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2022-05-12_From_14k_per_year_to_100M_in_7_years-The_Taylor_Welch_Story


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Some people take the straight path in life, but at Arizona State University, we respect your twists and turns. They make our online students more driven to excel in their professional lives. That's why our personalized suite of services empowers you, with innovative resources and staff that sticks with you. Make your next turn with one of our 300+ programs at ASU, number one in innovation for nine consecutive years.

Visit us at asuonline.asu.edu to learn more. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Josh Rasheeds, I'm your host, and today we're going to focus in on a really excellent nothing-to-wealth story, especially one that fulfills the promise of 10 years or less.

I've been fascinated by this idea of going from nothing to wealthy in a very short period of time for a very long time. But it wasn't just, for me, a random sense of "get rich quick." I remember the first time I read about this was when I read Michael Masterson's book called "Seven Years to Seven Figures." I had read it right after college, I think, when I was in college, something like that.

I subscribed to his Early to Rise newsletter and I really liked his books. I had read his book on the path to wealth, and then I found this book, "Seven Years to Seven Figures." I was so intrigued by it and the premise of that book. I should do a standalone podcast on it, I guess, but hey, let's just do it right now.

The whole premise of the book was that he profiles in that book a number of people. I forget if it's seven or ten, fifteen, who knows, but a number of case studies of people who had gone from broke, basically, to seven figures in seven years or less. What struck me at the time was that it was crystal clear that the single most important driving force that propelled them from zero to seven figures had nothing to do with investment planning, had nothing to do with technical financial planning in any way.

It had everything to do with their income. Most of the case stories featured a person who had started a business. Some of the case studies featured somebody who made very fast advancements in his or her career. I've been clued into this for many, many years. That's one of the reasons why so much of the content of Radical Personal Finance focuses on income, focuses on business, focuses on that, because that's vastly more important than the nuts and bolts of what kind of life insurance should I buy, do I need to do a budget, etc.

Today I want to share with you another story. This one comes from Taylor Welch. I ran into Taylor on Twitter a year and a half, a couple of years ago. One of the most remarkable, very remarkable Twitter account. He's a young man. I'll read you his story in just a moment.

He's a young man who is extraordinarily public about his wealth-building journey. I wanted to follow him for a while to get a sense of who he was. I haven't met Taylor. I haven't run into him. I've taken a couple of his courses. I've followed him closely. I've studied him as a model, but I don't know him personally.

I wanted to have some time for me to get to know whether I thought he was legit or not. I think this is something you should always be careful of. When people talk about their wealth, there are only a few reasons why any wealthy person would ever talk about his wealth.

It may be unavoidable. There are people whose wealth is so significant or whose wealth is so public that there's no way for them to not talk about their wealth. That kind of person might just very casually be—it's very normal that person would be identified publicly as being wealthy. There's no other way around it.

If your last name is Walton, then people assume that you're wealthy. If your last name is Bezos or if your last name is Musk or if your last name is Slim or if you're identified with a prominent family of some kind, and you always have been, if you're a Hilton, then you are going to be understood and thought to be wealthy.

That's fairly normal. There are people whose jobs are simply public. If you are the CEO of a publicly traded company, then anybody can pull up the annual reports for that company and find out how much money you have gotten paid this last year. It's rather silly if it's on public record that you made $22 million last year, that it's rather silly of you to pretend to be a pauper.

However, there are a whole lot of us who earn money, have wealth, etc., who aren't subjected to that same public pressure. If you're in that position, then the question is, why would you tell somebody about your wealth? There are only a few reasons that make sense to me as to why somebody would tell another person about their personal wealth.

One reason that's quite common is simply it establishes credibility. If you want people to take you more seriously, you start to exhibit the symptoms or the expressions of wealth. This is called signaling theory. I think it's important. This is the reason why lawyers can, do, and should, in my opinion, actually should, should drive exotic automobile brands or find some way to look through it because it signals how successful you are.

This is why your financial advisor drives a BMW or Mercedes. He's trying to signal how successful he is and that he's made money. Although there is always some of us who pride ourselves on our iconoclasm or just simply curmudgeons of some sort or another, there are some of us who fit into that.

The reality is that most people admire and want their financial advisor to drive a nice car. That's why your financial advisor drives a nice car. Many times people want to signal their attractiveness in the marketplace. You drive a nice car for its sex appeal. You drive a nice car to signal that you're going places, things like that.

You express it to establish social credibility. A related or perhaps subset of that is you talk about your wealth so that you can get other people to pay attention to your wealth so that you can sell them products on how they also can get wealthy. The world of financial advice is full of people who are not wealthy but who are talking about their wealth and conveying the idea that they're wealthy in order to inspire others to want to consume their advice.

Years ago when I was in college, I went to a Russ Whitney real estate seminar. Sitting in the audience as an impressionable young man, I remember noticing all of the trappings of wealth that the seminar leader, which actually wasn't Whitney, it was one of his seminar leaders, shared with us and basically did to convince us that he was legit, that he was worth listening to and paying attention to.

He wore his banker's suit, nice three-piece suit, braces, the vest, the whole thing. During the seminar at different points, he dropped various allusions to his wealth, allusions to his house. The one I specifically remember was he showed a picture of his coach, his big motor coach, big Prevost coach that was probably half a million dollars, $300,000, $400,000, $500,000, something like that.

He talked about the fact that he had a driver who drove his coach so that he could sleep in his own bed and here it is parked in front of a hotel room, etc. I just thought, "Wow, here's this guy." He's talking about his wealth to try to gain credibility so that you want to listen to him about wealth and about wealth building.

It's aspirational. People talk about their wealth. They show you their wealth to try to make it aspirational. You say, "I'm going to sign up and I'm going to buy this guy's How to Invest in Real Estate course so I also can have a $500,000 motor coach that I can use to travel in because I don't want to sleep in a dirty hotel room." This is another common thing that you see.

Then there are people who genuinely just want to talk about their wealth and genuinely want to share it and help people. I think, although I'm not sure, I think Taylor is in that third category. He does sell some products about wealth building, but I think he's got a heart and he wants to be an inspiration.

He wants to share with other people. There are other reasons as well why someone would do it, but a quick little background on I'm always suspicious when people talk about their wealth because there are many, many good reasons why you should be thoughtful, cautious, circumspect about sharing any details of your life.

Very few good reasons to speak publicly. However, with that background, let's talk about Taylor's actual story. First, I'm going to read you his Twitter thread. This is a Twitter thread that he first published on March 29, 2021. He's since continued on the same path. I want to share it with you because it's really inspiring.

Then we'll go back through and dissect it. I'll identify for you the specific things that you need to do if you want to model his success. Here's Taylor. "My path from zero to 100 million and the trajectory to 1 billion. Gather around. I have a story to tell. I am the most transparent wealth builder in history and do not see you as competition, but as a partner.

We win together. Here's how I did it. In 2014, I made $14,000 at a church. It was my dream for a long time, but I knew it wasn't what I was called to do long term. I transitioned to a real estate firm and I did property management for $28,000 per year.

Learned on the job. Two, I read 10 books that year. The Entrepreneur's Guide to Getting Your Ass Together, John Carlton. Got Getting Things Done, David Allen. The Happiness Advantage, Sean Acor. The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins. Tested Advertising Methods, John Capels. The Dip by Seth Godin. Good to Great, Jim Collins.

Ultimate Sales Machine, Chet Holmes. Awaken the Giant Within, Tony Robbins. The Five Levels of Leadership, John Maxwell. As you can see, I became voracious in trying to figure out how to win and I did that through reading. Three, I learned in "Tested Advertising Methods," which is a book, how to write copy.

It means sales copy. Then I bought a course called Copy Hour and in summer 2014, I started copying out great sales material by hand to learn how they did it. I copied 400 letters, about 2,000 pages, and almost got carpal tunnel. Four, January 2015, I got my first freelance client to write copy and ads for.

He paid $400 and I made him $120,000. It took me two more months to get another client and that one paid me $2,000 per month as a retainer. I quit my job to go full time. Five, September 2015, I started an agency with a business partner. We're still partners today.

We sold a $3,000 product online and sold three people that month. 100% of that revenue we put into advertising. We took nothing out of the business for about six months. Six, summer of 2016, we were consistently over $100,000 a month in sales. Summer of 2017, we were over $500,000 a month in sales.

Summer 2018, we hit $1 million per month and never dipped under a seven-figure monthly run rate for that business again. Seven, the beginning of 2019, two things happened. First, I started a second company training people in sales. The launch did okay but not great. Maybe $20,000 that month but nowhere near where the other business was.

Second thing that happened is we got our tax bill. Eight, the taxes were so bad we decided to find a way to pay less legally. And we went back to where it all started, real estate. In all of 2019, we bought $400,000 in real estate. It didn't help our taxes at all for the next year, not yet at least.

Nine, in January of 2020, we got serious about the sales consulting business. It did $30,000 in January of 2020 and over $1 million in July. Paid ads, my friend, paid ads. Ten, we beefed up the real estate team and added a fund to it for growth. Went from buying two in all of 2019 to buying 15 per month for all of 2020.

Eleven, today we have four main business units pumping out $40 to $50 million a year and a real estate firm redistributing it into healthy real estate assets that produce cash flow. A few extra bolt-on lessons for you to fill in the gaps. Twelve, buy as much insurance as you can.

Whole Life is a capital storage and protection vehicle. Business insurance protects your balance sheet and IP. And personal umbrellas keep you in the clear on virtually everything else. If under $100,000 a year, go with Term. If over, Whole Life. Thirteen, the greatest skill set you can develop. A, sales.

B, marketing. All else is secondary. Every single thing in the world depends on sales and/or marketing to survive and to grow. There are levels to this game. Learn income first, then learn what to do with it. Fourteen, select your friends well. Most people spend more time selecting shoes and music than they do their friends circle.

Who you hang with will define what you learn and how far you climb. If you ever get an opportunity to get in a room with me or someone like me, do it. Fifteen, generously share your learning lessons. Everything I have and am building today has been propped up on the back of my helping other people.

Hundreds of thousands of people have called me mentor, read my books, and gone through our programs. Help people. That's it. Sixteen, model principles first, tactics second. Many people have copied me, but the ones that have succeeded best have built their own vibe and their own stuff. They've modeled my thinking, but have created their own brands.

Innovate and dominate. You won't last as a mimic. Seventeen, keep your mindset razor sharp. What you think now is possible is one-tenth, maybe, of what's truly possible. Develop and protect your mindset daily. I thought I would just buy some real estate and help with taxes. This year, we'll buy $70 million and next year over $150 million.

Grow. Eighteen, lastly, the trajectory. 2,500 single-family units by 2026, 5,000 multifamily units by 2028. $2 billion at 3% to a portfolio equals about a $60 million annual cash flow drawn against 30% equity on $2 billion of assets. And then he links to his YouTube channel, which is great. Everything that Taylor does is, not everything is good.

Everything is getting good. He's very good and he's very smart and he's proven a lot of his stuff. I like him. Let's go back to the beginning and analyze this. He talks about $100 million. My path from zero to $100 million. Now, granted, we don't know from this Twitter thread what his net worth is.

He has shared his net worth in a number of other things. I haven't looked to confirm it specifically for this project or for this podcast. It's not necessary. The point is that he went from $0 of net worth to becoming a multi-multi-millionaire in a very short period of time, in less than seven years.

And he's on the trajectory to be a centimillionaire and on the trajectory towards a billionaire. Once you get the money machine growing, it can grow very, very quickly. Let's go back to the very beginning. First of all, the first decision he made in 2014, he was working at a church.

And he was earning $14,000 per year. I don't know why. I've known a lot of very smart people that work at churches and they earn a small amount of money. I think that this is one of the challenges. They usually do it because they care about the mission of the church.

Which is wonderful. I think that not being a greedy person is really, really great. And worthy of admiration. And it's quite laudable. But what we want to do is figure out how to do well financially and also be effective in our local church. Comment for another day. So the first thing that he did was he left the church job and he moved into a job at a real estate firm.

Doing property management for $28,000 per year. Now, what's unique about that is the shift from going from an industry that is famous. I need to be careful here. I was about to say it's an industry that is famously not focused on wealth building. But the problem there is I caught myself because there are certainly a good number of scoundrels around religious circles.

He went from a job where his job was not focused on wealth building to working in real estate and property management. And this is unique and important because I see this as the first step in his mindset change. When you go to real estate or property management, this industry is generally filled with pretty aggressive people.

It's a classic industry where many people have made their fortune and it's filled with people who are aggressive. The industry by its very nature, the way that compensation is structured based upon commissions, based upon performance, it attracts people who are aggressive and recognize that if I'm going to get something, I've got to get up, leave the cave, go out, get it myself.

I've got to do it myself. And so this can start to change your mindset. And I'm sure it had a big impact on Taylor's mindset. Just going from a non-aggressive industry to an aggressive industry will affect you. Consider making this a career move for yourself. If you are currently working in an industry that is not known for its aggressiveness, an example would be I'm a teacher, right?

I teach at a local school or I'm a nurse or I work at a local pharmacy as a sales clerk. Or I have a job at some kind of, I'm a mechanic, something like that. I'm an accountant. One of the first things that you can do is change your environment by changing your job.

If you go from an industry that pays you for showing up and is often pretty soft on people, right? The church industry will basically pay people because they can be kind and they can show up and they can do the job. Your pay is not usually linked to your performance.

And probably slow to fire, it's a pretty fun, relaxed job environment. If you go from there to more of a hustle culture where there are more aggressive people, that will start to change your mindset. And that can really be all you need is just to start thinking about it and changing your industry into something that's more aggressive.

And it'll change your financial trajectory. It may only have a modest change. In this case, it wasn't modest. He doubled his income, right? From $14,000 to $28,000. That's not modest. That's a doubling of income. But the most important thing is the change of trajectory. Next, Taylor says that he read 10 books that year.

And his books were very, very focused. Entrepreneurship, getting things done, it's productivity, happiness, mindset, first 90 days, tested advertising methods, the dip, etc. And these 10 books are 10 great books, right? They're all good. But the key here is you have to start to change your mindset. And you have to take an interest in something.

Now, for me, it's often hard. I talk to people because, of course, I've had a lifelong interest in money, entrepreneurship. And I'm like, "You don't read books on business?" But the world is full of people who don't read books about money. They don't read books on business and they're totally broke.

And they wonder why. And so, again, you've got to change your mindset. And these books will start the process of programming your brain. You want to program yourself for success towards your goals. Always be reading towards your goals. Because the reading will systematically program your brain, your mindset. The way that you see the world will be programmed based upon the input that you have.

This is also a very effective way of starting to surround yourself with the right people. You remember later in the thread, Taylor talks about surrounding yourself with the right people. But this is often difficult for young people. This is difficult for poor people. It's difficult to know how to surround yourself with the right people.

If you want to go out to dinner with millionaires and you're making $20,000 a year, what do you have to offer to a table of millionaires? Well, certainly your bubbly personality, your effective conversationalist, etc. But you know what I mean, right? It's hard to walk in those same circles.

But through books, you can change the kind of people that you spend time with. Every hour that you spend reading a book by somebody that you admire or you want to be like is an hour that you spend soaking up that person's wisdom, that person's insight. You don't go and pay $150,000 at an auction to go and buy lunch with a billionaire if you're not yet rich.

You do that down the road when you can gain something from it. I remember I enjoyed this. Alex Hormozy on YouTube has done a little series about his sessions that he did with Grant Cardone. He paid Grant Cardone $250,000 or something like that for a mentoring thing and did four one-hour sessions with him.

He gained a lot from it. He talks about the lessons that he learned from Grant Cardone. I view that as a perfect example of the proper way to spend your money, meaning you do it at a scale where you can gain something from it. The average guy making $28,000 per year, even if he was gifted an hour with Grant Cardone, would probably get very little out of that session because they're speaking very, very different languages.

Grant Cardone no longer speaks the $28,000 a year language. He speaks multi-centimillionaire and billionaire language. Alex Hormozy can gain something from those consulting periods that the other guy can't. Where the other guy who's getting started should spend his time and his money is from people who have written their things down.

Spending the time to read 10 books is much more effective of a use of time because you don't need precision in your advice. You need to change the mindset and change the people who are around you and start that trajectory. 10 years later, you might need the precision of a billionaire's advice, but you can't make good use of it when you're first getting started.

That's the comment on reading. Reading is a good way of reprogramming your brain. Next, Taylor says he learned in tested advertising methods how to write copy. Then he went on and he bought a course. He invested into himself and he bought a course called Copy Hour. This is a very, very important step.

It's investing in education, but it's education that's focused on building wealth. This is the great lie that we have been sold in the modern era with regard to a college education. I used to be harder on the idea of a college education because I thought when I was in college, that college was supposed to be a way of making me build wealth, a way of getting rich, a way of building job skills.

I have since abandoned that idea. While I actually do personally embrace the value of a liberal arts education, I don't see it as related to money. I don't see it as related to wealth. Certainly, there are college degrees that are applicable to a specific job set of skills. If you're studying civil engineering, you're going to need a college degree in engineering.

There are many similar things. If you want to be a lawyer, you're going to need to go to college and get a law degree. I personally derive a great deal of satisfaction and value from the concept of a liberal arts education, meaning to create free people, which is the basic point of liberal arts education.

But I don't any longer associate it with the concept of making money. Many people go to college and they didn't come out of college knowing how to make a lot of money. They say, "Well, that was a waste," and they stop investing in themselves. If you want to make money, you need to invest into education that is designed to teach you how to make money.

Learning how to do something like write advertising copy at its core is one of the best ways to do it. Who knows how much that course cost, but I would imagine a few hundred bucks. Yet, he did the work. The first lesson is, buy the education to what you need.

Whatever your dream is, your goal is, buy the education that you need to succeed in that. Always be investing back into yourself and do it in a way that's specifically focused on making money, if you're interested in making money. This is the great difference. I hope myself, I myself, even with my children, I want to separate their education.

Most of our education is focused on the liberal arts to help them to be free people, highly educated free people. But then we also do vocational training. The vocational training is where they learn how to make money. The liberal arts is where they learn how to live a well-lived life and how to deal with that money in a proper ethical way, how to develop ethical perspective, how to understand how the world works, etc., how to be fully formed human beings.

But then the vocational training is where we teach them how to make money. So get to your vocational training. If you didn't get any vocational training in college, go get some and find something that you're interested in. Start taking classes from someone who can teach you how to do something and make money.

The wonderful thing about, well, before I do the next thing, notice that he actually did the work. Years ago when I was in college, I bought a course on copywriting. I bought it from Michael Masterson. I didn't do the work. I started it. I started writing out the letters by hand, doing the copy, right?

I started copying those letters, which is basic technique of doing copy work to imprint the models of sales onto your brain. And then I quit. And I suffered the consequences for it. Taylor didn't quit. He continued. He did the work and then he started to get clients. I wish I hadn't quit.

I did quit. Be like Taylor, not like me in that regard. Now, notice that he chose a really good place to start. He chose a financially valuable skill because it's related to sales and marketing. A man who can sell or a man who can market can always write his own paycheck because every business needs sales and marketing skills.

And copywriting at its core is a classic way to get into that industry, especially for introverts, right? For people who want to just sit back and think. Copywriters will often be paid a small sum but then they get performance bonuses. If their sales letter becomes the -- my brain is failing me.

What's it called? The control. If their sales letter becomes the control, then they receive a commission on all of the products that are sold with their sales letter. And basically a copywriter can go into just about any business and say to any business, "Listen, you don't have to pay me anything but if I can sell more of your stuff for you, then will you pay me a percentage of what I sell to you?" And the thing that's superior about copywriting versus other forms of sales such as face-to-face sales is that it's scalable.

It's very, very scalable. If you can write a successful control letter, a letter that becomes the control, the best performing letter for a business, then in direct response advertising, it's just a matter of how much money can I pour into this. And so we mail the thousand letters out or we put a thousand ads on the internet and we got a certain response rate.

Now we know there's a response rate. Now we can spend millions and millions of dollars mailing that letter out millions and millions of time until we run out of mailing lists that we can rent or in the internet world, slightly different adjustments. But that particular model is a very, very scalable model.

So copywriting is a really, really good tool because it gets you out of time for money. It's a financially valuable skill. It's a skill that's always in demand and yet it's a skill that does not have limits. The limits are much bigger. Unlike a church where, okay, I can go and it's time for money and I need to be here and I can only have relationships with a certain number of people.

Unlike real estate and property management where I have to go and take care of a certain number of physical buildings, the move to copywriting is the move to something that's disconnected, disintermediated from the constraints of space and time. And so you can grow much, much bigger. Now he made his client.

He made his jump and quit his job to go full time as a copywriter. So this freed up his time and got him away from a full time job. You know it's right to do that when your job is costing you more money than it's making. So you get your side hustle to be profitable and then when the side hustle is profitable, you go on and you move into that and you get rid of the job that's costing you your time.

Now he talks about going in and starting an agency with a business partner. I don't know a ton about that story myself, but notice that he started to create a product. I think that was a sales copy product. So he learned a skill and then he started to create a product.

Creating your own product is now a way of changing basically your commission rate with the products that you sell from say 3% to whatever your profit margin is, which in products is often in excess of 50% depending on what kind of product. Not a physical product, but a digital product or an information product or something like that.

Your profit margin can in some cases be very close to 100%. And so once again, the lever that Taylor pushed was the lever of disconnecting from time for money and then moving into higher and higher margin products. So that business grew. He started with a three. He sold a $3,000 product online.

Took his $9,000 of gross sales, poured it into advertising. Took nothing out of the business for six months, but sent lots and lots of ads to that and then moved up to $100,000 a month in sales during the summer of 2016. Then that individual business went from $100,000 a month, $500,000 a month up to a million dollars a month in 2000 by the summer of 2018.

Now we don't know what his expenses were that were associated with that business. Always remember when people are telling you their stories, all of us have a tendency to tell you the highlights. So you need to recognize I don't know what the expenses were, but there's a very good chance that he was making profit of at least several million dollars per year depending on what his business expenses were, staff, etc.

To handle that volume of sales, at least a couple million dollars a year for him personally. So according to his timeline, we went from 2014 to 2018 of making a couple million dollars a year of income. That's four years to be earning a couple million dollars per year. That is fantastic.

But if you think about it, it's a remarkable story and certainly not everyone is going to do that. But that trajectory is not unreasonable. If you put four years into honing an intelligently chosen skill such as sales and marketing and then you create a product that has very high margins and then you apply that skill that you honed of sales and marketing into an industry with a high product where you've got your winner and you make it run, you could go from zero to a few million dollars a year in four years.

I'm trying to point out to you how it's done and there's no reason why you can't do it too. Just notice the lessons along the way. Now, the next thing that he did is that he started the company training people in sales and then he started investing into real estate.

So you reach this point in time, you reach this inflection point in wealth where you say, "Okay, I've made some money. So do I sit back and quit or do I double down and invest in it again?" This is scary to do and this is where I think Taylor is very much worthy of admiration.

Just imagine that you went from making $14,000 a year to making a couple million dollars a year. What would your decision be? Would you ramp up your lifestyle? Would you start consuming? Would you quit working and fire yourself so that you can go and do nothing? But Taylor didn't do that, right?

He went all in and he started ramping up other businesses. And this is often the decision that very wealthy people make. I've been studying a lot of Elon Musk's story lately. I'm just so fascinated. Like we live in the -- if I had -- you know, it's so tempting to me to think back and, "Oh, I'm going to read about Andrew Carnegie or Henry Flagler or some great wealth builder of the past," but to ignore the great wealth builders of today.

Well, I've got one of the greatest wealth builders of all time, one of the smartest guys of all time, and I can tweet at him whenever I want to. So I've been really digging into his story and learning everything I can from his example. And one of the things that's so interesting to me about Musk is that after he made a fortune at PayPal, he just turned around and he doubled down and he put the fortune all back in and he made the big bet.

And that's what, again, what you see Taylor do here as well is he doubled down and he made the big bet again. Now, I think this is scary for a lot of people and a lot of people won't do this. And yet, if you really want to stay on the fast track, you've got to make this big bet again.

So what did he do? Well, he continued to build the sales business and then he started to stockpile assets. That's where he went into real estate. And there's a lot of lessons we could draw from it because this is -- it's smart. So why real estate? Well, real estate for a number of reasons.

Number one, real estate can be highly leveraged very safely. And so with this high leverage, you can keep things on the fast track. And Taylor is a big fan of leverage. He uses a lot of leverage in his business. Also notice that he started to use other people's money by building a fund.

So instead of trying to do the real estate all himself, right, tweet number 10, we beefed up the real estate team and added a fund to it for growth. We went from buying two in all of 2019 to buying 15 per month for all of 2020. So the idea here is he set up a fund and he invited investors to come and invest into his fund.

And so you put yourself at the intersection where lots of money is flowing and you start to get to use other people's money. And now you get to enjoy the growth and the profits from the rents and from the capital gains profits of the portfolio. But then you also get to charge fees.

And then on the back end, he built up a company to working this business with staff so that basically the staff does everything and he's just the public face. That's what's so brilliant about real estate syndication or doing a syndication deal the way that they do it. As you become the public face, you attract the money.

And when you've got an inexhaustible store of money, then your only constraint is can I find the deals? And so you've got to figure out a way to be able to find the deals. And then he continued to build up the sales consulting business. What's the point there? Leverage, right?

You take your front end products and then you build up the businesses to serve them and you grow bigger and bigger and bigger. And then you keep it up. His other lessons I think are excellent, right? But I want to focus just simply on what I have said. This is the path.

If you are not earning a lot of money, this is the path. Number one, in the beginning you don't have money. So your primary asset that you have is your ability yourself to work. Your own personal energy, your personal intelligence, these personal assets, right? Your own physical capital, physical and mental and intellectual capital.

So you may not have social capital. You may not have a large following. You may not have money. You may not have access to money but you have your own personal physical abilities. So you want to move those abilities into the most productive path possible. Which means enhance your brain and your knowledge and your mindset related to money.

And then develop a financially valuable skill, a skill that you can sell. The most financially valuable skill is always going to be sales and marketing. Because it's the ultimate additive skill. And it's the skill that allows you to manipulate the world in a very profitable way. So find some aspect of sales and marketing if you are attracted to that.

Now if you are not attracted to sales and marketing, there are three other financially valuable skills. But those are usually your leading skills. And then find a way to focus on results for money rather than time for money. You will never become truly wealthy when you trade time for money.

You can become rich. You can make a high income when you trade time for money. You can make several millions of dollars a year. And that can be a really good starting point to provide you with the capital that you then invest into the assets that grow to become wealthy.

Think here of, I don't know, Shaquille O'Neal. You have time for money. You build a basic skill that allows you to earn good money for your time. But then you turn around and you have to put that time, that money into businesses if you're going to continue to keep it.

And so if you make that switch, you can become truly wealthy trading time for money. But recognize that trading time for money, especially an hourly wage, especially a modest hourly wage, is not a way that's going to help you build wealth. So you have to start with you trade time for money to support yourself.

Develop a financially valuable skill. Then invest that financially valuable skill in something that is not constrained by time and physical space, if at all possible. Then you can get onto the fast path. Then turn around, reinvest, reinvest, reinvest. When you find a winner, run with it, etc. So I'm going to stop there to keep this the most accessible.

40 minutes. I don't want to go any longer. Learn, anytime you find somebody who has become wealthy, go back through and study their story and try to figure out what did they do. And what you will find is what I've outlined here is something you'll find in just about every single story.

Thank you so much for listening and I'll be back with you very soon. With the Planet Fitness Black Card, you don't just get a great workout, you get a great perk out because your membership is packed with perks. For zero enrollment and $24.99 a month, you'll get perks like access to any of our 24/7 clean and spacious locations.

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