Business Finance Mega Masterclass Before You Start a Business in 2026

The money decisions you make in your first 90 days will decide whether you still have a business in 5 years. The SBA's Office of Advocacy puts the first 5-year survival rate for new business at 49.2% and the 10-year rate at 33.9%. You're going to end up in one of those 2 numbers, and the money decisions you make in your first year are what put you there. In the 1980s, Patagonia was the business that everybody wanted. Yvon Chouinard's company was compounding 30 to 50% a year. The clothes sold themselves. The culture was famous. Yvon was a climber who started by making pitons out of a chicken coop in Burbank, and now he was running one of the most admired brands in America. So he did what a business does when the line goes up. He planned for another huge year. Patagonia loaded up on inventory, expanded the staff, and leaned on a bank line of credit to carry all of it. Then 1991 arrived. The recession hit, sales went flat, and the profit went down a cliff. All that inventory had to be dumped below cost, and the bank, looking at a company that had bet everything on growth that stopped, Clamped down on the credit line. On a day the company still calls Black Wednesday in July of 1991, Patagonia laid off 120 people. That was about 20% of everybody who worked there. Yvon had to look at people who built the place with him and tell them that there wasn't any money. He later said the company had been on a suicide course. This is the most important part here. Patagonia wasn't a bad business. The products were great. The customers loved them. The brand became iconic. The finance was the problem. They funded fast growth with borrowed money and inventory. And when one quarter went sideways, the borrowed money is what nearly finished them. So Yvon rebuilt the company around the growth rate it could actually pay for out of its own pocket. And Patagonia is still here 35 years later because of that decision. Now you might be thinking, okay, Evan, I mean, I don't have inventory and I don't have a bank line. I've got a laptop and an idea for a business. This doesn't apply to me. And I'd say it applies to you more because you have less room to be wrong. Patagonia had a decade of profit banked before it got into trouble. You have your savings and some patience, and both of those can run out faster than you think. This pattern With finances repeats at every size. A company with 500 employees and the person with a laptop both die the same way on the same day of the month for the same reason. The only difference is how big it is when it happens. Every business that dies dies usually for the same reason. It runs outta money before it figures itself out. Everything else is just a story that people tell afterwards. Bad idea, bad market, bad timing, bad partner. Underneath all of them is a bank balance that hits zero on a Tuesday. So I'm gonna give you The money rules I'd want somebody to sit me down and explain before I had started—not accounting, not spreadsheets—the decisions that decide whether you're still standing in year five. If you've been here before, drop a hashtag believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video. And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation—the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily, one video at a time. Believe. Rule number one: Your first ninety days belong to one paying customer. Everything you want to spend money on right now is a way of avoiding. Avoiding the thing that's actually hard. You want to do the logo, the website, the business cards, the LLC, the branded notebook, the studio. All of it feels really productive, right? You're starting the business the day someone hands you money and not one day before. So for the first 90 days, the rule is pretty simple: talk to people and get a customer. That's the job. You can spend $70,000 on beautiful thought leadership content and finish the year with zero dollars in sales if there's no path from that content to a transaction. And people do this every single year. I've seen entrepreneurs drop a million dollars on a studio before. Before they ever pressed record. Now, some of them can't afford it, and awesome, good for them. But if you're starting from zero, copying a billionaire's opening move is how you go broke in 8 months with beautiful lighting on you. CB Insights went back through hundreds of startups postmortem and found that 38% of them died because they just ran outta cash, not because the product was wrong, because the money ran out while they were still figuring the product out. So here's your actual first 90-day budget, whatever it costs to reach humans and nothing else, right? A phone, a calendar link, a way to take money, maybe $200 on software, then you go have 100 conversations, not 100 posts, conversations. If 100 real conversations with your ideal customers produce zero sales, you just save yourself $70,000 in a year of your life, and you learn something that no branding agency could have told you. Rule number 2, start at the top of the market and work your way down. So everybody starts cheap because cheap feels safe, but it's actually the most expensive decision that you make. So look at how Tesla did it. They opened in 2008 with the Roadster. That was a $109,000 sports car built for people who could write that check without flinching. Those buyers funded the engineering, the factory, the supply chain. Then came the Model S, then the Model 3 at around $35,000 for everybody else. High end first, then down the ladder with the rich customers paying for the learning curve. So do the same thing at your scale. If you're a consultant, don't launch a $49 course. Launch a $5,000 done-with-you engagement with 3 clients. You'll learn more in 90 days serving 3 people closely than you'd learn in 2 years selling 400 people a video library. And you'll actually have money coming in While you learn. And there's a second reason why this works, and it has nothing to do with just the money. 3 clients paying $5,000 will tell you the truth. They'll call you, they'll complain to you, they'll tell you exactly where your service is breaking because they've got real money on the table. 400 people who paid $49 will just stop opening your emails and you'll never find out why. Now let's look at the math. To make $10,000 a month at $50 a customer, you need 200 customers, 200 support emails, 200 chances to get a refund request. At $5,000, you need 2. You already know 2 people who might say yes. You don't know 200. Rule number 3, put a bigger number next to your number. Price is a comparison. So nobody knows what $15,000 means just on its own in a vacuum. They only know what it means next to something else. So I run my own business this way. My top offer is a $50,000 YouTube mastermind. Underneath that sits a $15,000 growth strategist package. When you see the $50,000 first, the $15,000 stops sounding expensive and starts sounding like a, a smart choice. That's, Not manipulation. Both are real. Both deliver. Both have lots of value, but plenty people choose the $50,000 mastermind. But the $50K makes the $15K easier to say yes to. So build three tiers: a premium one that you genuinely want to sell, a middle one where you expect people to land, and an entry point that can get somebody in the door. Always show the expensive one first. Now one warning on the entry tier: keep it small and keep it simple because a cheap product with heavy delivery is the worst business on earth. A $650 a year service that takes 40 hours to deliver. Is not a business, it's a hobby with a lot of paperwork. If your low tier can't be delivered without you, then it doesn't belong on the menu. And understand what you're really selling at any price. What they're buying is confidence in a result. If you can't explain your price without, you know, your voice going up at the end, they won't be confident that you'll deliver because you just told them that you aren't confident. Rule number 4, charge for the result you deliver. So the hour is the worst unit you could possibly sell because it caps your income, right? It punishes you for getting faster and it Invites your clients to compare you against anyone else who is billing by the hour. I coached a therapist who was once doing life-changing work with kids and charging $250 an hour. He was terrified to raise it. I told him, go to $400 and to start with the clients he liked the least. So the downside was small. He did. Nobody blinked. Not one person left. That's the pattern almost every time. The price just lives in your head far more than it lives in your customer's head. So ask what the outcome is worth to them. If you save a business owner 10 hours a week, that's 500 hours a year. If their time is worth $200 an hour, you just handed them $100 grand in value. So charging $2,000 a month for that is not expensive. It's a, it's a deal. It's a bargain. It's a rounding error in what they're getting. So run the test that he ran. Take your next 3 prospects and quote 40% more than you charge today. Not your existing clients, your next 3. If all 3 say yes, you were too cheap and you just found out for free. If one says no, then you're probably priced right. If all 3 say no, you've learned something real about your market in a week instead of guessing about it for a year. Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write your biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just click the link in the description below to go grab it, and I'll see you there. Rule number 5, pull your money forward. You can be a profitable business and still go bankrupt, and people don't understand that at the beginning, and it's killed more companies than bad products have. It happens when your expenses come faster than your payments do, right? So If we walk through an example, right, a dance studio nets about $100,000 a year. On paper, that could be a healthy business and the owner feels great about it. But the money doesn't arrive in 12 equal pieces. Maybe October is $5,300 in the red because the annual insurance premium lands in October and December runs another $900 negative because enrollment maybe drops over the holidays. The year is fine, but 2 months out of it are not. And you only need one of those months to catch you with an empty bank account that crushes your business. Then September comes in and is strong and the owner wants a $15,000 $50,000 speaker system, right? That one purchase made in the best month is what runs the business out of money by December. So profit is, you wanna look at it on the year, but cash is a fact. Like right now today, you can be right about the year and still be unable to make payroll on the 15th of the month. And that's the one that ends you. So here's the rule. Pull your money forward and push the expenses back. Sell an annual instead of a monthly, or offer a discount for paying quarterly or upfront. Get a deposit before you start work, not after you finish. And before you spend a dollar of a great month, map out your next 12 months on one page with every lumpy expense you might have on there, right? So think insurance, taxes, software renewals, the slow season. Cover those first, then you can spend what's left over and only what's left over. And separate your money physically because willpower loses, right, to the bank account. So run 3 accounts: an operating, tax, and profit. Every time money comes in, move the tax portion out of the same day and never look at it again. The number in your operating account Then is the only number you get to spend, and it's finally telling you the truth of what you have. Rule number six: Keep your equity. I worked in venture capital, so let me save you some time. Do not go raise money for this. Somebody with an idea and no revenue goes looking for fifty k, and the investor takes half the company because at that stage you're pure risk, and they're pricing it honestly. Now you own fifty percent of something that you have to spend the next eight years building, and a day gets hard. You look at that number. And lose your motivation. That's the actual danger, and it has nothing to do with just numbers on a spreadsheet. There's a second cost too that people don't often warn you about. Raising money becomes a full-time job. You'll spend 6 months building a deck, taking meetings, following up with people who were never gonna say yes anyway. And every one of those hours was an hour that you weren't building your business and selling. Businesses die that way while looking extremely busy. Only take outside money under one condition. You already have a machine that works where every dollar in reliably produces several dollars out, and you just wanna run it harder. If you don't plan to go public or get acquired, finance the whole thing out of your own sales. Your customers are the best investors you'll ever have, and they never ask for board seats. Now, there's a version of funding that doesn't cost you anything, and almost nobody uses it. Your customers, a presale, a deposit, a founding member price for the first 10 people who'll pay before the thing exists. That's capital in with no interest, no equity, no board seats, no meetings, and it proves the demand is real for your thing before you build it, which is the one thing that no investor Rule number 7, hire late and hire green. Payroll is the fastest way to turn a flexible business into a really scary one. Every hire converts variable cost into fixed costs, and fixed costs are what turn a slow quarter into an emergency. Go back to Patagonia in 1991. Hire when you're genuinely bottlenecked by low-dollar work that's blocking you from selling, not when you're tired, not when you'd feel more legitimate if you have a team. When you do hire, think about green over pedigree. You don't need to hire a bunch of people. Young and hungry beats a 20-year veteran in a field that's changed 3 times in the last 5 years because you can teach skills, but you can't untrain habits. And run a real process. Write a long, messy job post and bury one specific instruction in the middle of it. Something like having your favorite entrepreneur in the first line of the message. Anybody who misses it is out, eliminated, because you just tested attention to detail for free. Then pay your shortlist for a small trial project, up to 5 hours of real work. Pay everyone, even the ones who don't make it. You'll learn from those 5 hours paid than from 5 interviews, and you'll find the person who catches a mistake that you didn't. I know what a bad hire actually costs you because it's never just the money. It's not just a salary, it's a salary, but plus 3 years spent training them, plus the work that didn't get done, plus the customers who had a bad experience, plus the 6 weeks it takes to hire again on a $60,000 role. That's easily a 6-figure mistake. So hiring slowly isn't cheap. It's the only version of this that you can't afford to get wrong. Now, one last thing. If you hate managing people, don't build a team that needs 50 people. That's useful information, so use it. Build a version of this that actually fits the life that you want to live. Start before you're ready. You don't need a perfect model to begin. You need a customer, a price you can say out loud confidently, and enough cash to still be here in 12 months. So don't wait for permission. Don't wait to feel ready because ready shows up after you start and never once before. The paper airplane here, right on my logo, isn't supposed to break the sound barrier either. And doing the impossible is exactly why you're here. And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. Now let's learn about the AI business model that's making millionaires this year. This is the first moment in history where one person with a laptop can outearn an entire company. AI is real and it is going to change every industry. Generative AI is on track to add up to $4.4 trillion a year to the global economy, according to McKinsey. And that number is a window into the biggest wealth shift of your lifetime. The ability to use these tools is both fun and empowering. And the people who step through it in the next 12 months are going to look back on this year as the year that everything changed for them. Let me tell you about a guy named Tony Dinh. He was a software engineer with a safe 6-figure job at a big tech company. Good money, good title, the kind of job you're supposed to feel lucky to have. But he wanted to build his own thing. And so he walked away from it and started shipping tiny products that he built on his own, building in public where the whole internet could watch him either win or fall on his face. Then the AI wave hit, and he built a tool called TypingMind. It's a faster, cleaner, more powerful way to use AI. AI chat with a better interface and extra features that the heavy users really love. One specific problem with one clean solution. And here's the best part: he runs the entire business completely alone. No employees, no office, no team— just him and a laptop, often working while he travels the world. And that one tool pulls in over $130,000 a month. He posts his exact numbers in public, so it's not just a rumor. You can go and check for yourself. He didn't raise millions from different investors. He didn't hire 50 people. He found one expensive problem, pointed AI at it, and let the technology do most of the heavy lifting that he used to then build his whole company. That is the AI business model that is making millionaires right now. One person, one specific problem, AI doing the work of an entire team. Now here's where your brain often goes and tries to fight. You're thinking, that's great, but Tony, he's a coder. I'm not technical. I can't build a tool like that. I wouldn't even know where to start. And this is where we got to relax because we need to shift the thinking. The model is not about coding. Tony built a product, but the exact same model works as a service. And the service version doesn't need you to write a single line of code. You bring the relationships and you bring your judgment. AI does the work. You can deliver the work that used to take a whole agency for a handful of clients and keep the money because you don't have the team to pay. The tools have gotten so good that the only thing standing between you and this is a decision just to start. Start. So let me show you exactly how it works step by step. Step 1, pick one specific expensive problem. The biggest mistake people make is trying to help everybody with everything. They want to be a general AI consultant who does a little of this and a little of that. That never works. The money is in being laser specific. So Tony Dinh didn't build a tool that does 100 different things. He built one tool that solves one problem really Making AI chat faster and easier for the people who live in it all day long. That's it. One specific painful problem that people pay real money already to solve. So your job is to find your version of that. Pick one type of person and one expensive headache that they might have right now. Maybe it's a small law firm when they need their client intake handled. Maybe it's real estate agents who need their listings written up and their follow-up emails sent off. Maybe it's local restaurants that need their social media run, right? The key word is expensive. You want a problem where people are already spending money because because that means demand is already proven. You're not creating a brand new market, you're entering one that already exists and doing it faster and cheaper with AI. So here's a quick test to find your problem. Look at what businesses around you are already hiring people to do that is boring, that is repetitive, and that is time-consuming. Writing product descriptions, answering the same customer questions over and over, editing videos, building simple reports, following up with leads. Every one of those is a task that AI can now do in a fraction of the time, and every one of those is something a is already paying real money for. That is the opening for you. The line between what you do and who you serve has to be completely straight. When you try to serve everyone, you connect with no one. When you go all in on one specific person with one specific problem, then you become the obvious choice to work with. So before you go do anything else, get super clear on this. Who do you help and what's one expensive problem you do solve for them? Write it down in one sentence. If you can't say it in one sentence, you're still too broad. Keep narrowing down until it's sharp. Step 2, start high, not cheap. This is where so many entrepreneurs sabotage themselves. They think the way to start is to sell something cheap, a $20 ebook, a $50 mini course, a small digital download. And I'm telling you, that's the slow road to go to nowhere, right? When you sell cheap stuff, you need thousands and thousands of customers just to make a living. And finding thousands of customers takes a massive, expensive marketing machine that you don't have yet. So just switch the math, go high ticket from day one. So let's look at how easy the numbers can get. So imagine you charge $2,000 a month to deliver an AI-powered service. You only need 4 clients to hit $96,000 a year. 4 clients, you can manage 4 clients from your kitchen table. Now picture 8 clients, and now you're nearly at $200,000 a year, still working alone. That's the power of starting high. A small number of clients who pay real money is 100 times easier to manage than a huge crowd of people who are paying you pennies. And high ticket ticket does something else for you. People actually take it more seriously. When someone pays you $2,000 a month, they show up, they do the work, they get results, and they refer their friends. So don't be scared to charge what the work is worth. The AI does a lot of the heavy lifting on delivery, which means your margins are huge. You're not paying a team, you keep almost everything. But there's also one more reason why high ticket wins. With a small number of clients, you can give each one an incredible experience. You know their name, Their businesses, their goals. You answer quickly, you overdeliver. That kind of care is impossible when you're just drowning in thousands of low-paying customers. And it's exactly what turns a client into somebody who stays for years and sends you everyone they know. So start high, serve a few people incredibly well, and let that fund everything you build next. Step number 3, let AI do the work a team used to do. So this is the engine that makes the whole thing run. The reason one person can now do what used to take 20 people is that AI handles most of the actual labor. So your job is to build a simple system where the machine does the repetitive work and you do the thinking. Run everything through 3 filters. First, eliminate. Look at your day and cut anything that actually doesn't move the needle forward. I used to write detailed notes for a group of mine that I later found out nobody ever read, so I cut it out completely. Be honest about what's just busywork. Second, automate. Anything repetitive Give it to AI. Turning a single long-form video into 20 short clips, transcribing every call so that you never lose an idea, drafting your outreach messages, writing your first drafts of your client work, organizing your research— AI can do all of that in minutes. Third, delegate. For a few things AI can't do and shouldn't do, you get help. You can hire a part-time assistant for 5 to 10 hours a week to start so you learn to lead without the weight of having a full-time salary. When you stack these 3 things together, something pretty wild happens. You start delivering professional-level work at a speed that looks impossible for your clients. They think you have a whole team behind you and it's just you and your AI. Now let's look at a simple client. So say you land a client who needs 30 social media posts a month, a weekly newsletter, and all of their customer emails answered. A few years ago, that's 3 completely different hires. Today you sit down with AI, you feed it their brain and their voice, and you generate first drafts of it all in an afternoon. You spend the rest of your time editing, adding a human touch, your taste, and making sure that it's excellent. And you're proud of. The client sees agency-level output. Your actual cost is a few dollars in AI and a couple hours of your undivided attention. And the gap here between what you can deliver and what you have to pay is where the millionaires are being made right now. Step 4, build relationships, not an audience. So a lot of people think that you need to go viral first, right? You think you need a million followers before you can make money. So you spend a year chasing views and end up broke and burned out. You don't need a giant audience for this model to work. You just need the right relationship. So let me give you a model that I teach my Movement Maker clients. Make a list of 50 people who could each be worth 6 or 7 figures to your business. Not customers, connectors, people who already have the audience or the network that you really want to reach. I call it the Money 50 list. Then instead of asking them for anything, you give first. Invite them to be a guest on a simple show or podcast that you run. You record the conversation. You make them look great and you build a real relationship. I've had clients build 7-figure businesses off of a channel with fewer than 50 targeted subscribers because they owned the relationships that mattered instead of chasing strangers and just views. And the give-first move works because it changes your whole relationship dynamic. Everyone else is sliding into people's DMs and inboxes asking for their time, their money, their attention, a favor. You show up often to make them look good. And put a light on their story. You're the only one giving instead of taking at the start, and that makes it different and unforgettable for them. I had a client who did a version of this by simply offering free coaching on Instagram Live just to show off what he knew. And in 2 weeks, he went from signing up 2 people to 55 in his high-ticket program and scaled past $1 million in just a few months. He didn't have a huge following. He led with value and just let the right people come to him. So stop obsessing about your follower count. Pick a handful of people who can change your business. Serve them, connect with them, and watch what happens. Quality relationships beats a giant audience every single time. Step number 5, stay lean on purpose. Here's something that nobody actually talks about. The goal is not to build the biggest company. The goal is to keep the most money and the most freedom. So when you grow a giant team, you create a giant set of problems as well, right? Payroll management, drama, overhead. The whole magic of this AI model is that you can make a fortune while staying small. That's the freedom of this model. You get to design a business around the life you actually want. You don't need a fancy office. You don't need a perfect website. You don't need a finished logo or a big brand to begin. Multimillion-dollar businesses have been launched with none of that. What you need is one clear offer, AI doing a ton of the work, and a few great clients. Keep your costs near zero, keep your team tiny or nonexistent, and let the technology be your leverage. Lean is not the limitation here. Lean is your entire advantage. Think about what that actually buys you. No two investors to answer to. No staff meetings. No rent. No payroll deadline hanging over your head every two weeks. When your costs are nearly nothing, you can survive a slow month. You can take a real risk. You can survive a client who says no or is not a fit for you anymore because you're not desperate to cover this giant overhead. That freedom is its own special kind of wealth, and it's only possible because AI lets one person carry the load that used to need an entire team of employees. The smaller the machine is that you build, the more money. Step 6, start before you're ready. Now, this is the one that actually decides who wins. You can know all of these 5 steps above and still do nothing because you're waiting, waiting to learn more, waiting for the perfect idea, waiting until you feel qualified. And while you wait, someone less talented than you is starting messy and figuring it out as they go. Tony Din didn't wait until everything was perfect. He left a safe, high-paying job and started shipping small products to Amazon. That's right. Products in public one after another, learning from each one as he went. He didn't get it right on the first try. He kept going and getting it going is what eventually got it right. So here's, here's your assignment this week. Not someday, this week, pick your one problem, write down your one offer and have one real conversation with one person who might pay you for it. That's the whole start. Not a website, not a logo, not a business plan, not more research, one offer. Offer and one conversation. The AI tools are sitting there right now, more powerful than anything a billion-dollar company had even just a few years ago, and they're free or nearly free, free to use today. The only thing missing is deciding to move. The window where this is wide open and uncrowded is right now. A year from now, a lot more people will have figured all of this out. The advantage belongs to the person who starts before it's obvious, and that person can be you. So the door is open Now, and it will not stay open forever. The people who win this won't be the ones with the most money or the best degree; they'll be the ones who actually started while everyone else was sitting around wondering if it was real. Pick one expensive problem, charge real money to solve it, let AI do the work of the team, build a few key relationships, and stay lean. You do not need permission, and you do not need to feel ready because ready isn't real. You just need to start today, right where you are, and with what you have. Now let's learn how to build wealth on a low income from Machiavelli. If you're broke right now, it's not because you're lazy or because you're not smart enough. It's because the game was designed for you to lose, and nobody ever handed you the real playbook. The Federal Reserve's own data shows the bottom 50% of Americans own just 2.5% of the wealth in the entire country, which means half the people in the richest nation on Earth are fighting over crumbs. But 500 years ago, a ruthless Italian named Machiavelli Machiavelli wrote down the cold, brutal strategies that the powerful were using to win and keep winning. And today I'm handing you 10 of them, because the day you stop playing fair with a system that was never fair to you is the day everything starts to change. Let me tell you about a man named Ronald Read. He grew up dirt poor on a farm in Vermont, so poor that he hitchhiked and walked miles just to get to school. He came home from the war and spent about 25 years pumping gas at a gas station. And then he worked as a janitor at JCPenney, sweeping floors for another 17 years. He never made much money in his life. He wore the same old flannel coat held together with safety pins and drove a beat-up secondhand car. So when Ronald Read died in 2014 at 92 years old, the people in his small town got the shock of their lives. This quiet janitor had left behind an estate worth almost $8 million. He gave $4.8 million to his local hospital and $1.2 million to the library? How does a gas station attendant and a janitor die richer than most doctors? He spent less than he earned. He bought shares of boring, solid companies. And then he did the hardest thing of all— he waited for decades. He let his money quietly multiply while everyone around them spent theirs on stuff that fell apart. He wasn't lucky. He wasn't a genius. He was patient. He was disciplined. And that combination beats a giant paycheck every single Now you might be thinking, okay, that's great for Ronald, but I'm living paycheck to paycheck. I can barely cover my rent. So how am I supposed to build wealth from nothing left over at the end of the month? Here's what's important to understand. Building wealth on a low income was never about how much you make. It's about strategy. And strategy is the one weapon that doesn't cost you a single dollar. A high income with no strategy goes away. You've watched broke celebrities and bankrupt lottery winners prove that 100 times over. But a low income with brutal discipline strategy compounds into actual real freedom. The amount you start with matters far less than the rules that you're playing by. And most people never learn the rules because the people who profit from you being broke don't want you to. So let me give you the 10 moves Machiavelli would hand you if he were sitting here with you today. And fair warning, they're going to feel uncomfortable because comfort is the exact thing that's been keeping people broke. your luck. So Machiavelli split the whole world into 2 forces. There's fortuna, which is luck, the random chaos that you don't control. And he said it rules maybe half of your life. And then there's virtue, the— your skill, your foresight, your decisive action. And that's the half that you do control. Broke people spend their whole lives praying to fortuna. They wait for the lottery ticket, the inheritance, the lucky break that's going to save them. The strategist does the opposite. You pour everything into virtue and take command of what actually is in your hands. And the very first thing in your hands is information. So start tracking every single dollar that comes in and every single dollar that goes out starting today. Most people who are broke generally have no idea where their money disappears to. And you cannot command an army that you cannot even see. So when you log every transaction for 30 days, you'll find the leaks, the subscriptions you forgot about, the little daily spends that quietly are Bleeding you dry. Plugging those leaks is the easiest money that you'll ever make, and it costs you nothing but a little bit of honesty. All progress begins with telling the truth, and that includes telling the truth about your money. And foresight is the part of virtue too. The strategist doesn't just react to the month; he plays the long game. He sees the moves three years out and acts on it today, while everyone else is only thinking about Friday night. You don't control whether you got Delta. Number 2, see the game exactly as it is. Machiavelli's most powerful rule was to deal with the world as it actually is, not as you wish it were. So here is a cold reality. The financial system is not on your side. It is engineered to keep you spending and borrowing because your debt is somebody else's income. Buy now, pay later, 0% financing, credit card minimum payment, buy now, pay later, buy now, pay later. These things are all designed to look harmless while they quietly drain you for years. So you fight back with what I call rich math. Never ever judge a purchase by its monthly payment. Judge it by its full total real cost. The system trains you to ask, well, what's the monthly payment? Because that little number, it hides the damage. The wealthy ask, what does this actually cost me in total? And what could that same money become if I invested it instead? And then you hunt down your high high-interest debt and you destroy it like your future depends on it. Every dollar you pay in interest is a soldier that is fighting for the other side. Take those soldiers back. Number 3, build walls of discipline, not willpower. So a brutal truth about human beings that Machiavelli understood 500 years ago is that people are weak under pressure. Your willpower will absolutely collapse the moment when something gets hard. And life always gets hard. That's why he never trusted good intentions. He trusted strong walls. So stop relying on motivation to save money because motivation is the most unreliable thing that you can do on your own. Build the wall instead. The very moment that money hits your account, automate a transfer that pulls a set amount into a separate savings account before you can even think about it. Then make that account painful to reach. No debit card attached to it. Delete the app off your phone. The goal is to make saving completely automatic and makes spending that money a genuine hassle. You pay yourself first before a single bill, before a night out. When the structure does the work, your weak moments can't sabotage you anymore. Number 4, move in complete silence. Machiavelli knew that the moment that you reveal your strength, you paint a target on your own back. The same thing is true with money. The second that people around you, they sense that you've got some, they all want a piece of it. Family starts asking for loans, friends expect you to grab every check, and worst of all, you feel this pressure to prove it with a new car or flashy wardrobe. So you do the opposite of what your ego wants. You build your wealth in total silence. You let your money be present but completely invisible. Drive the modest car for a few more years, keep the quiet apartment, wear the regular clothes. Let your bank account grow while your lifestyle barely changes. The broke person spends to look rich, the strategist looks ordinary on purpose and gets rich for real. Think about Ronald Read again. The whole town thought he was just a poor old janitor right up until the day he died. And that invisibility, that was a superpower because nobody ever came asking for a handout and nobody ever pressured him to keep up. Every dollar you don't spend impressing strangers is a dollar that stands guard growing your army. Let them underestimate you. The quiet ones are the ones who win. Number 5, seize assets, don't rent out your hours. The 99% trade their time for money, and that's exactly why 99% of people don't get rich. There are only 24 hours in a day. Everybody has the same 24 hours. So when you sell your hours, your income has a hard ceiling no matter how hard you're working. Machiavelli respected those who seized territory and held it. And in the money game, your territory is assets, the things you own that make money whether you show up or not. So shares of solid companies like Ronald Read bought, a small piece of real estate down the road, a digital product you build once and sell 1,000 times. This is where the pay yourself first money goes, not into savings account to rot, but into ownership. So stop thinking like a worker who rents out your hours and start thinking like an owner who buys things that pay you. Every dollar you put into an asset is another soldier you send on to work 24 hours a day. And unlike you, that soldier never sleeps and never quits. Number 6, be ruthless about your generosity. This one might sting, but you might need it. Machiavelli warned that generosity given carelessly will bankrupt the giver and breed entitlement in everyone around them. So when you're building wealth or on a low income, you simply can't be the personal bank account for your entire circle. Giving money Giving out of guilt drains your reserves and also trains people to depend on you instead of building things for themselves. So you give with strategy, not with guilt. Give when it actually builds something, when it lifts someone towards standing up on their own, not when you're being pressured into doing it. Protect your capital the way that the general guards a treasury that funds the entire war, because the thing that people don't say is staying broke Broke so that you can rescue everybody else doesn't actually help anybody. Get strong first. A wealthy you can help 100 people for the rest of your life. A broke you can't even help yourself, and it definitely can't help them. So it's put your own oxygen mask on first before trying to save the whole plane. Number 7, build the machine, then master one thing first. So the wise don't chase money around all day. They build a machine that commands money to come to them. Ronald Read built a quiet machine out of dividend stocks that paid him whether he was awake or asleep. So the goal becomes to build an automated income that doesn't depend on your sweat. But listen to this carefully, because a lot of people get this wrong. So don't try to build 5 machines at once. When you're starting out, the path to wealth is almost never multiple streams of income. It's not— look at people's stories. It's not. It's becoming absolutely killer at one single thing. The people who chase 5 side hustles All the same time, usually do five of them really badly and burn out with nothing to show for themselves. So pick one skill, one asset, one stream, and you master it until it actually pays you. Then and only then you can take that money and start building the next machine. Like the expression goes, one blade sharpened to a razor's edge beats ten dull blades every single time. Number eight: Pay for speed. Here's a strategy that feels completely backwards when money is tight. Right? But it's actually how achievers win. Achievers pay for speed. So when you're broke, your instinct is to figure everything out for yourself for free. But figuring out alone can cost you years and a mountain of actually expensive mistakes. The single smartest investment a low-income person can ever make on their own is into skills and knowledge, is into yourself, because your ability to earn is the one asset that no stock market crash can wipe you out and no thief can ever steal from you. A $30 book or an online course that teaches you a skill which raises your income for the rest of your life is the highest return you can make on earth. It's not even close. Look at it this way. If you spend 3 years struggling alone to learn something an expert could have taught you in 3 months, that lost time isn't free. It's the most expensive thing that you'll ever buy, and you paid for it with time out of your life. So before you try to invest in anything else, invest in your own earning power first. Sharpen the one tool that produces produces all the others, which is you. Number 9, speak like someone who selects, not someone who begs. Machiavelli understood that power is established by how you carry yourself. So show weakness and dependency, and the world will exploit you every time. So watch how you speak about money. Broke people speak like applicants, hoping, asking, begging for a shot. Wealthy people speak like they select, like they're the prize choosing who gets access to them. You have to retrain your own thinking and language. When you sit down to negotiate a salary, a rate, a price, a deal, you communicate from a place of authority and calm value, even if you don't have a ton of money in your bank account. So stop saying, I was hoping for, and start saying, well, my rate is— stop apologizing for your prices. Learn to say a number and then go completely silent and let it sit there, because the person who speaks first in negotiation usually loses. People will always pay more to someone who carries themselves like they're worth more. And remember, raising your income is the single fastest accelerant on this entire list, and it very often starts with nothing more than how you talk about your own worth. Number 10: Strike now while everyone else is hesitating. Machiavelli said fortune favors the bold and that wealth grows in the exact spot where hesitation dies. The number one reason people stay broke for their whole life isn't a lack of money. It's waiting, waiting for more money to start, waiting for more time to start, waiting for the perfect moment that is never ever coming. So let me be as clear as I can on this. Don't wait for permission. Don't wait to feel ready because ready is fake. You start with whatever you have in your hands right now. Invest $20 this week. Open the account today. Track your first dollar tonight. Here's how it works. You get rich slowly and then you get rich suddenly because the slow part only ever begins the moment you decide to start. The best time, they say, right, to plant the seed was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. How about right now? The story they'll tell about you. The fact that you're starting with less isn't the thing that disqualifies you. It's actually the thing that's going to make your story pretty remarkable. Ronald Read proved that a quiet janitor can outbuild a millionaire. And if a man with a safety pin that holds his coat together can do it, so can you. You have the ability So now you have the responsibility to actually use it. To learn the financial system explained in 60 minutes, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. The money sitting in your bank account is quietly losing value every single day, and the whole system is set up so you barely even notice. The best investment against inflation is to improve your own earning power. The value of the dollar.