I have been doing longarm quilting for several years. If I had to depend on the profit from it I would starve, lose my home, my business and be broke and barefoot.
If you have a job, KEEP IT. The headaches of dealing with people who change their mind from original, and written, discussion of terms, patterns, threads, etc. to pickup time is not always worth any amount of money. I feel lucky to make .50 cents to a dollar an hour on a quilt top, definitely not anywhere near minimum wage usually.
The sad thing is that although the prices on everything else is increasing my customers don't think I should raise my prices. When I did a very slight increase I lost cutomers. Plus there are more people doing this all the time because they see the ads saying they can pay for a longarm machines in weeks or months, always less than a year. (That's a laugh!) Customers also think I am making money like crazy because after all I've been doing this for years and it only takes an hour or two to custom quilt a king size, right? WRONG!
If I knew then what I know now, I would never do it if I had the chance to start over.
Longarm