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The
Ten Roads to Riches – The Ways the Wealthy Got There (and How You Can Too!)
By
Ken Fisher
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Preface:
1. In life there are roads leading to riches
and roads not.
2. Frugality is a virtue but isn’t necessary
to becoming super wealthy.
3. Becoming rich usually means doing good
and often living an exciting life.
4. The good news is, making $30 million or
so in your lifetime isn’t that hard.
5. Start young, and you have may be three to
five stabs at it.
6. It’s just a matter of making one of the
roads that leads to big wealth work for you.
Road
#1: Start a Business (The Richest Road)
1.
Founding
your won firm can create astounding wealth.
2.
Be
warned:
a.
This
road is not for the faint-hearted.
b.
Few
new businesses survive more than 4 years.
3.
What
it takes?
a.
It
requires courage, discipline, Teflon skin, strategic vision, a talented
supporting cast, and maybe luck.
b.
You
must be someone super and unstoppable. You must be great at your core business
and the business of business.
c.
You
need acumen, charisma, tactical thinking, sales and marketing skills, and
leadership skills.
d.
You
must know your product cold, become a great delegators, and able to build a
common culture on a life of its own beyond the CEO.
Guidelines:
4.
Pick
the right road.
a.
Which
part of the world you can change? (Founders create change, be it little or
big.)
b.
Select
an area that will remain relevant or one you can fathom steering out of
irrelevancy.
5.
Start
small, dream big.
a.
Find
an area that needs changing (i.e., fill a product hole) or improving (i.e.,
innovate on an older theme). Think scalability.
6.
Innovate
or improve.
a.
Create
something novel or improve something, or both.
b.
Today’s
wealthiest entrepreneurs simply took a fresh take on something existing –
improving performance, productivity, or profit margins – making it better.
c.
You
can choose to work for efficiency and lower costs through building proprietary
distribution, be the low-cost provider; or the reverse, intentionally make
something simply but really, really expensive.
7.
Build
to sell or build to last.
a.
Build
to sell.
i.
Your
business must be transferable.
ii.
This
may make you wealthy but generally doesn’t create mega-wealth.
iii.
Many
start, build, sell and retire only to discover that it was the challenge of
working that kept them happy.
b.
Build
to last.
i.
Practice
Dow-ism.
I.
Investing
heavily during your industry down-cycle because the competitors do not have the
courage to do so. (Benefit:
on the next up-cycle, you will have new, modern, low-cost, efficient capacity
to take the business away from the less courageous.)
II.
Hiring
young people, straight from school, and leading them to become part of the
company culture permanently by building lifelong career paths. (Benefit: Loyalty, commitment,
and strong corporate culture.)
III.
Committed
to a board of former insiders. (Benefit:
Internal problems couldn’t be hidden.)
ii.
Your
most important task = create an enduring culture that maintains your strategic
vision long after you’re gone.
iii.
If
you are trying to build something lasting, you must have a culture so “sure”
that no person, event, economic cycle, or social trend can knock it off course.
8.
Bootstrap
or find financing.
a.
Bootstrapping.
i.
Start
small and pouring profits back into the firm to self-finance growth.
b.
Find
financing.
i.
Venture
capitalists know the start-up game far better than you ever will.
ii.
They
can create a game plan, so by your firm’s second or third financing round, they
own much more of your firm than you ever imagined possible.
iii.
Try
to avoid venture capitalists.
9.
Go
public or stay private.
a.
Go
public.
i.
As a
public stock, you are beholden to strangers and public rules, forever.
ii.
Shareholders’
interests are often harmful to your longer-term vision and your firm’s health.
They are short-term oriented.
b.
Stay
private.
i.
The
vast majority of firms are private. That is better in my view.
10.
Ignore
naysayers.
a.
The
bigger you are, the more you’ll be attacked. So build your toughness.
b.
Most
folks can’t envision it as you do, and will think you’re a bit crazy – until
after your firm is seen as a success.
c.
Success
attracts attackers who are increasingly vicious and often dishonest for their
own self-interested reasons. This starts long before you have mega-wealth.
d.
You
must be tough in response, taking on your attackers and beating them into
submission.
e.
You
will be sued, attacked, and sued again. It comes with the territory.
f.
A
founder-CEO must harden himself to simultaneously keep focused on customers,
employees, and product superiority while finding some good bug spray.
g.
I
recommend hiring plaintiff’s lawyers (i.e., the very best pirates around) for legal
defense work.
11.
Be
a quitter.
a.
Just
do it. Quit. Founders quit before they found.
b.
First,
you approach your prospects first. Don’t see your most important prospects
first. You’re not ready. (Remember to
bring books along during customer appointments. This will make you think more
and more about what you are doing – founding a company.)
c.
Second,
hire a salesperson to approach your prospects. Pay your salesperson a
commission only. (Forget about those people who want a base pay. The right
salesperson is only a little less entrepreneurial than you are and is otherwise
a ride-along, hoping to get wealthy on your coattails.)
d.
Third,
hire an Operations VP (to handle whatever functions you want to quit).
e.
Fourth,
turn to your sales rep and say, “It’s time to hire another sales rep – one you
could train and manage to make the business bigger.”
f.
Fifth,
repeat the quitting process. Each time you hire someone, you quit the function.
12.
But
never quit your clients.
a.
Stay
with your prospects and customers even when you have great sales
representatives.
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