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Boring Biz Nets Him $16K/Month Working 5 Hours Per Week

Mike
  • Mike

  • Entrepreneur
  • $190,000 Annual Net Income

📝 Mike writes

I was a painter in the Chicago suburbs working for an a**hole. I made $25 an hour…

I did a fair amount of side work for extra money.

One weekend I did really well on a fairly big side job and made about $2500 over the weekend (this was basically a windfall). I posted before and after pictures in a local facebook group and the post went viral.

I ended up booking two weeks worth of work from that post (and more as time went on)…

I figured screw it… I spent $1200 on a POS van and quit my job… I was able to make around $100k in my first year as a solo operator.

Fast forward a few years and we’re doing $2m annually, I’ve got a 50/50 partner, the business is extremely well systemized and I work 0-5 hours per week on that business.

I’m not exactly killing it financially because we have a lot of overhead in order to keep out of the day to day, but I’m making $180-200k with complete flexibility.

Clearly he worked a lot more than 5 hours per week to build the business 💪

But just goes to show how much money there is to be made in simple, blue collar service work.

And how hands-off such a business can become with the right systems in place 😎

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Updated: December 29, 2025

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