the kind of senior talent you expect from a consultancy, computers, desks, space...
Re:Cleaning restaurant floor for $1000 per night by dsfyu404ed on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @09:15AM (#18920977)
It's even worse in blue collar industries where you have OSHA and possibly DOT circling like vultures waiting for you to slip up. The regs are basically written in a way that it's impossible to comply with the letter of the law 100% of the time at scale. You can't possibly be sure every employee will do everything perfect all the time. It's like speeding. Everyone does it and the unlucky pay the price. One person can't be bothered to tie off to the scissor lift and there goes everyone's bonus.
Re:Cleaning restaurant floor for $1000 per night by mattmanser on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @11:17AM (#18922086)
In the UK we also have a VAT tax cliff that further compounds this problem. If your business makes more than £80k you have to add 20% VAT, but before that you don't. It results in strange scenarios like an accountant recently told a family friend to take more vacations as she was getting too close to the cliff.

Makes a lot of small businesses unscalable, but also makes a lot of smaller business ideas viable.