To build any serious income you have to use leverage. You accomplish
this by spending your time creating and managing levers. I’d bet that
if you are creative enough, you could probably create a lever on
anything that can provide an income. Let me explain this with several
examples.
If you do not have an employee, you are not leveraging your time. Start
leveraging your time in a tiny way with something that doesn’t require
complex skills, like a dog walking service. But get other people to
walk the dogs. You never walk the dogs, you focus on marketing and
increasing the number of dogs to walk, and more walker employees. Then
you hire an employee to handle the marketing and sales duties, and then
you’ll have a business that runs on its own without you. You’ll have an
absentee ownership model where you have the free time to start another
business to leverage. You have to learn that you can’t run an empire if
you are doing everything yourself. The old quote for this situation is,
“The more I do, the less I accomplish.”
If you are not saving money every month, you cannot leverage your
money. Start tiny, take 3% of any income into your checking account,
and move it into a savings account. How are you going to work your way
up into big deals, if you don’t have any money to buy-in to smaller
deals? There are ever larger playing fields, but saving money is
necessary to get into the entry-level business game.
If you haven’t converted your ability into products, you are not
leveraging your skills. Start tiny with something that doesn’t cost
anything. Like writing an article or a song, whittle an animal figure
from wood, record a speech. Any start will be helpful that gets you
thinking about creating products from your skills. If you only know
services, they can also be turned into products: books, tapes,
software, newsletters, subscription services, etc. If you only have
service skills, you can leverage them like step one above. But beyond
that, you can start marketing to new market channels by developing your
own proprietary products that I just mentioned.
If you don’t have business contacts, then you are not leveraging a
social network. Start talking to people about what you want to
accomplish; I can’t remember the source of the quote, but it is, “He
who has the bigger rolodex wins.” The more entrepreneurial business
people that you know, the more business opportunities you will hear
about, and thus more financially successful you may become.
You can employ non-physical assets that can be leveraged. This is one
area that I use a lot. For example, I have offered my credit to
purchase an income property for a partner to manage, but we split the
income by 50/50. You can offer your credit and be paid to co-sign on a
loan. By having good credit, you have access to loans that you can use
to buy investments.
When you’ve worn yourself out on those exercises, you can start
figuring out how to leverage everything you have done toward what you
want to do next. This is a critical phase. If you have an idea, do you
start thinking like this, “I don’t know what to do, so I guess I can’t
do that.” Or, do you start to think like this, “Get my rolodex, and
find three people already in the industry that may be able to point me
in the right direction. Then call my bank and let them know I’ll be
asking for some money in the next couple weeks for a new project.”
Now, who would you bet on to make quick progress that will lead to
success, and who won’t be able to move beyond their own fears and drop
the idea altogether.
