My dad started three small businesses on his own over the period of 20 years: a restaurant, an upholstery business, and a long line commercial fishing boat. First, let me just point out that sales (or revenue) does NOT equal profit. I'm pretty sure everyone here knows that. If you count just sales, then the upholstery business marked with inflation would probably be doing $150-200k a year in sales/revenue for a single sole proprietorship. However, count in rent, materials, utilities, etc... my family was probably making about 70k a year in today's dollars. The fishing boat, though, is another story.
Although the fishing boat was incorporated as an S-corp with just my dad as the sole owner and 100% owner of stock, he did employ a crew of people. I mean, there was a boat captain, and at any given time, 7 to 8 guys on board. We had fuel expenses, salaries (which were a portion of the catch), food expenses. If you looked strictly at our sales, which I used to do the bookkeeping for, we would easily net 500k to a million a year in today's dollars. After all expenses were paid and done, my dad would make about $100-120k a year on a decent year.
Since we're using accounting terms-of-art, you almost certainly don't mean that you would "net 500k", you mean gross 500k, right?
The popular culture seems to use net to mean "total in the income category", but in accounting it generally means EBITDA, i.e. your dad would gross $1m and net $100k.
Although the fishing boat was incorporated as an S-corp with just my dad as the sole owner and 100% owner of stock, he did employ a crew of people. I mean, there was a boat captain, and at any given time, 7 to 8 guys on board. We had fuel expenses, salaries (which were a portion of the catch), food expenses. If you looked strictly at our sales, which I used to do the bookkeeping for, we would easily net 500k to a million a year in today's dollars. After all expenses were paid and done, my dad would make about $100-120k a year on a decent year.