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Buy it or build it?
Thirty-three documented owners, and two completely different routes in. One group started with $150 and spent years. The other wrote a cheque and inherited a customer list. Here is what each actually cost, and the one failure that shows what buying can hide.
There are two ways into every business in this database, and the owners who took each route rarely talk to each other. One group started with almost nothing and spent years assembling a customer list by hand. The other wrote a cheque and inherited one. Both are documented here, often in the same trade, which makes the comparison unusually clean.
What building actually costs
Marcus Gram started a vending route in 2018 with $10,000 and two machines. His first year produced about $5,000 in revenue. It would have been entirely rational to quit. By 2022 the route was doing $500,000 in sales across six states.
That shape repeats everywhere in the cheap-entry trades. Anna-Marie Ortiz put her last $2,000 into a cleaning company and reached $10,000 months about fifteen months later. Trevor Kokenge spent $300 on used tools, including a $50 lawnmower, and stored them in his apartment because he had nowhere else to put them. Brian Winch spent roughly $250 on hand tools in 1981 and has been walking Calgary parking lots ever since, now reporting $600,000 to $700,000 a year.
The pattern is not that building is cheap. It is that building is slow, and the capital you save is paid back in years. Winch's business took four decades to become what it is. Gram's took three years before he could leave his job.
What buying actually costs
Adam Hill skipped all of that. In 2014 he paid $60,000 for an existing Tampa Bay vending route from an owner who was moving away, and the business now grosses over $58,000 a month across more than 100 machines. What that $60,000 bought was not equipment. It was placements: the relationships with property managers that Gram spent years assembling one handshake at a time.
Dan Spracklin did the same thing with a septic company founded in 1929, acquiring roughly $1 million of revenue and 22,000 customers from his father-in-law, then tripling it to about $3 million in two years by adding services, routing the trucks with GPS, and raising prices that had sat still for years. Dave and Carla Menz bought a failing laundromat for $85,000 after 25 banks declined them, and built a four-store chain reporting over $2 million.
Buying converts capital into route density. Building converts years into equity. The database contains no evidence that either is generally better. The comparison, so far
The hidden third option
The fastest documented year-one result in this entire database belongs to neither group. Ryan McCoy did over $900,000 with 1,100 clients in his first year running a Scoop Soldiers pet waste territory. But he had spent two years managing that exact Dallas market as a corporate employee before he bought it. He knew the routes, the customers, and the staffing before a dollar changed hands.
That is the version nobody advertises, and it is probably the lowest-risk entry into any trade: work in it first, then buy the part you already understand. It costs you time rather than money, and it removes the single largest risk in an acquisition, which is not knowing what you are looking at.
The risk nobody prices correctly
Buying transfers the business and the problems together. The one documented failure in this database is an acquisition: Dan Burnside bought an HVAC company turning $2.1 million with roughly $800,000 in owner earnings, then discovered after closing that the seller had misrepresented the business, watched a key employee leave to start a competitor, and could not hire replacements in a thin rural market. It ended in bankruptcy.
Nothing on a spreadsheet catches that. Our exit research found the same thing from the other direction: the premium buyers pay is almost entirely about contracted revenue, low customer concentration, and whether the business runs without its owner. Those are the things a seller can misrepresent, and the things a model will happily accept at face value.
How to decide
If you have more time than money, build, and expect the first year to be about reputation rather than revenue. If you have more money than time, buy, and spend a disproportionate share of your effort verifying the seller rather than negotiating the price. If you have both, do what McCoy did and work in the trade first.
The picker will filter documented models by what you can spend, and the cost ladder lists every documented entry figure from $150 upward. If you are evaluating a specific deal, the Deal Kit prices it and gives you the questions that would have saved Burnside.
Common questions
Is it better to buy or start a small business?
Both are documented here, often in the same trade. Gram built a vending route from $10,000 to $500,000 in sales over five years; Hill paid $60,000 for an existing route that now grosses over $58,000 a month. Buying converts capital into route density, building converts years into equity, and nothing in this data says one is generally better.
What is the cheapest way to get into a trade?
Starting cold. The documented floor in this database is $150 of window cleaning gear, followed by roughly $250 of litter tools, $300 of used landscaping equipment, and $2,000 for a cleaning company. The full list is on the cost ladder.
What is the biggest risk when buying a small business?
The seller, not the price. Diligence assumes good faith and no ratio detects misrepresentation. The one documented failure here involved a $2.1 million business with $800,000 of stated owner earnings that ended in bankruptcy. Verify customer relationships and key-employee intentions independently of the seller.
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