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If you’re an avid listener of motivational speakers and read personal development books with regularity, there’s a strong chance you’ve stumbled across this simple but accurate piece of advice.
Success leaves clues.
Research any successful entrepreneur, athlete, author, or actor, and you’ll find information on the steps that person took to get to the top.
Now, maybe those aren’t always the exact steps you should follow, but they’re clues in the right direction.
Dr. Greg Reid took this advice a step further in his new book “Wealth Made Easy.” With help from co-author Gary M. Krebs, Reid interview one hundred successful people from all different fields to figure out how they built their wealth – and held onto it.
The book contains “proven, real-world strategies for hanging onto money.”
Dr. Reid mentioned four of these proven strategies in an article for Business Insider.
Here are his tricks from “Wealth Made Easy” on explaining how the super-rich get to the top — and stay there.
Trick #1: Buy Dirt
Canadian land mogul Brian Sodorsky shared a simple equation with Dr. Reid to hammer home the idea that buying land is a smart idea – “Time plus dirt is wealth.”
“Find a town anywhere in North America that is growing 20 to 25 percent a year. Pinpoint their ‘Main Street’ and draw a line out eight miles from that location and buy that land. That is the ‘dirt.’ Rent the soil to local farmers who will pay the rent that covers the costs, so it’s free. As the town continues to expand, eventually it ends up on your property where you own the largest lot and, since you are already near Main Street, you can then sell that land to a big-box store for one hundred times what you paid for it.”
Trick #2: Combine unrelated business ideas
Dr. Reid suggests finding 2 (or more) things you love and building a business model around those ideas.
“Gene Landrum did something seemingly impossible when he founded Chuck E. Cheese’s. He created an entirely new business model by combining several different ideas into one chain: food, family, and amusement park-type entertainment.”
If you find the right combination you too could be sitting with a ton of cheese. Money, I mean.
Trick #3: Take advantage of obsolescence
Take old stuff and make it new again.
Reid uses Ron Klein as an example. Klein ran General Associates, Inc., a data communications company.
“Klein refurbished the old Teletype equipment and sold it to major communications companies. As a special service, GA converted many of the machines into special teleprinters for the hearing impaired with messages imprinted in Braille.”
Another excellent example of this is flipping stuff from Amazon.
Trick #4: Work with your competitors
Reid explains.
“Competition is the new collaboration. Why are there four gas stations on every main intersection? Would you rather start your restaurant on a dirt road or situate it alongside restaurant row in the best part of town?”
In other words, if you can’t beat them, join them, or at least hang around and make money off the people they can’t serve quick enough.
For more great tips from 100 super rich and successful people, check out “Wealth Made Easy.”
[via Business Insider]
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Chris Illuminati is a 5-time published author and recovering a**hole who writes about success, fitness, parenting and occasionally pro wrestling. Reach out to him on Instagram & Twitter.