Personally i believe that if you seriously think the site can generate several 000′s a month i’d see no reason for selling and definatelly not killing it but if you think it won’t ever make enough to make you happy (that figure would be different for all of us) why not leave it as it is?A couple of 100′s without any work is better than nothing…

Excellent article. Thanks.

My advice is somewhere between TaTouille, macmoov & Robert.
Basically, I suggest reinventing this as a different, more interesting project. There a lot of approaches you could take with this. The potential upsides are substantial & the potential learning is enourmous. Here are a few possibilities:

franchise
macmoov outlined this.

protige
Get a student on board with a 50%/50% ownership split. Give her some money (for investing in the business). Mentor them & let them come up with their own ideas. Could be very rewarding. Could also help you with your other business (scoping out new suppliers, etc.).

Charity/Protige
Teach someone to do what you do. Somewhere that has an impact. Could be great for a single Mum. Could be even more important for someone in the developing world. A couple of hundred a month could maintain a family in some places. A thousand could send kids to Uni.

* A great chef can make good food. Julie Child can make good food, and then write down explicitly how an awful cook can make the same thing; that puts her on a whole new level above chefs. Similarly, franchising is about making a recipe that non-geniuses can follow to do your business all over again, and it is hard and extremely powerful. If you can learn to do that even just a little bit, it will be worth way more than the business itself.

* To worry about BodyMonkey’s competition with HouseOfRave is misplaced. They probably do compete with each other, but drop-shippng is an area with a low barrier to entry, and their will always be competition. It’s better to have a piece of that competition than not. If you close BodyMonkey, someone else will just get a cool domain name tomorrow and start the same thing. What’s going to happen when all those thousands of Chinese people now gold farming or working on Amazon’s Turk thing discover drop shipping ? There are lots of Chinese and some will be smart enough to make sites even cooler than BodyMonkey. I say, keep your fingers in everything you can.

* Finally, you mention the trouble of finding a buyer. At $15,000 I don’t know who would buy it, but at a revenue sharing scheme, I know several people who might be interested. Email me at rgristroph@gmail.com if you are interested.

My advice: find someone to run BodyMonkey, and pay you a percentage. I think this is better than even an outright sale.

* Most Important: You can LEARN about transfering a business. I suspect that selling or buying a business successfully is hard, and a different set of skills than starting or running a business.

* The Worst that can happen is Body Monkey fails, and the interaction with a problemic other person costs you a lot of time and attention and maybe money. This is worth it.

* Just because BodyMonkey generates what seems like a small stream of income now, and maybe will only ever do that, does not mean it is worthless. There are people out there for whom a small business they could attend to in the evenings that made $300 / mo would change their lives, it could make the differnce between having to put a loved one in a nursing home versus being able to run BodyMonkey at home and take care of them. There are smart, dedicated, hard working people out there, who would be great people for you to know, who would kill for something like that. You just have to find them (maybe that’s not easy).

Long time reader… Why don’t you hire (for nearly nothing) a student (or someone else) who would have the task of improving the website?
He would mainly be paid at % of sales, so you get some money AND an improving business…

If after a few months, the website is still a BloodyMonkey, then you would not regret anything in unplugging it…

Btw, still enjoy every single post ;)

TaTouille

If you do kill it (which seems like a good option to me), make sure you 301 redirect everything on BodyMonkey over to the closest corresponding page on HoR. Might as well benefit from any links/traffic BodyMonkey gets.

Adam

Have someone pay you a smaller amount (say $1,000-2000) as a buy in and you take a percentage of sales on a monthly basis. That way you can get someone else to do the day-to-day and you can still see a portion of the potential upside.