At a networking event, a friend told me that they wanted to build a system where they could get paid for selling leads by selling the rights to counties within a specific vertical market.
I went to the meeting with a working demo of generating pages for all the cities in Florida, so won the work.
I designed a system of Foxyshop, WordPress, FoxyCart for checkout, the Consolibyte QuickBooks integration, and QuickBookds itself.  I also used a commercial integration between QuickBooks and vTiger.
I had two full time developers from SupportResort for $700 a month, and got done the custom code that I needed by managing them closely.
The company did $1 million a year in sales for almost 5 years before being killed by a Google update.