I traded $30k/mo for $3.4 million
In 2022 I sold my company for $3.4 million. I've been more financially stressed ever since — and it taught me what an exit actually costs.
Back in 2022 I sold my company. $3.4 million landed in my bank account — more money than I'd ever had at once. I've been more financially stressed ever since.
That sounds insane. Let me explain it, because if you're dreaming of an exit, it's the part nobody tells you.
What I actually sold
For 18 years that company paid me about $30,000 a month. For the last eight or ten of them I barely worked for it — we'd built a team that ran it better than my partner and I could. That's the dream: money showing up every month with your hours detached from it.
We sold so the company could reinvest that cash and expand into new countries. Good decision for the business. For me, it meant trading $360,000 a year of cash flow for a pile of money that pays me nothing on its own.
Now I have to make roughly 10% on $3.4 million every year just to get back to where I was. And the moment the money is sitting there, the maths turns on you: invest it wrong, lose it, and you're back to square one — except now the company is gone too. The pile only ever feels like it's shrinking.
Why the pile shrinks
I can't just throw it all into investments, because I still have to live. And living in Mallorca isn't cheap. Two kids in private school, the house, a million-dollar mortgage at today's rates, insurance, the rest of it — call it $15k a month. To pull $15k out I pay roughly another $15k in tax. So $30k leaves every month with no new cash flow coming in.
Three months of that is nearly $100,000. People dream of earning $100k in a year. I spend it in three. And in this market I can't easily sell the house to ease it, so I'm a little stuck.
What I'm doing about it
Building cash flow again — the thing I should never have given up. A trading course, and my prop firm, TraderFunder. They're working, because building businesses is the one thing I actually know how to do. But it costs time, and time was the whole point.
I talk a lot about GET: geographic, economic and time freedom. I had all three for years without noticing. The cash flow bought me economic freedom, which bought me time, while the laptop gave me geography. I didn't appreciate it until it was gone.
I still own 20% of the company. If it goes well that's another six, seven, maybe ten million down the line. But you never count on money you don't have — a competitor could come along and run us over tomorrow.
The lesson
If you dream of building a company and selling it one day, here's what I'd tell you: an exit only makes sense if it's a genuinely life-changing amount relative to how you live. Mine was life-changing — right up until my fixed costs ate it. Cash flow is freedom. A lump sum is just a number that gets smaller while you watch.