Andrea Palacio and her husband thought they were playing it safe. In a search for a passive income business, they paid $470,000 for a South Florida landscaping company a few years ago. It was, in their words, a “boring business,” which was hands-off and had good cash flow. Within days of the deal closing, though, the seller vanished, 10 of the 12 employees quit, and revenue took a sudden dive from $70,000 per month to $40,000.
Making matters worse, they had pledged personal assets as collateral on their Small Business Administration loan. Palacio, pregnant while raising a 7-month-old, was thrust into a role handling booking, marketing, admin work, and customer service.
“We got into this business thinking that we’re going to be these investors, that we’re going to acquire the companies and just eventually exit for millions of dollars,” Palacio said on The Side Hustle Show podcast. “And I end up just driving a landscaping truck that’s old without air conditioning. . . . Quitting was never an option because we would lose our home. I can tell you that it was the hardest moment of our lives, and that the pressure was—it got a few tears, a lot of tears out of us.”
Over the course of the next year, Palacio and her husband rebuilt revenue to $60,000 to $65,000 a month, sometimes hitting $70,000. The problem was, they were working 80-hour weeks, leaving Palacio feeling like she wasn’t present for her kids.
Her sister mentioned ChatGPT, a tool that had just come out, and the tech-curious Palacio began experimenting with it. She eventually hired a freelancer to create AI customer relationship software. She created an AI receptionist herself, which would forward calls to her if the client was upset, and book estimates on a calendar automatically. The automations saved her 20 hours a month, she said.
By December 2024, Palacio and her husband put the business up for sale. The couple were hoping to simply recover the money they had invested.
“The thought at this point is we can at least recoup what we paid for the business,” she said. “Maybe it’s not going to be a huge profit per se, but it’s better than it was, and we can kind of get out and try the next thing.”