Depends on what you want. If you just want the work and don't care about owning the company but are using the equity to secure payment that's fine. It'll prob

Depends on what you want. If you just want the work and don't care about owning the company but are using the equity to secure payment that's fine. It'll probably be a hard sell (not impossible) for them to hand over $30k out of $90k of revenue when they aren't actively growing the business. First thing no matter what, define the job and figure out how much it would cost if the work was being performed by a professional firm. If that cost is $100k including profit, then that is your base cost and you need to figure out how you get at least that value out of the business. To be fair, the above is only the way most people think when trying to make money. Wealth is not built that way, but paying the bills can be. IMO if you think this business is profitable, and can be grown and leveraged better than you need to think about permanent equity stake or a leveraged buy out of some sort where you own it all. A business doing $90k a year, may sell for $30k or may sell for $900k, just depends on the factors of the specific business and opportunity. If you want to own it, then look at leveraged buy out ideas, these work in a lot of small business transactions and generally let both the current owner and the new owner have skin in the game at the same time so everyone is working for the best outcome. But if this isn't a business you are going to want to spend time really growing and working in every day, then just do the consulting + profit route and be done. I did a few e-commerce deals where I paid for their development with my time and my teams time but I took a percentage of their profits until my cost + profit was paid off, and then I still kept getting a smaller percent of profits until some next milestone since I took the risk and they had little risk. e.g. I might get 30% of profits until I am paid back, and then 3% for 5 years with a minimum of $X/year guaranteed. These types of deals are good when you don't want to be in the business but you are taking risk and they are getting to leverage you/your time and/or your money. The percentages are all super dependent on the business, types of deals, number of transactions, deal size etc. There are almost an infinite number of ways you can structure these types of deals to be fair. You have to define what you want to be doing first, then you can figure out options.