My first business was incredibly similar to yours in terms of success. A partner and I share about $75K/year in profit, and at this point we only answer occasional technical support (no custom development or contracting).
Neither of us were looking for the additional contracting work that you take on, we instead regarded this as passive income, and took the liberty to travel and relax.
I've now moved onto a new (bigger/riskier) project full time (with another partner), with my month-to-month financial burden still being taken care of by this first business.
From my experience, what I'd suggest is that, if you haven't already, build out incredible demonstrations, tutorials, how-tos, videos, etc for your customers, in an attempt to render yourself as useless as possible (on the contracting side). Then I suspect (based on the particulars of your business), that you could just maintain the project for some amount of time, only fixing problems, enhancing support materials and answering technical support, while earning significantly more than the $25k you suggest.
I say some amount of time because these things don't last forever, especially if you aren't growing it. But to me this doesn't sound like a killer business - it sounds like some passive income that you can use as a stepping stone to the next big thing in your career.
So don't sell it. Round it out with a last big push, turn it into a solid source of passive income, and let it fuel your future endeavors.
If you want to talk about this more in private shoot me an email, it's in my account info.
Neither of us were looking for the additional contracting work that you take on, we instead regarded this as passive income, and took the liberty to travel and relax.
I've now moved onto a new (bigger/riskier) project full time (with another partner), with my month-to-month financial burden still being taken care of by this first business.
From my experience, what I'd suggest is that, if you haven't already, build out incredible demonstrations, tutorials, how-tos, videos, etc for your customers, in an attempt to render yourself as useless as possible (on the contracting side). Then I suspect (based on the particulars of your business), that you could just maintain the project for some amount of time, only fixing problems, enhancing support materials and answering technical support, while earning significantly more than the $25k you suggest.
I say some amount of time because these things don't last forever, especially if you aren't growing it. But to me this doesn't sound like a killer business - it sounds like some passive income that you can use as a stepping stone to the next big thing in your career.
So don't sell it. Round it out with a last big push, turn it into a solid source of passive income, and let it fuel your future endeavors.
If you want to talk about this more in private shoot me an email, it's in my account info.