You don’t have to be born into money to become wealthy. You don’t need to get extremely lucky or get a one-in-a-million chance to reach financial success.
What you do need is the understanding that growing wealth is a skill. Like any skill, this is something you can learn. Once you learn it, you can practice it over time to get to some truly astounding financial results.
But you can’t get lucky if you’re not playing the game to begin with. Once you know the rules and start participating, you can hone your skills and start growing your net worth…
Be born Rich (or adopted by a rich family)
We don’t choose our parents, but a small percentage of the population gets better cards at birth.
Before you judge them, think that this is the same thing you want for your kids, you work hard so they don’t have to struggle the same way you did.
Actually, some of the most successful people in the world were built by people who were born at least in middle-class families: think Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk – rich or middle class- they had access to basic opportunities to build up.
They got to go to university in a developed city, which gave them access to tools and networks.
You might not have been born into a rich family, but that can change with you.
Win the lotto
They say: The lottery is a tax for people who can’t do math.
But every once in a while, the planets align, and you end up with a big winner.
People will waste their fortunes away, hoping that one day they might be the ones who win big.
By the way, 70% of lottery winners end up broke and even sadder than they were before winning the lottery. That’s because they had a taste of money, blew through it and now can’t deal with being broke again.
Win your way to riches through competitions
You win Who wants to be a millionaire, or some other random raffle and find yourself the big winner of some prize.
Some might be more skill-focused, while others might be more lottery than strategic.
By the way: Whenever you win a car or something on a TV show, the prize doesn’t include tax.
So you have to pay the tax out of pocket if you want to receive the actual prize.
Most TV game shows never actually give the player the prize; instead, they settle for a smaller cash amount.
Marry Rich, Divorce someone Rich, or have someone rich’s kid
Do you feel the other people watching this video get a little uneasy when we say that?
But it’s the truth.
Out of the Top 10 richest women in the world, nine of them got the money from their husbands through divorce or death, and the other one had a sex tape leaked.
Trapping a rich partner by having their child is unfortunately a real way some people accumulate wealth and fame.
Ask Nick Canon about it.
Inherit the money
Your rich uncle hit it big and then passed away with no next of kin.
I’m not talking about the scam emails you get pretending to be from a bank manager, but the natural succession of financial wealth.
You never know which side of the family doesn’t have a will in place, and you might find yourself with a windfall.
Have people donate you the money
This is how some pastors get to own private jets.
Human beings are caring by nature, which can spiral out of control once there’s an economic incentive added to the mix.
Speaking of churches, here’s a terrible map of all the churches in Poland I found while researching this article:
Map of churches in Poland
Illegal activities: eg: Rob somebody rich
I’ll bundle all of them here.
You’ve heard about them, and you’ve seen people in the news because of them.
Illegal activities are highly profitable, which is why people are willing to risk everything to do them.
For everyone listening who thinks they will get rich and successful doing illegal things:
Going to jail disqualifies you from the game of success!
If you can’t do it in the light, you shouldn’t do it at all.
Suing someone rich and winning
Someone rich is usually a company.
Back in 1992, a woman spilled hot McDonald’s coffee on herself to the point where she got 3rd-degree burns totaling $10,000 in medical bills.
She asked McDonald’s to reimburse her for her costs, and they declined, so she sued.
Long story short, she won $2.7 million, and McDonald’s was forced to change its practices.
A lot of people sue big companies and win, but most cases end with a large financial settlement outside of court.
Remember the Red Bull commercial where they said: Red Bull gives you wings? Ever wondered why those commercials stopped airing?
A guy sued Red Bull and won 13 million dollars because the energy drink didn’t give him wings.
Sell your body physically
They don’t call it the oldest profession in the book for nothing.
Highly lucrative, with a running clock on it based on your beauty and willingness to fuck strangers.
The highest-paid workers flock to big events where rich people hang out throughout the year.
The Cannes Film Festival is a great example of where workers from all around the world rush to provide their services.
The highest-paid ones earn upwards of $40,000 a night.
Sell Your Body/Looks/Appeal Online
Attractive people have a massive unfair advantage in life if they know how to use it before it goes away.
Some people have managed to build fortunes based on the way they look.
With the internet being a content machine, subscription platforms like Patreon, OnlyFans, Fansly, etc. have become private membership clubs.
These creators leverage other platforms to drive people to their X-rated content.
For some, it can be a fast way to get rich. Amouranth earns $100,000 per month streaming on Twitch but $1.5 million a month on her Onlyfans.
Vlog Squad Member Corinna Kopf also earns around a million dollars a month:
Corinna Kopf’s OF earnings
Do you remember the Dr. Phil catch me outside girl? $50 Million in earnings.
Bhad Bhabie’s OF earnings
The highest-paid male adult creator is probably the rapper TYGA, who reportedly earns around 2-3 million a month.
Now that I’m done with the trashy, dumbass ones, let’s jump into those that won’t get you banished by society.
Someone rich wants something you have badly (Luck)
It might be the case that, by some mere chance, you find yourself in possession of something someone with a lot of money needs or wants.
They’re used to overpaying, so they’ll throw money at you.
It’s the case of this family in Australia, where they refused to sell their home and move.
They purchased the land and property 11 years ago for around 1 million dollars and refused to sell it every year the property developer came knocking.
The last offer was for $33 million.
This also happens with cars.
Some collectors want that one piece that’s missing to complete their collection, and you just so happen to have purchased it retail years ago.
This is what all the auction sites are for and why a first-generation iPhone sold for $190,373.
Hold a high-paying job for an extremely long period of time
Climbing the corporate ladder can be extremely effective. It’s one of the more conventional ways of getting rich.
If the industry you’re in allows for a 6 figure salary, all you need to do is stick to it for over 10 years to earn your first million.
A lot of software development jobs, higher-end legal work, and medicine pay over $100,000 per year.
Jobs that pay over $100k
You might be thinking these are fairly complicated jobs, but due to inflation and market conditions, salaries are growing across the board.
UPS was in the news recently when it came out that their top UPS delivery drivers can earn up to $172,000 per year.
Be an early member of a startup that takes off
You get rich when you own something that goes up in value over time!
If you’re skilled enough to build something, you can do it yourself or join a team that builds a company.
Depending on your role and the different values you add, you will deserve a different percentage of the company.
Many people don’t realize the value of shares because they’re pretty much useless in the early days until they’re not.
If the company blows up, those shares will be worth a fortune.
Some of you may know Graffiti Artist David Cho, but few know how he got rich.
One day, he was asked to do a mural for a company in the valley. The gig was worth around $20,000, and since the company wanted to minimize monthly expenses, they offered to pay David in stock, which he accepted.
That company was Facebook.
When Facebook went public, David Cho’s stock in the company was worth $200 million.
Be a professional athlete
If you have a competitive advantage physically, have the discipline required to go the long way, and are lucky enough not to endure a career-ending injury, you can acquire both fortune and fame before the age of 30.
If you can manage it, it’s one of the more interesting ways to get rich.
You earn money on your salary, bonuses on performance, product endorsements, and other commercial work where you sell your likeness, or people will grant you partnership deals just because of the credibility you bring.
Before going to the Middle East, Cristiano Ronaldo only earned around $50 million from soccer but over $100 million from commercials and endorsements.
The GOAT, Michael Jordan, didn’t earn his fortune through his salary playing basketball – the inflection point happened when his mother negotiated the Nike shoe deal on his behalf and demanded he be paid a percentage of the sale of the shoes bearing his name.
This quote still gives us chills: “A shoe is just a shoe until my son steps into it”
70% of athletes end up broke or going through financial hardships because they spend so much time focusing on the sport that they fail to educate themselves financially.
The richest professional athletes are able to transition from athlete to business owner.
Be a one-hit wonder
You just need one big success, and your life could change.
Whatever it is you do, one person can change everything for you.
Do you remember the Gangam-style hit? PSY. We estimate that PSY made around 25 million dollars from that one hit alone. Ballpark of $10 Million on YouTube alone.
Vanilla Ice’s Ice Ice Baby is also one of those one-hit moments.
It doesn’t have to be singing. One-hit wonders can happen in all creative fields. Write a good book. One good invention. One idea. That’s the thing about money: you only need to get it right once.
Be a highly in-demand entertainer
The superior form of the one-hit wonder is the long-haul entertainer.
Year after year of hard work, and your portfolio of work goes up. So does your fan base.
Taylor Swift is a great example of this.
Her ERAS tour is the biggest tour in human history.
Previously, the highest-earning tour was that of Elton John, who brought in 800 million dollars in total.
Are you ready to have your feelings hurt? Beyoncé’s tour is happening at the same time as Taylor’s.
Beyoncé is estimated to bring in around $500 million, definitely putting her in the top 10 of all time.
But Taylor Swift is estimated to bring in… are you ready for it? 1.4 BILLION DOLLARS.
Not only does she take the number one spot, but it’s three times as much as Beyoncé and 50% over Elton in second place.
If we just look at the scoreboard… Taylor Swift is – and we can’t believe we say this – the GOAT, undoubtedly.
Talent Management
Let’s say you don’t have the talent to write your own songs, perform, produce, market, and everything else that goes into entertainment success, but you have a brain for business.
A talent manager takes between 10 and 20% of an artist’s earnings.
15% is the standard deal. They find the artists and give them the opportunities to become big.
Scooter Braun is one of the most successful talent managers right now. He’s the one who found Justin Bieber and helped him get to international stardom.
Other artists managed by Scooter are: Demi Lovato, Black Eyed Peas, The Call Me Maybe girl, David Guetta, Usher, Hilary Duff, Quavo, Kelly Rowland, and the list goes on.
If you’ve watched Entourage, think of these people as the Ari Golds of the industry. By the way, the guy the character Ari Gold is based on is called Ari Emanuel.
His most recent play was acquiring the UFC from Dana White for $4 billion.
Patent an invention
If you’re able to figure out a better way to solve a problem that nobody else has solved so far, you can patent the idea in order to protect it.
Companies will come to you and license the idea from you if they want to deploy your solution, OR you can go out and market yourself and make it a successful company.
Is one of my favorite examples. It’s just a blanket, but with sleeves and holes to put your hands through. It sold for $200 million.
Shark Dad’s Scrub Daddy crossed 1 billion dollars in lifetime sales.
On just the idea front, did you know that Nokia—yeah, the old phone company—has more than 20,000 patents, including 5,500 patents that are related to 5G technology?
Apple is paying Nokia a licensing deal to be able to use that technology.
Other examples include the invention of the stapler and Post-it notes, where the inventor invents the idea and gets paid 2-3% of whatever money the product brings in when produced by a different company.
Trademark a name, phrase, logo or Copyright a piece of work
There’s a reason why you can’t use the Nike logo on your products.
The visual logo is owned by the Nike company. Michael Buffer owns the phrase “Let’s get ready to rumble”
So every time you hear that at the beginning of a boxing match or a fight, know that Michael is getting his $50,000 check.
It’s the same with many other creative works.
Samsung was granted over 6,000 patents and trademarks last year alone.
All this IP adds to the company’s value.
Write a bestselling book (or a bunch of medium-selling books)
If you’ve got a talent for writing short stories, the barrier to entry has been completely eliminated. It’s become a popular way of getting rich these days.
The Martian by Andy Weir was fully self-published. The Twilight series was a passion project that eventually got picked up by the industry.
Robert Kiyosaki made his fortune selling books, and he still earns over a million a year from rich dad, poor dad.
The thing is, you don’t have to be ultra-successful to make money through your writing; you just have to have a niche fan base and pump up numbers.
Mark Dawson earns around $450,000 per year from his self-published portfolio on Amazon.
He’s written 43 books so far, and they’re all selling well enough.
If you write a book per year, you’ll end up with 20 books in 20 years. Your entire family will receive checks even after you’re gone from these books.
Trademark a name, phrase, logo or Copyright a piece of work
If you have a loyal following that trusts you to be their guide, you can leverage it to build wealth.
The world’s influencers no longer carry any power since we now have large, medium, small, and even micro-influencers.
When everyone is an influencer, nobody is!
The value lies in just how much sway you have over your community.
The easiest way to measure this is to ask your community to buy a $1 product.
In theory, everyone can afford it, but you’ll be shocked at how few you’re able to convert.
This is why people like Chiara Ferragni or Mr. Beast are in a different tier.
When they launch something, people show up with their wallets open.
Content creator: YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Rumble, Medium etc.
We’re entering a new age of media where platforms will be forced to pay out creators.
You’ve been on Facebook and Instagram for years now, and they’ve never paid you a cent, despite generating tens of thousands of dollars for them.
YouTube pays its creators 60% of what they make.
Twitter – now X under Elon Musk, switched to a similar model where creators get paid to post on Twitter.
When people turned on monetization, they realized just how much money there was to be made.
TheDiscFather Twitter payout
X shows ads in the replies to a thread, and you get paid based on them.
X shows ads in the space between threads and shares ad revenue
Rumble is a platform looking to compete with YouTube, which has a similar pay framework but is more lenient on the type of content it allows on the platform.
TikTok is also paying creators, but disproportionately low because the content is light and the volume of content consumed is extremely high.
2 and 4 cents for every 1,000 views, which adds up to only $20 to $40 for a million views.
To put things into comparison, a million views on YouTube gets you between $5000 and $10,000.
Sell an online course
The goal is to build a business where you can build once and sell a million times!
There are a lot of examples in this article. And an online course is a great example of this.
Platforms like Thinkific, Teachable, and Kajabi already make it super easy to just upload your content and sell it as a course.
By the way, YouTube will soon launch this functionality directly into YouTube, where you can buy an online course to the side of the video.
Build an online game
If you’re a decent programmer and have a great idea for a game, it can scale up fairly easily.
Although the age of Doodle Jump, Angry Birds or Cut the Rope is over, there are still games there that do incredibly well.
- At the top, Candy Crush was bringing in $4.2 million PER DAY.
- Merge Mansion is making around $10 million per month.
- Clash of Clans brings in half a BILLION dollars per year.
A lot goes into making a great game, but the new monetization tools like micro-transactions or simply filling the game with ads for in-game-perks have allowed mobile games to go to a whole new level—and we’re not even talking about Fortnite, Roblox, or Minecraft, which have become their own universes.
Just to put things in perspective:
- Fortnite generates over 6 billion dollars per year in revenue.
- Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) earns $6.8 billion.
Yeah, gaming is big.
Commerce: Sell actual products
Any product that you can literally put together yourself, you can sell for a profit online or physically.
There are millions of stores and millions of types of businesses that rely on you having a product and selling it for profit, taking the money from the sale to create more products, and repeating the cycle.
If we were to go through every single thing you can sell online, this list would never end, so think of this as your default commerce business, be it online or offline.
The more value you can add to a product and the more you can differentiate it, the better.
People sell everything from normal products to waifu pillows and memorabilia to bath water in jars.
The marketplace is so wide and growing so fast that there’s a market for anything.
Safe to say, the market is growing
Sell advertising for your blog
The concept of a blog has evolved over time.
It used to be an online place for your own articles.
Then it became a vlog, and now everywhere you put together content, it’s basically “your blog.”
If you own the platform and have regular visitors, businesses will want to place their ads next to your content.
The most successful blogs have evolved to compete with mainstream media platforms.
Arianna Huffington started the Huffington Post. Mashable was a blog. Perez Hamilton started off as a tabloid. All you need is traffic.
Google exploded as a business when it launched Google Adsense, a way for people to monetize their blogs, and it’s at the core of how YouTube works today.
Sell consulting services
I know people who are really good at what they do. I am one of them… Check me out at Kentuckianawebsites.com
They’re experts in their field, so they can sell their expertise.
These are not full-time employees, but they jump in now and then or for fixed periods of time where their expertise is valuable.
Actually, some of the biggest businesses in the world are consulting businesses.
PwC, McKinzei, and Accenture all make their money as consultants, and these are multi-billion dollar businesses.
Actually, most employees can immediately increase their income if, instead of being employees, they incorporate and contract with their former workplace as a customer for their consulting services.
Start an agency business
If I were to start today from absolute zero, I would probably go for an agency business again. Owning BOOKER Technologies has been amazing!
I have enough expertise to be able to add a lot of value to any digital business. It’s a sure way of getting rich once you have the know-how.
You basically create an inventory of products and services that you sell to consumers and other businesses as part of an ongoing relationship. Unlimited monthly income is possible for content creation.
We charge between $499 and $50,000 for a website that we know will make you money and then leverage our marketing division to drive your customers to the website we built.
The average client sees an 8X return when working with us, which justifies our pricing.
Start a podcast
Starting a podcast became mainstream once people saw Joe Rogan take over the world with JRE.
The Joe Rogan Experience podcast brings in around $40,000,000 per year in advertising alone, I’ll talk about his licensing deal in a second.
This is why everyone you know has started a podcast.
There are around 2 million podcasts online. This might feel overwhelming, but if you zoom out, you’ll see that:
90% of podcasts don’t get past episode 3. That’s 1.8 million people who quit.
Of the 200,000 left, 90% of podcasters will quit after 20 episodes. That’s another 180,000 gone.
To be in the top 1% of podcasts in the world, you only need to publish 21 episodes of your podcast.
Your competition is not the 2 million podcasts. It’s the 20,000 podcasters who didn’t quit.
So even today, the market for podcasts isn’t that competitive, but since everyone has a limited number of hours in a day that they can spend listening to podcasts, you end up with a situation where the very few best absorb that time for themselves.
The more niche you go, the higher the likelihood you’ll develop an audience that Joe Rogan, Lex Friendman, Andrew Schulz, and Call Her Daddy aren’t talking to.
Sell one-on-one coaching
This is the fitness trainer model applied to anything and everything.
If someone wants dedicated coaching in order to achieve their goal, you can be that person for them. It’s a really good way of getting rich.
Therapists, psychiatrists, personal stylists, celebrity trainers, voice coaches, etc.
There are a couple of people who are so valuable to you that you are willing to pay them a premium.
In the business world, these are called Executive coaches—people who have extensive expertise and can help you evolve.
I call myself an Entrepreneur Coach however.
Every big CEO has worked with several executive coaches in their career, each of them helping in the evolution of the business at the stage they are at.
For example, Matt Mochary coached Naval Ravikant, the CEO of OpenAI, the CEO of Coinbase, the CEO of Bolt, and a bunch of other heavy hitters.
It used to be that Matt charged $12,500 for one Zoom call per month until he eventually grew so popular that even at that rate, he no longer takes clients.
Executive coaches cost between 20,000 and 250,000 dollars per year, depending on what kind of impact they have and the stakes at which the game is played.
Most new entrepreneurs cannot afford them, although they would need them most.
Build a subscription app or membership site
As long as people pay, they get access to the service. Netflix is an absolute beast.
Which is why we launched the .
Remember the really expensive executive coaches?
No matter what you do, try to get your customers to stick around on a recurring basis.
License your content
Once you have something cool, other companies will want to pay you to show your work on their platform.
Here’s an example: A couple of years ago, Emirates Airlines approached us to license our content for their inflight entertainment system.
Basically, they’d be paying us to showcase Alux content onboard their airplanes.
Joe Rogan’s famous $100 million deal with Spotify wasn’t a buyout. It was a content licensing deal.
Meaning, Spotify gets exclusive access to Joe’s content for 5 years – clips are not included; those still go up on YouTube – and in exchange, Spotify pays Joe 100 million dollars.
Once the five years expire, Joe can put all his content back on YouTube or renegotiate an extension.
Before you think it’s stupid to pay someone this much, the announcement added over a billion dollars in value to Spotify’s market cap because more people wanted to own shares in the company.
License your likeness or other attributes
You see it all the time:
Beyoncé and Pepsi
Taylor Swift and Diet Coke
Messi and Lays
Brands want to align themselves with celebrities in order to maintain relevance and boost sales.
Sometimes it works because of your performance in a field.
Think Federer with a Wilson tennis racket.
It makes sense to be sponsored by Wilson when you win with their product:
Roger Federer and Wilson
Sometimes partnerships are a great fit due to someone’s reputation.
Think of someone with a pristine reputation partnering with a private clinic. The examples can go on.
You have to be careful of who you associate with, both as an individual and as a brand.
Tom Brady and his then supermodel wife Gisselle Bundschen publicly endorsed the crypto exchange FTX, and it turned out to be a massive fraud and mismanagement of investor funds.
Tom Brady and SBF
Other times, it plays badly for the brand.
David Dobrick used to be one of the biggest names on this platform, bringing in 5 million dollars a year in sponsorship deals, until his scandal hit and his name became toxic, so brands dropped him.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is when the commercial relationship between the creator and the brand is intertwined.
Let me give you an example:
Temu makes it easy to sell online. We have a community of entrepreneurs in our clientele.
If you join Temu through our link, we get paid a commission for every sale we generate for them.
The same is true with Audible.
Since we have an affiliate partnership with them, if this is the first time you sign up with Audible, you will get a free audiobook, we get a commission, and Audible will get a new customer.
It’s a win-win-win.
But we try to choose very carefully when we pick long-term affiliate partners. Amazon, Commission Junction, and ClickBank are three of the most popular affiliate platforms. If you’re sales game is on point, it can be a potent way of getting rich.
Start a newsletter business
Newsletters are the podcasts of the writing world.
Substack, ConvertKit, Beehiiv, MailChimp, and a bunch of others are great enough to keep a newsletter going.
As long as the content of the emails is valuable, people will stick around.
I’m a fan of the myfirstmillion podcast, and I was happy when I heard Shaan Puri sold his newsletter TheMilkRoad for several million just 10 months after launch.
At the time of sale, they had 250,000 paid subscribers and were earning around 1 million dollars per year.
Daytrade/Invest in stocks
Warren Buffett famously said that if he were young again and had a portfolio under 10 million dollars, he would average between 50 and 100% return year over year, simply investing in stocks.
Investing in stocks allows you to share in the profits the company makes. It’s one of the best ways to get rich.
Investing regularly will help you build wealth.
Pick the companies you use the most and buy shares in them.
eToro, TD Ameritrade, Interactive Brokers, Capital.com, Plus500, or whatever is available in your region have guides that can easily get you started.
Even retail platforms like Revolut, Acorns, and Gemini allow users to buy and sell stocks fairly easily.
It’s no longer something specialized investors and math geniuses can do.
Know that markets are volatile.
Maybe Nike or Starbucks had a good year, and next year won’t be as good. Investing is risky.
Invest in ETFs
If picking stocks yourself is risky, the way you minimize that risk is by investing in an entire category as a whole.
Investing in green energy, transport, the banking sector, or the best-performing 500 companies in the US at the same time.
These baskets of companies are called ETFs.
The most popular is the S&P 500, which bundles basically the entire American economy into one stock.
Historically, the S&P 500 has returned 10% per year since the beginning.
S&P500 Index
You’re not going to get rich overnight, as you need compounding to work in your favor, but paying attention to this could literally change your life.
If you have a newborn child, when they are born, invest $7000 in the S&P 500 and allow it to compound.
That $7,000 is going to be worth over 1 million dollars by the time your child is 65, which should be enough for them to retire comfortably.
Do not rush to get rich; allow compounding to work in your favor.
Invest in Art
If you’re looking for something to grow a little bit faster than the S&P 500, you can do what the rich do and invest in blue-chip art.
The rich buy art because it outperforms most traditional investments.
The line in green is art, and the red one is the S&P 500 over the last 23 years.
Historical Appreciation of Art
Blue chip art is crushing it for investors.
Historically, this was an investment vehicle with a big barrier to entry: poor and middle-class people don’t have 5-10 million to buy a Picasso, wait a couple of years, and resell it for profit.
But that’s no longer the case.
Masterworks is an art-focused investment platform that allows anyone to invest in blue-chip art starting at $1000.
They buy high-end paintings – vetted by experts – and divide them into shares.
You buy some of those shares, and when the painting is sold, the profits are distributed among shareholders.
They have almost $1 billion in assets under management.
Almost 1 million people invest with Masterworks, and all their recent sales have returned a profit for investors.
Masterworks Annualized Track Record
Normally, there’s a waiting list to join such a service.
Invest in Real Estate directly or in REITs
The highest number of millionaires in the world is because of real estate.
It’s also the least complex way to get rich.
You buy property, the property rents out, and the property also appreciates in value over time.
You only need a $200,000 downpayment to buy yourself a million-dollar property.
Now you borrow the rest, rent the property out, and the tenant pays your mortgage. In a few years, you qualify as rich.
If you know what you’re doing, you buy the property with a small down payment, fix it up, rent it out, get it re-appraised for a higher value since you made all the improvements, and refinance it, pocketing the difference.
If this all sounds complicated to you and you do not want to bother with finding the right property or dealing with banks and tenants, know that there are these funds called REITs: (Real Estate Investment Trust, where people pool money together and it all gets invested on your behalf.
You just get your checks in the mail. Also, we feel like this expression no longer holds. Who gets checks in the mail nowadays? It’s a notification on your phone or, at most, an email.
RIP to checks in the mail.
Develop real estate
When it comes to real estate the way you generate the most value in the shortest period of time is through development.
You buy the land, build something on it, and sell it for profit. Sounds like a pretty straightforward way of getting rich, right?
The risk lies in the management of funds, how long it takes to complete the project, and finding the right buyer.
If all goes to plan, you will double your money with every development. Doesn’t sound like a bad way of getting rich, right?
30-50% annual return is average, and it takes 2-3 years to go from when you go into when you get out.
Here’s a graph of the average cost distribution of a real-estate development project:
Cost breakdown of an apartment
Develop real estate
The current most profitable real estate investment in terms of rent is short-term holiday rentals.
Listing great properties on Airbnb and booking and renting them out to tourists returns 4-10X what you would get for the same property through long-term renting.
There are many people who sublet the property to other people just to monetize it themselves.
20 decent Airbnb apartments will get you at least $1 million a year almost anywhere.
Really really nice properties in high-demand areas can bring that on their own.
Think multi-million dollar luxury villas that rent out at $3-4000 midweek and 5-10K per weekend.
At that point, you no longer think of the place as a rental, but more as an experience.
The highest level of what technically a short-term rental is are theme parks.
Technically, when you go to Disney World you rent out the experience for the day, and then you go back home.
Flip things for profit (online and offline)
This is another one of those staples of money making and your life changes once you understand that every business is a BUY LOW – SELL HIGH business.
The only difference is in what you’re trading.
The most basic one is straight-up commerce.
Buy something where they have a lot of, so you get it cheaply, take it to another place where it isn’t as readily available, and sell it for profit.
A water bottle is more valuable in the desert – demanding a higher price. Keep this in the back of your head every time you think of ways of getting rich.
The modern equivalent of flipping products for profit is buying things directly from the factory, usually in China or India, getting the product, repackaging it to look nicer, and selling it on local marketplaces in Europe or North America.
The more evolved version of that is called Dropshipping.
You just generate the orders and the factory fulfills them on your behalf – taking care of packaging, shipping, and everything else.
Anywhere in the world, you can find a product that you can afford to sell for a profit if you’re willing to put the time in.
You can flip sneakers, buy a car, wash them, take better photos, and sell them for profit.
Washing it and taking better photos is where you are actually adding value.
Repeat until you can graduate to more expensive things like buying a property, cleaning it up, and reselling it for profit.
Even the agency businesses we mentioned earlier are technically buy low, sell high businesses.
You buy services at a lower price than you can charge a client and pocket the difference.
Start a product brand
Brands are valuable because they add value to the things you associate with them.
A plain white T-shirt is worth $1. The moment you put the Mickey Mouse logo on it it’s worth $10.
Supreme is an example of sole brand play.
A couple of years ago, the company was sold at a $2 billion valuation to the folks who own Vans and North Face.
The biggest businesses in the world are product companies with an established brand. Think Apple, Coca-Cola, BMW, Mercedes, and Starbucks.
The value of the brand is derived from the way it builds and presents its products.
Both Toyota and Rolls Royce make cars that have four wheels and drive you from A to B, but they don’t do it in the same way.
Vending Machine coffee is different from the one at Starbucks, although they’re technically both just water and ground coffee beans.
With the exception of Medicine, even if the product is identical, people still pick the branded version over the generic.
The sale of cereal in supermarkets is proof of that.
Building a human-based service business
Service businesses are one service / one payment situation.
Where “time and skills” get traded for money.
Usually, both technology, know-how, and human capital are leveraged to grow the business.
Think cutting hair, doing aesthetic work, having someone paint your house, or hiring a contractor.
On the lower end, you do nails; on the higher end, you reconstruct someone’s face after an accident.
The more technology you have, the more knowledge you have, and the more people you can leverage, the higher your service-based business can be.
The entire healthcare industry fits here. So do legal work, accounting, and even restaurants.
We’ll talk about software businesses in a few moments.
Software as a Service
Google is a software-as-a-service business.
Amazon makes most of its money from its server business – AWS.
Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle, and Salesforce are all software-based companies where people pay an ongoing subscription to keep using them.
Remember when we said the subscription game is S tier?!
Software as a service has become a hot topic among tech people – where you can’t go to a tech event without almost everyone talking about launching a SaaS business.
There are three big tiers of software businesses: Enterprise, meaning they sell software to other large companies, and retail SaaS, where they sell software to individuals or small businesses.
Raise money for an idea
Reputation and Trust can be worth a lot of money.
Let’s say you have an entrepreneur who successfully sold two businesses in the beverage industry, and now he’s starting a third one.
Their track record will get investors to give them millions of dollars even if they’re in the idea stage for a percentage of the company.
I’ve seen this play out over and over again in Silicon Valley.
Some companies are even losing money year over year and still getting more money from investors because of their long-term potential.
Uber is a great example of that.
Uber lost $9 billion last year and is still going. They have been losing money every year since their inception.
Their operating costs were just too high.
But investors and the company are betting on the performance of the company, which has been slowly rising, as you’ve probably noticed, and in Q2 2023, they had their first profitable quarter, bringing in $323 million dollars.
Uber burned through 31.5 Billion dollars to finally get to profitability, so now they can work on recouping those losses.
It will be a while until they get to 0 and be a profitable investment for those backers, but it seems to be on the right track.
Get lucky with crypto
You’ve heard the stories.
A genius kid invents a new kind of money; people bet on it online; some make millions, others lose millions; and very little value is added.
Crypto as a whole is more volatile than the stock market, which means traders can make even more aggressive plays in order to build up their portfolio value.
Technology has a lot of potential to help a lot of people, but it feels like in the rush to get rich, it’s all been sabotaged by greed.
Everyone should do what they want with their hard-earned money, as long as they don’t hurt anyone else.
For the past 4 years, we’ve been on the board of a crypto fund, backing early-stage products. 2023 is the year we’ll walk away from it.
Personally, I still believe in blockchain technology, but it’s too time-consuming for me to be actively managing an investment portfolio.
Bitcoin acts like the S&P 500 of the crypto industry.
Ride the next technological trend: AI
Since I’ve been in business, it feels like every five months now there’s a new tech trend.
Networks, then blogs, then social media, then crypto, and now AI…
The people who jump on early make a lot of money and get to position themselves at the forefront of the new wave.
There are thousands of AI companies that are basically ChatGPT wrappers, meaning they tap into ChatGPT and channel it for a specific niche.
ChatGPT for lawyers. ChatGPT is trained on financial models for investors. etc.
You can basically take a language model, feed it a large data sample, and have it spew answers based on that data.
I’ve been around for long enough to know that trying to predict what the next one will be is a futile endeavor.
Remember when everyone thought the metaverse was going to be a thing?
Zuck remembers 😀
Although the Apple Vision Pro might hint at the future of work, right now, it feels like longevity is a big one—health hacking, sensors, infusing AI into everything electrical, think Internet of Things 2.0.
Quantum computers might actually be a thing soon if the LK99 thing turns out to be legit but it doesn’t look like it.
They really had my hopes up.
By the way, none of our content is written with ChatGPT.
At BOOKER Technologies we pride ourselves on only speaking from experience.
We’ve literally lived through a bunch of these businesses, and it’s the reason why we can so clearly tell you what each one is about and what it feels like to go through them.
Peer-to-peer lending
Peer-to-peer lending is basically loan sharking but legal.
You give someone money, and they lock themselves into a contract to pay it back with interest.
There are hundreds of peer-to-peer lending platforms online.
For some reason, all of them felt shady to me, despite some of them being 100% legit and having been around for a while.
LendingClub, Kiva, Peerform, Upstart, and Prosper are just some of the platforms you can use.
Some of these call themselves Micro-financing businesses, but the math is simple.
You lend out money and get it back with 5-50% interest, depending on the duration of the loan and the amount of risk.
Believe it or not, peer-to-peer lending is actually quite common among the rich, who finance each other quite often.
The difference is that they do it with much larger amounts.
Commission based skills
I love all commission-based work because it’s dependent on the outcome. In my former career as a mortgage banker, I was 100% commission and loved it!
Here’s an example: Let’s say you’re the most skilled diver in the world.
Someone found a treasure at the bottom of the ocean and needs your skills to get it out.
You’re the right person for the job.
If the dive is successful, they’re willing to split the fortune with you.
You’ll find these in every industry. The higher the treasure, the higher the commission you earn for your efforts.
Russell Brunson is the founder of ClickFunnels, an online business that brings in over 150 million dollars per year.
Russell is the OG funnel builder, and for a long time, you could commission him to build you a funnel for 1 million dollars.
And businesses that needed it would do it because the reward was higher than the cost.
Industrial Agriculture or Livestock
There’s a lot of money in cattle and agriculture.
A sheep gives you wool and milk, which you can sell for profit and also reproduce.
Cattle is one of the few asset categories that not only can be exploited for profit but also increases in numbers.
You start with a few and in a few years, you can have a lot.
The same is available for most livestock. That’s why it’s such a great way of getting rich.
By the way, the fastest way for the poorest people in the world to get out of poverty is to raise chickens.
With agriculture it’s similar.
Seeds have become more efficient, with higher crop density and shorter bloom periods.
Rotation crops are also safe for the environment — and with the way commodity prices are going, you can find your yield highly profitable.
The average small farm can support a family, which is why for the longest time most people were farmers
Today we live in a more industrialized and technology-first world and you can see that with farming as well.
Bill Gates is the biggest private owner of farmland in the United States.
You will never go poor if you own something people will consistently need.
Specialized agriculture or mineral exploitation
There are some crops that grow only under very specific conditions that are limited to a certain geography.
So other countries are forced to import it.
West Africa, more specifically the Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Ghana are responsible for 70% of all the cocoa in the world.
For a long time, the Middle East was the only region in the world where natural pearls could be farmed until Japan figured out how to mass-produce them.
The world is building itself up.
Raw materials and minerals are needed more than ever. In many countries, you can buy the mineral and exploitation rights for natural resources.
Getting the value out of the earth is highly profitable.
Customization, Repair, Restoration, Garbage & Recycling
Value can be added through know-how. And there are big opportunities for those who can do it well.
Home repair, technological repair, furniture restoration, re-loving anything.
Waste management is one of the biggest industries in the world that is only growing with our population numbers.
Waste management is a $1.6 Trillion-a-year industry and is expected to double in the next 20 years.
To put things into perspective, recycling right now is barely an 80 billion-dollar industry. Also, when we say waste management, we actually mean waste management, not the wink-wink Sopranos version of waste management.
Import/Export business
Since some things can only be found outside of the country, there’s a market for those able to bring those desired products within.
In every country, you’ll find a handful of people who made billions in the import-export business.
- Koch Industries in the US brings in over 100 billion dollars per year.
- Vitol is a Swiss-based company that operates in over 40 countries.
- India’s Gautam Adani made his fortune in the import-export business and is now worth 55 billion dollars.
Just google your country + import export and you’ll find just how potent the industry is.
Franchises
If you’ve got a repeatable system you have two options.
You either:
- You open up locations around the world yourself and you own them all. A great example of this is Andrew Cherng, the founder of Panda Express. 2,300 stores, 47,000 associates, and $3 billion in sales. They own everything.
- You franchise the model, Mcdonald’s, Dunkin Donuts, etc. and you collect a portion of the sales while other people manage them according to your system.
Put on your own events
Festivals have gotten bigger and bigger in the last couple of years.
Small clubs booking an artist over the weekend for a party are the entry level and then you go up based on the number of people who get to attend and buy tickets.
Tomorrowland, Coachella, South by Southwest, Untold, Burningman, and the list just seems to be getting bigger and bigger.
On average Coachella grosses over $115 million in ticket sales across both weekends and makes tens of millions more in food, beverage, and hospitality.
Private Equity: Invest in other people’s businesses
If you have a little bit of money, buying businesses and growing them can be incredibly lucrative.
If real estate gets you 6 to 10% per year, buying a boring business can get you 30-40-50% returns per year.
Codie Sanches has made a name for herself online just by doing this.
You can buy them fully and become both the owner and operator, or you can buy a portion of the business and just help the founder scale up.
Business extraordinaire Alex Hormozi has a $200 million per year portfolio of businesses.
And like them, there are a bunch of other people you’ve never heard of.
You buy a business, fix its operations, upgrade the way it does business, and then you keep the profit or sell it for 20 times what you paid to another private equity fund that plans on doing the same.
In the digital world, you have platforms like Flippa or Acquire.com where you can browse real businesses that others are selling.
Move things and people from one place to another
The cargo shipping industry alone is expected to top 4 trillion dollars in the next 7 years.
Cargo Shipping Industry
Moving people around from taxis to planes, to ships is similar in numbers.
There’s a lot of money to be made here, that’s why it’s such a great way of getting rich.
Starting a logistics company doesn’t have to be complicated. You start with a truck, then add a couple more.
It’s not easy work, but it ain’t mining or roofing in July.
The name might not be that well known in the States, but before we had the technology, everyone knew who Aristotle Onassis was.
He was the richest man of the 20th century, all built on a shipping empire.
In the 1920s, at the age of 25, he had already become a millionaire.
The man is fully self-made and has built his entire fortune one strategic deal at a time.
He built a cigarette company, introduced smoking to women, and then made it his mission to be the only person to ship goods around the world.
At the peak of the Great Depression, he bought his first ship for half of what it was worth.
The business started booming when he negotiated directly with the kings of Arabia to be the only one allowed to transport oil out of the region.
The US government had to threaten military war to stop Onassis from becoming the largest figure in human history.
From Athens, he settled in Buenos Aires, taking over the region.
They eventually moved to New York.
When the Suez Canal was blocked and the demand for goods and oil skyrocketed, Onassis was the only person who had a fleet large enough to keep the world going.
Reports say that at that time, he was making 2 million dollars per tanker, per trip.
This is at a time when the word billionaire wasn’t even invented.
Be a matchmaker
There’s money to be made in the ability to find matching puzzle pieces that need each other but do not know each other.
Some of the richest people in the world are just incredibly well-connected.
Think of these matchmakers as the real estate agents of the business world but with less brokering and more finesse.
You want to have a champagne business; someone else has a chain of nightclubs, and the matchmaker makes the deal happen so that everyone wins and gets a slice of the pie.
They even facilitate company sales. The world of investment banking was built on this model.
If you want to sell a business, I’ll find you a buyer to pay even more than it’s worth, and I’ll get 10% of the deal for smaller companies, and it drops down to 1 or 2% or even a flat rate on multi-billion dollar deals.
Power Brokers (politicians)
Have you noticed how politicians are some of the richest people in the world despite earning less per year than a high-paid UPS driver?
I wonder how they manage to do it. Mmmhmm, we all know how.
Power brokering has its roots in elections—someone who has the ability to sway the outcome of a vote—but more recently it has become widely used in the business world.
It relates to people who “can make the deal happen – at a cost.”
The world is corrupt, government contracts aren’t awarded fully transparently, and guess what? There are people who open doors for others.
Others go to illegal means and even blackmail others into getting what they want based on privileged information.
Jeffrey Epstein was one of these power brokers, getting rich and influential individuals to compromise themselves and then slowly taking over their resources.
Epstein did this with Victoria’s Secret owner Leslie Wexer.
It had gotten to a point where Epstein was fully in charge of Wexer’s finances; he could borrow money freely; he was in charge of spending and acquisitions; he signed his tax returns; and he even gifted himself mansions and properties.
In a couple of years, the “gifts” added up to around 100 million dollars.
All this power brokering netted him over half a billion dollars in total. And then he pissed off some people with a lot more reach than he had.
We feel like the story simply went away, but all evidence shows that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself.
Insurer
People are willing to pay a premium to mitigate risk.
If you pay me this amount, I’ll take the risk for you.
You’re transporting 100,000 dollars worth of fragile China from one country to another.
- I’ll take the risk for you for $3,000.
- If they break, I will pay you $100,000.
- If they don’t, I keep the $3,000 dollars.
This is how insurance companies have become some of the richest in the world.
The global insurance industry is estimated to be worth around 6 trillion dollars, and it spans everything you can think of.
Wherever there’s a risk, an insurance company is willing to throw its hat in the ring.
You all know about life insurance or shipping insurance, but if you’re a farmer, there’s crop insurance, where if the weather ruins your crops, you still get paid.
People insure anything they want. You can insure your wedding, but if an accident happens and ruins the venue, you’re not on the hook.
Kidnap insurance is another one where, if you travel to dangerous places, you want to make sure there are funds available to get you back.
Football players insure their legs; artists insure their special talent, like if their voice gets affected by an accident and they can’t perform.
In the high-end business world, it’s actually common for the company to take out an insurance claim on key business individuals.
Apple insures Tim Cook because his potential death would affect the stock price.
The insurance world has always been fascinating to us because, on a macro scale, it’s very much like a casino where the odds are stacked in the house’s favor.
Insurance is just math, and it’s one of the safest businesses to build, but it comes with a high barrier to entry.
Invest other people’s money
If you’ve ever heard the term private banking or hedge funds, this is it.
Rich people give you their money, and you invest on their behalf and keep a cut.
The average hedge fund operates on a 2 and 20 rule. 2% as a standard fee of the amount invested plus 20% of the profit they make for you.
This formula allows hedge fund managers to grow wealth incredibly fast.
The biggest fund of this kind is BlackRock.
Chances are you haven’t heard of them, but they basically own everything you touch.
People don’t realize just how big this fund is—9.5 trillion dollars of assets under management.
In fact, they’re so big that they are able to fund countries and wars – sometimes even both sides of a war.
They’re one of the largest investors in the biggest companies in the world:
BlackRock portfolio
BlackRock portfolio – Part 2
And they partially own these companies:
BlackRock ownership list
BlackRock ownership list – Part 2
Blackrock has gotten so big that even governments bend to their will.
For example, after the war ends, BlackRock will lend 100 billion dollars with interest to Ukraine in order to rebuild.
And they’re just one of a bunch of these funds that basically hold the wealth of the world.
Most likely, your pension is in their hands as well.
Blackrock has $9.5 trillion under management.
Vanguard has 7.6 trillion.
Rankings by Total Managed AUM
Starting your own hedge fund is quite complicated, and you’d need at least $5 million raised to get started.
I did my best to bundle multiple industries and smaller businesses into buckets. I think I covered almost everything.
Make sure you save this article because it has the potential to change your life. See you next time!
There is definately a lot to find out about this subject. I like all the points you made
Thanks Erica! 🙂