I’m 35. I’ve been owning and operating a two store mattress business for going on 7 years. I make about 60k (gross) a year, with no benefits, retirement, etc. I do pay for health insurance and my Roth IRA 100% out of pocket. I feel like I’m financially falling behind in life. I just signed another lease in a house with three other strangers. I budget like crazy to ensure I put some money away. I don’t see me ever owning a home or having enough income to support a family, unless my business explodes and we scale up.

My business is difficult to scale. Commercial real estate has become very difficult and expensive, and expanding seems damn near impossible. There’s more competition than ever. Costs continue to rise. People are spending less money. I don’t see my income drastically increasing unless I can open at least two more stores.

A problem is that we’re a licensee and have to sell specific lines of mattresses and use their terrible website (which hinders us). Selling online outside of my local delivery area is very difficult due to delivery/QC issues. Being a licensee was great to get started, but now I’m shackled to it. I can’t sell the brands or operate in a way that I think could drive more profit. For example, I can’t carry the popular online brands. The huge benefit to this is they drive door swings, are great for SEO/search results, and those companies invest heavily into advertising.

I love working for myself. I love the flexibility my schedule can provide me. But, like I said, I feel like I’m falling behind. I’m at a place where I can exit the business. A friend has offered to put in a good word for a remote job paying 80k with full benefits. Some customer on-boarding specialist role. I can’t say it sounds exciting, but the pay, benefits, and remote work seem great. This sounds like hell to me.

I’m broken and tired. I don’t really have the savings to take a few months off and figure it all out.

Ultimately, I have no idea what I’d do after this? Whether it’s start a new business (which I don’t have any good ideas) or take on a job elsewhere that wont make me miserable. Outside of sales, management, and product buying, have some soft skills in Google Ads, SEO, running an already built woocomm website (no coding experience). I could lean into these and try to scale those up by taking on clients. However, tons of people are saying to avoid coding a future career. Google Ads/SEO guys say to avoid it as well.