The existing owner is the hardest working guy i've met, used to be in the Army so has a proper work ethic. Thing is, hes not very good with people, hes got an abrasive personality, which doesnt bother me at all but i can see how its not good for managing people, and hes fully aware of this and doesnt want to manage people either. He currently does all the rounds himself for a total of a 60 hour work week in addition to his other things. I've already made hires to take over this and i'll manage them. Its going to be hard work to begin with but its an automatable system.
After expenses, it should generate £20k-£25k a year which is enough for me to live on frugally. I'll ideally expand it to generate more over the next year though. I'm paying less than the yearly profit to buy it as well, so its a damn good deal.
I notice some Americans will call freelancing contracting even though they mean two very different things over here.
As a contractor, you generally have several years of experience in a technology (let's say Oracle ATG ecommerce platform). Companies that want to implement ATG may not want to hire a full time and permanent group of Software Engineers as building software is not there business, instead, they will hire a contracting firm, someone like IBM, Oracle or Accenture. These firms send people to the client to work in the new implementation on contracts that could last from 1 month to 12 months (for example).
Sometimes companies and consultancies will hire independent consultants (like the parent poster) who will join a company for a just a few months / until the project is done then they will go and join a new company so on and so forth.
Contractors generally charge per day (a good friend of mine charges £500 per day) and they have no employee benefits.
It's a tough market but if you have the right skills (tech and otherwise) you can earn yourself some very good money.
Some Americans think that there freelancing efforts are the same as contracting. This may be the case in some instances but a lot of the time I see people claiming that you don't need much experience go contracting and it's easy work to get if you try hard etc etc. These are usually Americans that are getting confused between the professional service offering that is contracting and the low value informal work they do which I would call freelancing.
EDIT: the parent just told us he was talking about a cleaning business. What I have described is IT contracting.
My current earn to frugal living ratio is: 5 working days buys me a month of living expenses.
Currently though i'm working very hard because i'm in the process of buying a non-tech real world "lifestyle" business that will run with minimal hours after a initial time investment peroid, which should allow me to give up contracting completely, should i choose to.