How To Become Mega-Wealthy

I had breakfast this morning with a young man I’ve been mentoring for a few years. He’s doing extremely well in his job but recently figured out that no matter how successful he is in his duties he will barely be able to move up in the organization and never achieve a significant income. He is not totally focused on money, but he would like to have the chance to grow his salary so that he can take care of his growing family. He would also like to be wealthy enough that he can be philanthropic on a multimillion-dollar level. He asked me what I thought it would take for him to achieve these aims. Here is what I told him:

• You will never get mega-wealthy working for someone else, you have to own the company or at least part of it.
• You will never get mega-wealthy selling your time, you have to have a product.
• The best products are digital, so you have development costs, but after that, there is no manufacturing cost.
• There needs to be a large enough audience to bring in significant revenue. Depending on the price of your product that target audience could be anywhere from a few thousand people, to a billion or more.
• You have to create a product that is unique and compelling – highly valuable to your target customer – difficult, if not impossible, to copy – and then be able to deliver it flawlessly to the marketplace.
• You have to be able to sell. Sell to customers, sell to investors, sell to your staff. And it is even better if you LOVE to sell.
• To make millions in sales, you have to have real passion and belief in your product – be highly competent in your business and sales skills – sell something that is highly valuable – to an audience that can scale.
• It also helps if you sell something that people have to purchase multiple times, or you sell to an audience that is constantly refreshing with new people coming in that will need/want your product.
• No matter what, be honest and guard your reputation carefully. From a business standpoint, at the end of the day that is all you really have.

He seemed to find this helpful, and I hope you do too.