In his first months at a corporate HR job, Luke Van Der Veer was the youngest person in the building by a wide margin. Part of his onboarding required him to sit down with every subject matter expert on staff, most of them in their mid-sixties, several of them past retirement age and still showing up. After the training portion of each meeting ended, he started asking a simple question: what would you do differently if you could go back? The answers came back nearly identical. I am still going to have to work even after I leave here, so I might as well just stay. I did not get to do the things I wanted to do. I wish we had traveled more. It was the same regret, repeated by person after person, and it landed on him as a warning rather than a regular conversation.
Luke Van Der Veer is a business owner, investor, and the founder of Website Rental Coaching, where he teaches people how to build and rent digital assets that generate customers for local service businesses. He left his HR job in his twenties after learning search engine optimization, built enough recurring income to stop working entirely by 28, and then used the profits to buy an ice cream catering company operating across three states for $1.7 million. He is currently in the process of acquiring a paving company valued at roughly $4 million. Before any of that, he studied marketing and spent a short stretch as a financial representative, where he sat across from people in their fifties and sixties and looked at what they had actually saved. Most of them had almost nothing. That early exposure shaped everything that came after it.
Why a Skill Outlasts a Business Model
Before anything worked, Luke Van Der Veer tried nearly every option the internet offered. He sold on eBay. He sold on Amazon. He tried drop shipping and affiliate marketing. He paid for coaching on Facebook ads and built a Facebook ads agency, then paid for coaching on Google ads and built a Google ads agency. By his own count, he was eight or nine businesses deep and close to quitting. Each attempt made some money. None of it replaced a salary, and none of it was remotely passive.
Looking back, he can name the pattern precisely. Almost everything he tried was a business model rather than a skill. Selling on Amazon, as he puts it, is not a skill. You create something, and you list it. When the model stops working, or the platform changes the rules, you are left holding nothing you can carry forward. Search engine optimization was different because it belonged to him. He could use it to build his own business, sell it as a service, or consult on it, and it stayed valuable regardless of what happened to any one venture.
The practical lesson for anyone feeling stuck is to evaluate the side project by what it leaves behind. Ask whether the effort is building a capability that transfers, or simply feeding a system that only pays while you keep feeding it. During the pandemic, while friends were losing jobs, Luke Van Der Veer had the answer to that question in hand.
What Leverage Actually Means When You Strip Away the Hype
Leverage is one of the most overused words in business, and Luke Van Der Veer defines it in unusually concrete terms. It means putting yourself in a position where you set things up that will pay you without doing future work. Everything he built afterward is a version of that sentence.
In practice, it involved three moves. He learned a process well enough to document it. He taught that process to virtual assistants so he could manage the business rather than work inside it. Then he deliberately chose his markets, an important piece that most people skip. He could have gone after highly competitive niches, but he knew that once a site reached the top of those search results, holding the position would require constant effort. So he selected markets where the work drops off sharply once the ranking is earned, leaving something his assistants could monitor in a couple of hours a week.
You can put yourself in a position where you set things up that will pay you without doing future work.
– Luke Van Der Veer
That is what he means by working backwards. Decide what you want your week to look like first, then choose a market and a model that can actually produce that week. He is careful not to oversell it. Nothing is one hundred percent passive, and there is still maintenance. It is simply nowhere close to a job.
How Renting a Website Works, and Why It Changes the Power Dynamic
The mechanics are easier to grasp than the name suggests. Millions of local service businesses exist across every trade, and their owners tend to be excellent at the work itself and unfamiliar with how to attract customers. A concrete contractor may be outstanding at installing patios and walkways while relying entirely on referrals, radio spots, or billboards to keep the phone ringing.
Luke Van Der Veer builds a website for a specific trade in a specific city, moves it to the top of the search results, and lets the inquiries come in. When homeowners search for driveway repair in that market, they reach his site rather than one of the hundreds of contractors competing below it. He then approaches a local contractor with something rare in marketing conversations: proof. He is not asking anyone to trust a projection. He arrives with customers already in hand and asks whether the contractor wants more of them, then rents the flow of leads for a monthly fee.
He ran a traditional SEO agency first and shut it down after a client woke him in the middle of the night to complain, even though he had gone from no leads to a steady stream. The agency version had turned into another job, with clients dictating reports, edits, and uploads. The rental version inverted that. Because he owns the asset rather than the client, the relationship changes entirely. As he describes it, if one contractor stops paying, there are hundreds of others in the same market who want the same thing. He does not need any single one of them, and that is the whole point.
Buying an Existing Business Can Be Faster Than Building One
The move into acquisitions started with a tax bill. His accountant explained that he could reduce it by purchasing real estate or buying a business, and pointed out that plenty of profitable companies are already for sale and operating. His skill set could then be applied to something that had cash flow from day one.
He paid for training in evaluating and buying companies, then purchased an ice cream catering business he had known growing up and had no idea was available. The deal was structured through an SBA loan requiring ten percent down, and with legal and closing costs, he was roughly $225,000 out of pocket for a company producing tens of thousands per month in cash flow. He then did two things that compounded the value. He applied his lead-generation skill to the business, which raised the valuation by about a million dollars over the following eight to twelve months, because the sale price of a company is a multiple of its net income. And he brought his brother in as a 50% owner to run it, then built a team so that neither of them was needed day-to-day. Owner independence raises the multiple further.
Luke Van Der Veer also sees a window forming. He expects a wave of baby boomer owners to reach retirement age between 2027 and 2029, flooding the market with businesses for sale. That is difficult for sellers competing against a long list of options, and useful for buyers who can grow what they acquire or help an owner increase lead flow now to sell for more later.
The Due Diligence Lesson That Cost $250,000
The most instructive part of the acquisition was not the win. When Luke Van Der Veer bought the catering company, it came with fifty-two trucks. Inspecting all of them would have been expensive and would have stretched the closing timeline, so he skipped it. In the first year of ownership, the fleet cost him $250,000 in repairs. The equipment began failing almost immediately after the purchase closed.
His takeaway is not that acquisitions are dangerous. It is that you do not know what you do not know, and that even the best coaching will not surface every surprise. Things will emerge after closing that never appeared in due diligence, and the skill that matters is the ability to absorb new information and adjust rather than freeze.
For anyone evaluating a purchase, the usable principle is straightforward. When the cost of verification is small relative to the cost of being wrong, pay for the verification and accept the delay. Fifty-two inspections would have been an expensive inconvenience. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in repairs was a much more expensive education.
Time Is the Asset You Cannot Earn Back
When Luke Van Der Veer first set out, he thought success was a specific number in a bank account. He reached it and found that the feeling did not follow. What actually changed his life was time, and specifically the ability to decide what to do with a given day. He could stay home for a month at Christmas. He could travel with his family. He bought the Lamborghini he had always pictured, kept it for five months, and sold it after enjoying it for roughly two weeks.
He is also honest about the ending most people do not expect. Two days into a celebratory trip to the Bahamas, sitting on a lounge chair, he realized he could not do that for forty years. He went back to work on his own terms and eventually started teaching others after a friend lost their job during the pandemic and asked to learn what he was doing. That teaching became the source of fulfillment that pure freedom had not provided.
His advice for anyone who feels this is out of reach is to start at the end. Decide what you want your life to look like, work backwards to the kind of business that could produce it, and then find someone who has already done it rather than trying to figure it out alone. He compares it to putting the bumpers up at a bowling alley, keeping you on the lane long enough to stop throwing gutter balls and giving up. Luke Van Der Veer was told he would fail by nearly everyone he knew, every single time, and he answers that people evaluate your plan through the lens of the life they lived, not the one you are trying to build.
