Before I started working for myself, I sat down and did some math.
I wanted roughly $20,000 a month in recurring gross revenue.
I wanted to keep business expenses under about 20%.
And I wanted to cap paid client work at roughly 20 hours a week.
I also wanted to stay solo. No employees. No big team of freelancers. Very little overhead.
The rest of my working time had another job: writing, experimenting, building an audience, and creating intellectual property and assets that belonged to me.
That was the business I was trying to build.
I had already helped build and run an eight-figure agency. I’d done the partners, employees, clients, management and overhead version of entrepreneurship. It was successful and rewarding in plenty of ways. It was also extremely stressful.
There’s a lot of business advice about buying back your time by delegating. Hire people. Outsource. Get yourself out of delivery.
I understand the logic. I’d already lived it.
What gets left out is that handing work to someone else doesn’t automatically hand you your time back. You still have to prepare the work, explain it, answer questions, review it, fix problems and manage the person doing it.
And once you have a team, your business gets hungrier.
You need enough revenue coming in to pay everyone. That can push you into taking projects, keeping clients or making decisions because the business needs feeding, even when those decisions aren’t particularly good for you.
I didn’t want to build another hungry business.
My expertise was the fastest thing I could turn into money. I already knew companies would pay well for it because I’d spent my career being paid for exactly that expertise.
So selling my time made sense.
I just didn’t want to sell all of it.
That’s how I ended up with the $20K target.
Why $20K?
Please don’t get too attached to my number.
I lived in San Francisco at the time. I had children. My expenses and expectations were mine.
Someone else might create exactly the life they want on $10K a month. Another person might look at $20K and wonder how anyone survives on it.
For me, it felt safe enough.
It was also less than half of what I had been earning at the agency before bonuses and revenue share.
So yes, I was taking a substantial pay cut.
I was completely fine with that.
At 38, maximizing my income had moved pretty far down my priority list. I wanted flexibility, independence and enough room in my week to build things I owned rather than spending all of my time servicing clients, managing employees or building someone else’s company.
I wanted enough income that I wouldn’t panic and take whatever client showed up.
Enough that I wouldn’t immediately go looking for another job.
Enough that I could give myself time to figure out what I wanted to build next.
At the time, I didn’t have a name for any of this.
Now I do.
I was building FU Money.
And one thing mattered almost as much as the amount: predictability.
I didn’t want a spectacular $30K month followed by a miserable $6K one.
I didn’t want to spend every month looking for the next project, client or launch because I needed cash.
I wanted a certain amount of money already coming in before the month started.
Eventually, I got that recurring baseline to roughly $20K a month while staying solo.
That’s what I now call my revenue floor.
One clarification because this drives me crazy when people talk about business numbers online: $20K was gross revenue.
There were payment-processing fees, software, other business expenses and taxes between that number and what I could actually spend.
Someone saying, “I had a $100K launch,” does not necessarily mean they made $100K.
They may have spent a fortune on ads, affiliates, contractors, software, refunds and everything else required to create that revenue.
Sometimes the impressive launch made excellent money.
Sometimes the profit was pretty ordinary.
Sometimes they lost money.
Funny how that part doesn’t always make the Instagram carousel.
So whenever I share numbers in FU Money Receipts, I’m going to tell you what they actually represent.
What FU Money Receipts is
There is already plenty of business advice on the internet.
I’m less interested in telling you what business you should start than showing you what actually happened when I built mine.
The things that worked extremely well. The ideas I thought were brilliant that flopped. The revenue streams that made good money but created work I hated. What I kept, what I killed and what I would build differently today.
I’ve been doing this long enough to have receipts for all of the above.
I’m writing this series for people sitting in jobs wondering what else they could do with their skills and experience, and for people already running businesses who sometimes wonder whether they want to keep running them this way.
If seeing the real numbers, workload, decisions and tradeoffs behind someone else’s experience helps you make a smarter decision about your own, good.
That’s what I want these articles to do.
And since we’re here, I should probably tell you who this publication is not for.
If you want someone to tell you how to quit your job tomorrow and make $1 million in the next 90 days, I am definitely not your person.
If you’re looking for a $97 Claude prompt that will apparently build your seven-figure funnel while you sleep, the internet has you extremely well covered.
I’m interested in the messier questions.
How much did it actually make?
How much time did it take?
What did it cost?
What did you give up to get it?
Did you even like the business once you built it?
Would you do it again?
Those are the questions I wish more people answered.
Which brings me back to my $20K revenue floor.
The route I took to build it was fairly winding. Some income streams were excellent for cash and terrible for my time. Some things described as “scalable” hid a ridiculous amount of work behind the scenes. A few revenue streams stayed with me for years. Others I eventually got rid of completely.
And if I were starting again today, I would build the mix differently.
Below the paywall, I’m breaking down how I built the service-business portion of that $20K floor:
how I packaged the expertise I already had
how I decided what to charge
why I chose recurring retainers over more lucrative projects
what it actually cost me to run the business
the contract term that protected my monthly baseline
and how I kept the whole thing small enough that I still had time to build something beyond client work
Annual subscribers also get my actual rate sheet and the detailed revenue breakdown behind the $20K monthly baseline.