Yesterday I talked about various ways to earn more, invest, and strategies of spending less. One of the better ways to start earning more and build actual wealth is to start a business.
The more people you serve and help, the more money you will be able to make.
If you are working a job, you really can only help a few people. The primary one being your employer. You may be able to provide a lot of value but ultimately you have one customer.
A business can serve multiple people and can grow. You may provide less value to each person individually, but you can scale up to serve more and more people until you out scale your personal ability to make money through a job.
One of the reasons I began looking into starting a business is that it takes less starting capital than real estate. This may be important to you if you are planning on using your own money.
There are a few different types of businesses you can start, and I will go over some here.
Informational Business
Ideally you would want to build this business through something that provides the value, but doesn’t cost you too much after the initial creation. This is why informational businesses, training courses, and e-books have become so popular. They take specialized knowledge that cost you some time and effort to obtain, but after you create the course it can be provided to multiple people at low cost to you.
The trick is to provide real value. You have to actually solve people’s problems.
This is the style of business that MJ DeMarco suggests in his book Millionaire Fastlane, which I highly recommend.
Another form of informational business, the one MJ DeMarco used, is affiliate or lead generation sites. If you can get people’s attention, and then send them to other businesses, you can make money. You don’t have to have any inventory or product yourself other than attention and trust of your audience.
For example, lets say you have a blog that writes about hiking and camping. Your audience would probably love to know what gear you are using. See if you can find affiliate programs associated with your gear and send them through those links.
Physical Product Business
There is an untold number of actual physical things to be bought in the world. Finding something that has an untapped market or can be improved on, then selling that thing is a solid business strategy.
Often you can find a product that is already being manufactured and white label it, sell it under your brand, to find a way into the market.
There are a few courses on how to get started with this method. I can personally recommend the My Wife Quit Her Job blog as a place to get started. Another good resource is Freedom Fastlane. Both sites have a similar strategy and philosophy. I recommend watching or attending webinars from both to learn more.
A physical product business has the upside of not requiring you to have valuable specialized knowledge, but the downside of requiring a little more money to get started.
Own Your Own Job Trap
A lot of people start brick and mortar stores that are really just jobs that they own. There is not a good way to scale them to serve more than a few customers and they are trying to do everything themselves.
Avoid this trap at all cost.
I am not saying don’t open a brick and mortar store. I am saying don’t do it if you are just creating a job for yourself that does not have the possibility of turning into a successful business. For brick and mortar this means one that can expand to other locations.
It All Requires Work and Patience
Regardless of which model you choose to follow, they all require work. Your return will be proportional to your input. Your reap what you sow.
They also require patience. Often you are putting all of the profits of your business back into them for the first year to 18 months (after you start making sales). The primary reason is grow critical mass so it can become self sustaining.
I may write more about this topic in the future as there is so much to write about. This is just a brief overview and some resources to get you started on your journey if you are interested.
Keep getting wiser, stronger, and better.