Why millionaires keep telling you to start with sales

According to a lot of millionaires and billionaires, sales is like one of the most common precursors to becoming a millionaire at a young age or any age for that matter. This gentleman named Aaron Wallace analyzed the Forbes Rich List, don't really know what that is, and found that 10 of the 53 billionaires who had started their careers working for another company actually started in sales. That's almost 20% of this one particular list that this guy was surveying.

Yeah.

You've heard Mark Cuban say it. If he's down to his last $500, the first thing he's gonna do is go and find a sales job and put one of his best skills to use. Maybe you've heard Ken Griffin say it. CEO of the most profitable hedge fund in the world for the last 20 years, Citadel, agrees that sales is everything.

I want the $10 plaque that was behind your desk that said, if we're all gonna eat, someone has to sell. Because when I was like 20 years old, looked at that plaque, it was like, it was like a wake-up moment. Like, of all the things that this man could have around him. He's got like this cheesy $10 plaque that says, if we're all going to eat, someone has to sell. And it speaks to the importance of what it takes to build a business. You're always selling. You're selling to candidates, you're selling to vendors, you're selling to counterparties, you're selling to customers. You need to get comfortable with the art of selling.

And time and time again, the stuff is coming out from these very successful people on why that is. And in this video, I'm going to break it down to you. Show you how I used some of these methods to become a millionaire myself by 26, where 5 years prior I was driving an Amazon truck while in college. And I'm gonna kinda show you the reasoning in my head after starting multiple ventures, sales being one, businesses being another, failing some, succeeding at a few, and having some runners that did over 7 figures. Here we go. Hopefully the light is better when I stand back here. I'm working with a limited setup. I'm also a little sunburned, so I got the hoodie on. It's a little chilly in here. I'm gonna preface this by saying, guys, I'm kind of a math guy. I'm kind of a data guy. When I make decisions, I might think about it like you, I might not. I actually don't know if this is normal. It's normal for me, but I find, I find a lot of interest in reverse engineering certain outcomes that I got, whether I expected to get them or not, and under— trying to understand why I got them, what I could have done differently to get one that was You know, potentially worse or potentially better, and what I can do to replicate the success. So that's what I'm going to illustrate for you guys on here. This, in my mind, is what success is. I am talking like a business and financial component. Everyone has a different definition. This is not my definition of success for life, but this is my definition in terms of becoming a millionaire or stacking resources financially. Success is basically your skill times effort. I don't have room, but times Network. And these are kind of buzzwords. Let me tell you what that actually means. Over time, you get— hopefully you get good at something. For me, it was sales. For you, it might be sales. However long it takes you to get good at that is just the prerequisite to play the game. Then it's how hard or how dedicated are you actually applying this skill? How many hours of your day, of your week, of your month, of your year are you applying this skill where where you have the leverage because you've become good at it. Not starting a new skill every month for a year, you're just killing your progress every single month. Getting good at a skill and seeing that compound effect over time, times who knows that you're compounding this skill. I wrote network because that's an easy one. For sales, it could be job applications. If you've compounded this skill over the course of 5 years and you've become very good at it and you have a track record, But nobody knows that, you're not going to have an opportunity to use the skill. If you compound that same skill and over the course of 5 years you meet all these people and you stay in touch with them, and one day you need a new vehicle to deploy the skill, to extract resources from the market like money, it helps if let's say 100 people know that you're good at the skill. And as an extreme example, if I'm really, really, really good at sales and I can prove to people that I am really, really, really good at sales, And I have someone in my network like Jeff Bezos. Like, let's just say I'm Jeff Bezos's nephew. I've gone on my own and gotten really good at this skill. I'll probably have a really badass opportunity because right person, right skill, right time, right connections. Don't just like maximize this one and then, you know, get super lazy and not meet anybody. You're not gonna get what you want like that. Another thing that you need to become sharp at is identifying options, identifying likely outcomes, and kind of finding these checkpoints in your career, in your progress, in your journey towards $1 million. Let's say you're born, you are a kid, you know nothing, nothing matters, staying alive matters. But then you realize like, hey, I wanna be good at football. How do I get good at football? I have to put in work. A lot of kids' first realizations that like, I can actually influence the outcome that I get in my life to be in favor of what I want. They realize that work, can get them there. If I practice football every day after school, I will get better at football and I will make the team. And then you start to get curious about money. Why does this friend have all these nice things and these cool clothes and this cool bike? How do I get that stuff? Can I just ask someone or do I have to work for it? Boom, you go back to work. Once you hit this second realization that work gets you the outcome that you want in your life, you then start to realize like, okay, if I want to be good at something, I work skill times effort. If I want to be good at extracting capital from the economy, you work skill times effort. But at this point, you're looking for something else, which is efficiency plus— this is a weird angle to write— efficiency plus leverage. And that's where this comes into play: skill, effort, and network. How do I make more faster? How do I make more easier? How do I make more for a longer amount of time? And I think a great way to assess this are by asking yourself these 3 questions: what What do I have? What do I want? How likely am I to succeed? That doesn't look so good. Hopefully you guys can see that okay. How likely am I to succeed? And so you might not realize it, but as you are here, there's a bunch of different paths you can take. As you're here, there's a bunch of different paths you can take. At every step of you leveling up and trying to get something greater that you don't have, There are many options you can take, and what you're probably evaluating is something like this. It can be implied in this question, but one of those other considerations is like, how do I minimize the downside? How do I not reach catastrophic failure if this doesn't work? So your ability, your ability to identify what you want, assess, assess all the potential paths that can get you there, evaluate it on the criteria of do I actually want this? What do I have to make this work? And based on that, how likely am I to succeed? It's going to help you solve a lot of these problems. I want to focus in on when you realize work times efficiency and leverage is what gets me to become a millionaire. To become a millionaire, like, you don't— I mean, the odds statistically are pretty low, but like, you don't have to be particularly lucky as in like winning the lottery. You just have to Go work for these things, make a consistent effort, and apply them over time. There's 3 main ways that you're going to see people become a millionaire in their 20s, and we'll show you them here. Some are more common than others. 1, job. 2, skill. 3, business. Skill can technically be job. Doesn't always have to be. It's like a square can be a rectangle. A rectangle is not always a square. Job, skill, business. The issue with job is the ceiling is pretty low. And I think job, I think of being a cashier at a grocery store, okay, entry level, or even more like college educated, being a teacher, for example. In these common jobs, not only are you going to hit the ceiling, but in the event that you went to college, you are also starting from under. You are starting in debt where you had to work and deploy your resources to get the education to hit the ceiling. That's why these jobs where you're making $30K, $40K, $50K, $60K per year in the beginning are not going to fast-track you to 7 figures. Now, business, we all know, I mean, you can make infinite money if you hit the gold mine that is a successful business, but the odds of that are low. In fact, extremely low. You've probably heard the stats around it. In some cases, people are starting back with college debt, or they had to pay the college tuition Just to start a business, which is not really recommended. I feel like people kind of know now that like college doesn't help you start a business, starting a business does. But there's another setback potentially, again, for this potentially not to work, which is the costs associated with a failed business. They don't just go away. The money that you spent to run ads and test, the money that you spent to open a brick and mortar, the money that you spent on the equipment that you needed, and not to mention the time. If your time is worth a lot of money because you've proved that, through another realm of life such as maybe a sales job. Time is expensive and it adds up. Well, the most simple answer to becoming a millionaire is, yeah dude, just start a business and like make a lot of money. It's not the most likely in my opinion. The most likely, the most likely is gonna fall in number 2, at least in the beginning. Learning a skill, that's gonna be something where like that specific skill should you be able to take it and apply it into various industries, some are going to pay more than others. Example, if I'm really, really good at sales but I'm selling shoes at Dick's Sporting Goods, I'm not going to make that much money. If I'm really, really good at sales and I'm selling for a door-to-door solar company where the top guys make $50,000 a month or something, that is a more serious vehicle. And so things like sales Where you have leverage, you can sell more expensive things, you can sell them faster, you can sell them to more people. Coding is another thing that you know AI is kind of giving it a run for its money right now. Performance marketing, not like in-house marketing graduate that just like clicks a couple buttons and makes pretty designs. I'm talking about someone who actually can generate demand, drive customers, positive ROI on marketing dollars. Maybe someone who's really, really, really good at operations or finance in a way where it is a multiplier on wherever it's. Applied to here. The skill can be a job, like all of these things can just be a job where you do the bare minimum, get your check and go home. But if you want to maximize, there really is no ceiling if you can put this into a better vehicle. Like example, I got decent at sales. I made a lot of my first money in sales, and then I leveraged that into a sales community. I leveraged that into a sales agency. I leveraged that now into a sales media brand. So I did eventually parlay that skill into business, which is what a lot of these millionaires are are probably doing, millionaires and billionaires, and even my friends that are millionaires. But it starts here, and actually doing it as the job to begin with is pretty low risk. Why I like sales though specifically, because the ceiling is not there. If you hit a ceiling in sales, it is the opportunity that you're in, it's not sales itself, because I guarantee you there's a salesperson making more somewhere else. I also like the fact that in many cases, You do not need a college degree to go and sell for a company. You just need effort, maybe some skill, but effort in the beginning. You just need to go knock doors. You just need to pick up the phone and make dials. So in a lot of cases, you don't need college. And with businesses, their starting costs, in some case, you might not have those. In sales, it's like a high-paid internship to run a business. Now, there are a lot of commission-only sales jobs. Not everybody who works a commission-only sales job gets absolutely filthy rich. Rich. But there are sales jobs that give you a base pay. So there's like a sliding scale on like, do you like more risk, more reward, or do you want something more conservative? Either way, you should get paid. In terms of those startup costs for sales, you don't really need them unless you're selling insurance and you want to go get licensed and buy leads. The job can get you paid. Most people with a standard job are getting paid, but they're not getting ahead unless they went to school for something that pays them a lot in their field. Most people that work a job and clock out at the end of the day are not getting close to that millionaire status. People who work skills, while they might not be becoming millionaires directly off the skill itself, they can stack 6 figures, more than 6 figures. You can absolutely become a millionaire just by being good at what you do at the right company. And if anything, that gives you the capital to go into business, have the funds to start it up, have the runway to see it through, and then actually have success with business. Had to crack out the new blue marker. Why sales? Here's why I personally Why do you like sales? Here's why I personally chose sales. I did not become a millionaire just off of sales. Again, wanna make that clear. But it put me in the position to become a millionaire. And honestly, through my businesses, I literally used the skill set that I gained and learned a couple of other adjacent skill sets. I like sales for a few reasons. One, it's social, meaning this part of the equation, the network, you can actually begin building that while you're in this high-paid internship. Not always gonna happen, But you start to get exposure to people that run businesses, make big decisions, who are probably a little bit further ahead of you. So there's that social element. Also, I know a lot of people that are really good at making badass products but don't know how to drive revenue. They don't know how to get people to pay them money. By being in sales, and maybe even Alex Hormozi is going to agree with this, by being in sales, you learn how to drive revenue, which is the most important part of the business. That's what Mark Cuban said. It's what all these rich people say. I know Hormozi says it too. Another thing, this might be kind of niche, but you're upstream in terms of business operations, meaning it's not dependent on a lot of processes that happen before you to go right, which means you don't have to rely on that many people to make the money. Something like coding, for example, put the AI stuff aside because I learned how to be a coder 2 days. Not a great one, but I can deploy stuff with code. What happens if nobody sells the coding projects? The coder doesn't get paid. Somebody else's team is going to get paid. And so by being upstream, and if you could learn a little bit of marketing, you can take that skill of a little bit of marketing and sales and apply it to any business under the sun in the United States or in the world and drive value to them. And then your target market Huge. And then the last thing I'll put on here is kind of that high-paid internship. So you can make a lot of money without having to put up a lot of money. Something like coding, or let's say something like health related, a lot of time you, you have to go to school. Like, you have to, or you're not going to be taken seriously. You have to do this boot camp, or you have to do this prerequisite, which takes time and money. Sales I can go knock doors today. I could Google right now or go on LinkedIn, find insurance companies, find solar companies, you know, high-ticket remote sales companies, and get a high-paid internship that gets me in close proximity to other departments of this business and pays me to learn. Quick recap for you guys: sales is flexible. Sales puts food on the table for you, your team, Your family. Sales can be applied in a safe entry-level role, in a high-flying commission-only role where the ceiling is higher or non-existent, and in the business that you potentially start one day. I've never heard anybody say that they regret having success with sales. I've never heard anyone say, oh, you know, I really just, you know, I wish I got into like web design instead. I hate sales. Sales gave me so much money. I learned so much. I met so many cool people. I should have been a web designer. Nobody says that. Now, if you watch this video and you're like, okay, yeah, I'm on board, I see it, I know I'm not going to become a millionaire overnight, but like, I see the steps to get working in that direction. And all you have to do is work in that direction for long enough and not quit before you get there. You have to be able to assess all the different outcomes of all the decisions that you make based on what you want and choose the one that serves you the best. The most direct straight line from $0 to $1 million It's probably not going to be for you. You probably have to sacrifice everything you love and care about to do that, but that's okay. You don't have to do that. I didn't do that. So if you watch this far and you're like, okay dude, I see, I see it, I see the vision— we help people get remote sales jobs. I've been doing it for 4 years, mostly commission-based, work from wherever you want. On this whiteboard conversation thing, I'm talking about sales in general, but if you're interested in doing it remote and getting to a $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 a month and starting to put money away and starting to get in proximity to these businesses and meet cool people, you should hit us up. You should go to the first link in the description and see some of the stuff that we've got. We do have like a soft guarantee that basically says if you do X, Y, and Z that's in our agreement, you should have a role extended to you where you can start earning money in less than 60 days. Whatever sales job you end up in, whether it's with us or in a different industry like I did— I started in roofing sales, that's where I made my first 6 figures— just know That directionally you are heading the right way. You will not always make the perfectly correct decision that gets you from zero to a million fast. As long as you just avoid catastrophic failure, you will eventually get there. You just have to keep trying. And it gets a lot easier. As someone who's a self-proclaimed introvert, I promise you, when you're really good at something here and a lot of people know about you, it's a force multiplier. If I'm the best salesperson in the world and nobody knows it, then I'm not. But if I'm the best salesperson in the world and 100 people, 100 people who I hold in high regard know that because they're also good at things, I am almost finding difficulty not to succeed in that case. And if you want to get connected to the right people, sales reps, managers, business owners, me, go down below to the first link in the description. We'll help you start taking those baby steps too. Financial freedom, putting money away, getting things that you like, meeting cool people. It was the best thing that I ever did, and I didn't even— I didn't even write it on here. I'll add it on here. Kind of messy. Character development. Aside from my bank account completely 180ing when I got into sales, I became the person who was capable. I was an introvert. I was afraid to talk to people. I was afraid to knock the doors. And through pushing myself, I found out that I can really be whoever I want to be. And I hope You know that that's possible. It helped me socially. It helped me make badass friends, badass connections, business and personal. And it was literally the best decision I've made in my life to date. So if you guys are looking to make that same decision, we can help you and we can help you do it remote. Go down below to the first link in the description, scroll the page, click the buttons, and talk to our team. Love to help you. Do do do do. And big choppers out the window.