Barely making the salary of a really, really highly-paid person.
The 'realities of business' are not expensive for a sole proprietorship, if you are frugal. At $10/k a month, I could live like a king.
At that point I don't think it would be hard to find an investor (other than the OP) to help out.
A) Borrowed money.
B) Rolling those profits back into the company.
Assuming lead time is less than a year and the profits are already significant both of these options can grow extremely fast. However, just because you can pay someone a reasonable wage to do what you do does not mean it's profitable. It's easy to throw a lot of time and money after a bad idea that only seems to be working.