A Realistic Path To Becoming a Millionaire Before The Year 2030

Play Long Term Games with Long Term People

When starting my business a few years ago I had less than $600 in my bank account.

Fast forward six years and I had built two multi-6 figure businesses with over ten people working for them and complete financial freedom.

I vividly remember as a young entrepreneur, I was constantly bombarded with ads for get-rich-quick businesses like Dropshipping, Amazon FBA, Currency Trading, or whatever else was popular in the ‘wantrepreneur’ space at the time.

In a world of endless information, it’s hard to know what’s legit and what’s not.

What I’ve found is that many people want to get money fast. They want to hop on the next trend or invest in the next crypto coin.

Ambition is a great thing, but here’s the problem. This ‘get rich quick’ mentality is actually what holds people back from achieving sustainable wealth.

A lot of people look for shortcuts to financial success. Forgetting that wealth creation is a marathon, not a sprint.

They hop from shiny idea to shiny idea, without ever giving anything a prolonged, sustained effort.

I know people like this personally, one month they’re trying their hand at trading, the next month they’re doing affiliate marketing, and a few weeks later, they have started a t-shirt brand. Years later, they’re no further along financially than they were when they started.

Shiny idea hopping is BS.

For most people, it will take a few years to become a millionaire. At least for me, it took 5 years of sustained effort on one business.

If I had hopped from one idea to another, I would have made little progress in each one and probably been no further along today than when I started.

Building Wealth Is a Lifelong Endeavour

When I’m 95 years old, I will still be hustling.

That doesn’t mean I will be pursuing things with the intensity that I am today as a 29-year-old. Maybe I’ll just be involved in a business working a couple of hours per week from a villa in the south of France, but the key is, that I see entrepreneurship, business and wealth creation as a lifelong process.

This is because the mindset of a millionaire must be long-term.

You Wanna Get Rick Quick, Be Prepared To Get Poor Quick

We’ve seen this play out with all of the crypto boys and meme stock investors over the last couple of years alone. We see it with lottery winners — according to Yahooo Finance, somewhere between 30%-70% of lottery winners go bankrupt.

The reason for this is that if somebody gets rich really quickly, it’s usually a fluke or stroke of luck. For most people, they couldn’t repeat the process if they needed to. Combine that with a lack of financial education or discipline and they will go broke as quickly as they got rich.

So instead, I strive to get rich slow… and stay rich. Gradually building my net worth over time so that I have a sustainable foundation of skills and knowledge in place for lifelong wealth. To learn a process that can be repeated again and again if needed.

“It’s Not Timing The Market, It’s Time In The Market”

This is one of my favourite truisms from the investing world.

Ultimately, it boils down to spending consistent time in your market. For example, you are better off drip-feeding a few hundred dollars each month into the stock market, than trying to time it all at once.

Market timing strategies (attempting to buy into the market at the lowest point and sell at the highest point) notoriously fail time again.

The greatest investors of all time, Warren Buffett and the late and great Charlie Munger do not try and time the market. Instead, they find a good business in a good market, get into it, and spend a lot of time in that market. Decades upon decades. They adopt the get rich slow methodology.

Buffett and Munger are great role models. In their nineties and still in the game. They did not get pulled in by get-rich-quick schemes or shiny ideas. This is why they’re billionaires.

To highlight how important their ability to zone in and focus on getting rich slowly was — I’ll share a brief story.

Did you know that the investing duo had a third business partner in the early days of their careers? His name was Rick Guerin. Warren, Charlie and Rick used to invest together. However while Warren and Charlie went on to become some of the wealthiest people of all time, here’s what happened to Rick.

Buffett:

“Charlie and I always knew that (we) would become incredibly wealthy… We were not in a hurry to get wealthy; we knew it would happen. Rick was just as smart as us, but he was in a hurry. And so actually what happened — some of this is public — was that in the ’73, ’74 downturn, Rick was levered with margin loans. And the stock market went down almost 70% in those two years, and so he got margin calls out the yin-yang, and he sold his Berkshire stock to me. I bought Rick’s Berkshire stock at under $40 apiece, and so Rick was forced to sell shares at … $40 a piece because he was levered.”

Today, as of writing this article, Berkshire stock is valued at $543,592.56 apiece.

All Rick had to do was be patient and stay in the game.

Instead, he got lured in by get-rich-quick ideas. He took on debt to invest more and speed up his path to wealth, however this wiped him out. If he had just followed the same path as Warren and Charlie, Rick too, would have been one of the richest men of all time.

It’s the same in business. We’re bombarded with shiny ideas, tempting us to jump into different markets or money-making opportunities. Following this strategy is the equivalent of trying to time the market in investing, and most of the time will not work.

So what’s the antidote? We must strive to be like Warren and Charlie and avoid being like Rick at all costs. Spend time in your market. What I realized after the first few years of being in the same business was that:

• Revenue grew, steadily but surely, each year.
• I grew a reputation in my industry, which resulted in word-of-mouth sales happening.
• My skills increased each year, so I could provide a better service, close more sales, increase efficiency, etc.
• As I helped more clients, they started to refer us to their friends and others in their network who could benefit from our services too.
• We grew a team, and I put systems in place so the business started to take less of my time to achieve even better results and income.

These things didn’t happen overnight, they took 2–3 years to start compounding on one another. But I can guarantee that I made a sh*t ton more money than the vast majority of people who were trying their hand at shiny idea businesses like dropshipping or trying to become overnight currency traders — I found a steady, relatively boring business that was in decent demand and simply plugged away at it for a few years.

Forget shiny ideas. Find a steady business with a proven business model. Then stay consistent with it for a few years. You’ll be surprised at the wealth you can create by doing that.

I Know It’s Cliche’, But Making Money Is All About Relationships

In my journey as an entrepreneur, I’ve hired dozens of people, worked with hundreds of clients, and made millions of dollars. Here’s the most important lesson I learned.

To be truly successful in business (and in life), you must focus on relationships over transactions.

A transaction is a short-term exchange that typically ends there. A relationship is a series of exchanges that can happen again and again over many years.

In business, you don’t want transactions, you want relationships.

A relationship is far more powerful than a transaction. If you see business as purely transactional, as simply money changing hands and nothing more — you’re missing one of the most powerful drivers of business growth — humans.

The amazing thing about human relationships in business is that they compound over time.

Just like investing a dollar into the stock market each day compounds your money, investing in your business relationships each day has the power to compound over time.

When you build a business relationship based on delivering excellent service at a fair price, not only will the relationship keep going, but the person you’re doing business with will tell everyone they know. This in turn sparks brand new relationships, and so the cycle continues. It compounds.

So strive to build a rapport and relationship with your customers, colleagues, employees, and bosses. Strive to delight them with your attitude, kindness, or service. This creates a sense of longevity that can span years.

In my business, I’ve had clients that I delivered great service for. They have stayed with me for years and referred me to dozens of potential clients resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue from just that one relationship.

If I was in a short-term mindset and saw each client as purely a transaction, I would have missed out on that. Instead, I was in a long-term mindset, I took my time to build the relationship and it paid dividends.

Of course, you will come across purely transactional people in business too, they’re often in a short-term mindset instead of a long-term mindset. I promise they will not be successful. Their lack of respect for relationships will cause them to fail in their business — avoid these people whenever possible.

If You Wouldn’t Do It For 10 Years, Don’t Do It For 10 Hours

Getting rich slowly is about sustainability. What good is being financially rich if you’re time-poor? Or if you don’t enjoy life?

The goal must be to create a road to wealth that serves your lifestyle, not the other way around. Business is a high-reward game. If you do it well, you can be in the top 1% of earners in your country while enjoying exponentially more freedom, independence and autonomy over your lifestyle.

The sense of freedom that comes from Entrepreneurship done right is the biggest reward for me.

I can work from anywhere on the planet. I can start and finish my day when I want. I don’t have a boss breathing down my neck. I don’t have office politics to contend with. I don’t have a soul-destroying commute each morning. And I also make great money. That’s the good life.

The thing is, the get-rich-quick way of doing business is focused on making money as quickly as possible and usually involves doing something unsustainable — like Rick Guerin taking on a bunch of debt to finance his investments or sacrificing relationships in the name of a quick buck.

They cut corners, take unnecessary risks, make bets, engage in short-term transactions and change up their approach because they have not set a stable strategy that they could execute for the next decade or more.

This means they stay on the hamster wheel. They miss out on the compounding power of relationships. They’re constantly in that fight or flight ‘get rich quick mode’. This leads to stress, a constant sense of tension and inevitable burnout.

Aim To Get Rich Slow, and You’ll Probably Get Rich Faster Anyway

Now, here’s the crazy thing about this all. You’ve heard the story of the Tortoise and the Hare right? If you haven’t, the morale of the story is that if you take your time and do things properly, you will get to your destination faster than if you try to cut corners and rush to get there.

This is why getting rich slowly is so powerful. It took me less than 5 years to achieve lifelong financial freedom by simply focusing on doing things the right way and not trying to hack my way to wealth through shortcuts.

It didn’t happen overnight, but in the grand scheme of things it still happened relatively quickly. If you stay steady and consistent on one proven business model, you can do the same.

Sometimes when you slow down, you go faster.

Thanks for checking out my article. I’m a UK-based entrepreneur and investor currently scaling two multi-6-figure businesses.

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