What 3 Billionaires Taught Me About Wealth

I've sat in rooms with billionaires not once, but multiple times, and each and every one of them said exactly the same thing. In this video, I'm going to break it down exactly why you're working harder than you probably should be and what to do instead. So the 3 billionaires I learned from, they all fundamentally said the same thing. It all comes down to leverage. It's not about working hard. It's making sure you have the right skill, the right effort, and the right assets in your business. Effort, assets, and skill. If you have those three things with leverage, that's what really gets you ahead in business. So learning that from those billionaires, it all comes down to everything I learned from, from my businesses that I've built and all my friends that have been around at $10 million, $50 million, $100 million, it all fundamentally came down to those three things. The first thing is skill. It's being able to do something world-class in your business that your competitors can't. And that comes down to time, okay? So have you put the 10,000-hour rule into that skill. So I talk about sales and marketing being the key skills in most founders' businesses, and then being able to attract a high-quality team. But all of these require skill, and skill is not just knowledge. So you can acquire knowledge, you can learn knowledge, but it's by doing the thing. So doing the things that you need to do in your business to take you to the next level. So being able to hire an 8-player team, being able to retain them, being able to build the culture, being able to build the right offer, the simplification of the business as you scale, being able to know that you can make still high profits in a business, build enterprise-level value. All the billionaires I have met all have this aura about them. They've got this status about them. They've got a little bit of swagger. They've got a bit of arrogance. They've got confidence. They've got that self-belief. They've got self-esteem. All of these pillars that you build up over time comes down to your mindset as well. So like having the skill is one thing, but being able to have the skill in your mind of being able to achieve what you want to achieve in life and having this underlying desire to still want to go to the next level. Because when you get a certain level in business, you could, you could really plateau. And most founders I've seen that gets, they get stuck at maybe 300K a year, 500K a year, maybe a million a year. Very few and far between actually get past that million a year barrier because it requires a different level of intensity. It's it requires a different level of skill that you need to keep growing all the time. Personal development is very important. So reading books, getting mentors, being around the right people, upgrading your peer group all of the time, all of those fundamental things that you, you hear about all of the time. These are the things that all multi-millionaires are doing and billionaires are doing. They're in the room with the right people. They're learning their skill all the time. They're obsessed with it. When I first started my business, I didn't have all three things. I didn't have assets. Okay. I had effort, so I could put in the work and I had a bit of skill. And then I was just obsessed with putting in the effort and then learning the skill over time. And that way you had 2 of the 3. And then once you get the skill and the effort right, then you can start building the assets, which is getting leverage in the business. So putting in the effort is just fundamental. All entrepreneurs are working 40, 50, 60 hours a week. In fact, if you're working 40 hours a week, in your business where you're still not even past $100K a month, then you're not going to get to the next level. Okay? Every business owner is still working long hours, but it's not working in the business, it's working on the business. And I know you hear this term all of the time, but it's when you've got assets in the business and you've got leverage, then you're spending more time strategically thinking, directing the business, spotting challenges, spotting roadblocks, firefighting when you need to, but then also always thinking about how do we take it to the next next level? How do we go from $100K months to $300K months and $500K months? So making sure that you have skill and effort dialed in, that is in your control. The assets will come next. When you have assets in the business, you've got brand, you've got capital, you've got a team, you've got recurring revenue. And then that way, that's when you can really fundamentally scale past $1 million a year in the business. When you have all three of these, then it's just all about rinse and repeating, dialing in more effort with the team, and then making sure that the assets in the business are growing without you. So being able to buy back more and more leverage so you can get more compounding in the money that you put into the business. You get a good return out of the business. That brings me on to rich versus wealthy and what the difference is. So rich is you have income that is very dependent on you. So you've got a big cash flow in business, but you are still in the business. When you've got real wealth, that means you've got assets and you've got wealth that can just compound without any effort from you. And that gives you way more leverage. And that's when things compound Faster and faster. And that way you can then work on other pillars of what real wealth is for you. Family, your faith, the people that you're around, the love, and your good health. Like all of these things is when you get wealthy, but getting rich first and getting the cash flow dialed in is still important. But a lot of business owners don't manage to get from the rich to the wealth because they don't have the right assets in the business. They don't get more freedom. The businesses are not really designed by them. They just get stuck in this cycle and the trap of constantly chasing more and more. And that's one thing that I realized when I started building my net worth versus my self-worth. It was how many more millions is it gonna take for me to feel wealthy? You know, there's a quote from a billionaire when he said he felt really wealthy was when he hit $5 million. And that definitely resonated well with me because with 5, it will compound. So even if you get an 8% return of your investment or 9 or 10%, depending on your risk factor, you've got that as a security blanket. So then you can take more risks. So once you really work hard and get to the 5%, although there'll probably be a clip in here from Succession when they say, "You can't do anything with 5%, Greg. 5% is a nightmare." But once you get to the 5%, things just get so much easier. You know, you could never technically have to work again. Even living off a 4% to 5% withdrawal rate, you're good for life, you know, depending on your lifestyle creep. So then it's just taking a little bit more risk but without risking all of your capital. So once you've got that as a nest egg and you've got that invested, then you can take more risks. Okay. So like once you get that freedom number for you, that's when things get a lot easier. Now, albeit like some of you watching might not be anywhere near that figure. Some of you might have surpassed it. Once you hit that, then you just feel more peace and more ease. I talked about it in previous videos, like once you hit the first $100K in your bank account, that's probably one of the best feelings ever. Cause you feel rich. You could, you don't have to work for a year and buy a few things. And then once you hit a million, then that's when you start to think that you can create more wealth, when you get into compounding. And then once you go past 5 and then 10, then things get way more easier. You don't— you definitely don't get stressed as much, you know, like nothing in business can really affect you unless you're taking big leverage risks with your capital. Most entrepreneurs that I know that are very successful, they don't risk the money they've earned. They put that in a safe asset class usually into stocks or property, for example, because the biggest risk you take in your entrepreneurial journey is in your business. But you don't want to be doing that forever where you just— your nervous system's constantly alert. So making sure that you build the wealth, not just getting rich in terms of cash flow, is very important. That brings me on to what does real leverage look like? So what does that look like in my company? So for example, leverage for me is having an empty calendar, picking and choosing when and where I want to work. Not having to turn up for meetings every single day, not having to dive in and firefight, not having to have employee issues. To me, that was real leverage because the business makes money every single day, every single week. It brings in cash, brings in profits without it being reliant on me. Albeit that you as a founder, you still have to be on the pulse of the business, yes, but leverage is having a great team. A lot of my team are remote now. We still have an office in one of the companies, but a lot of the team's remote. So that gives a lot of flexibility for team. We have great assets in the business, which means we've got a great strong brand at the Agency Blueprint brand, Ronald James brand. One's been going 10 years, one's been going far. So they have good assets online, even the website hits, the LinkedIn company profile pages, all of the video assets, all of the documents, all the SOPs, our email list. All of these are assets that I know that if we turned off ad spend for one of the businesses, we still generate great leads, we can still close deals, for example. So that's another thing of leverage is Once you build a company to a certain level, it's easier and easier for you to generate cash and cash flow. And then the rest of the leverage is down to AI. So I've always been big on systems and automation. So before AI came around, we automated a lot of things, you know, with the outreach, the way we communicated with clients. So having AI now, there's just so much you can dive into. Maybe we'll dive into it on another video, but the leverage you can have now being able to systemize your true business with the right SOPs, the right follow procedures, the right backend systems. All of that can be done now with AI and, uh, an offshore remote team. So I'm really big on hiring remote offshore teams. We've, we've built, uh, quite a successful team— not quite a successful team, a very successful team in South Africa. And we've helped hundreds of other business owners do exactly the same with my exact blueprint, step by step. I've of how you hire, train, and onboard offshore talent, because a lot of people get it wrong and they fail at it, then they just give up on that. But being able to do that works really well because your profitability in the business is 3x more than you hiring employees in the US and the UK. So having a remote team mixed with AI, you can then do really 3 job roles within one person if you hire right, and you, you build the right systems with it. So that way you can get way more leverage. Now, there's never been a better time when you've got, especially a service-based type of business, to get so much leverage. Now, there's no excuses for you not to be able to hit great $50K months, $100K months, and beyond with a small and lean agile team. One bit of advice I would give you all as entrepreneurs is if you're going to be pouring in the next 5 years and beyond into your business, make sure that you're doing it with the right sector, the right niche, the right offer, because you could waste the next 5 years working on something that's not going to be highly profitable and it's not going to be sellable. And I think as entrepreneurs, and as I've went through the journeys of entrepreneurship for over a decade now, or even more than a decade, is you only have so many units of energy and passion that you want to put into one business. And I've seen that in the trend, the 3 7-figure companies I've built, it's normally been every 4 or 5 years I've started the next company, then the next company. So you have a timeline really of 3 to 5 years where that's where it's the most passionate that you are with the business. You're going to be working the hardest. Once you get past 5 years, if you're still stuck in that same business and it's not growing, it's going to be very, very hard to, uh, get out of that plateau. So make sure that you're doing a business that is profitable first. Never just a business idea that sounds good. Look at other companies that are doing something already successful and just piggyback and model them. Don't try and be an inventor like Einstein thinking that you've invented this great outreach system or whatever the business model is. Like, just make sure that you just— sometimes in boring businesses is where you make the most money, and be prepared for that to just be boring, but it's profitable. All my companies that I started start from zero, scaled them all to multi-millions and high profit margins. So I talk about having a hygiene standard of 60% profit margins. You want to try and maintain at least 50 to 60% and always just be picking profit first. Some other gurus might talk about or the business people might talk about having this 10-year vision. I don't really have a 10-year vision. It's like, in the next 3 years, where would the company be going? And in this next year, how much revenue and profit can it be achieved with the leanest team and the simplest methodology possible? Always thinking simple, but always thinking about profit. A lot of founders don't even like talking about profit or don't even know what profit they've made last week or last month. I think being on top of the numbers and just being honest with yourself that the business is there to serve you not you serve the business. Most founders make the mistake, put in far too much stress, hours, risk, and they don't get financially rewarded for the business. And they think, oh well, next year the profits are going to come on, next year. No, if the business isn't making profit in year 1, then you've got a problem. There's something fundamentally flawed. So what I would say is don't have this big 10-year vision, just look at it in smaller increments and just be thinking profit first. So billionaires and all these multi-millionaires, they are not different to you. They're not luckier. They just stopped trading time for money. These billionaires, they started to build things that compound. So if any of this resonated with you, drop a comment below where you are in your business right now. Like I said, with these videos, I want to try and give as much value as I can to each founder, but just let me know where you are right now, what your biggest bottleneck is, because every business owner, we all take on a lot of stress, we take a lot of risk. I've been in the trenches the same as you in entrepreneurship. It's, it's a lonely road, so I like to see what community we can build within the comments. So if you enjoyed this video, give it a like, make sure you comment below exactly where you're at right now, what you would like to see next, and I'll catch you on the next video.