What would be your strategy to get wealthy?

What would be your strategy to get wealthy? –@djmainevent

I think a lot of people get lucky on the road to wealth. They build some company in a hot space, and they sell it for an ungodly high number. Think Bebo, which got bought by AOL for a billion and then sold for $10 million a year or so later. Those founders got fabulously wealthy.

But for the rest of us that won’t happen.

The real way to get wealth is to find a customer and perform a service for that customer. Then repeat. My first company found a customer (a company that needed a website) and built the website for that customer. Then we found another customer and built that website. And word of mouth spread and before you knew it we were making websites for dozens of companies. I also always made sure I delivered at least one extra feature that the company didn’t ask for.

One way to get a customer is to help other companies get customers and you charge for that service. If you live by a bunch of gyms, put up Facebook ads for those gyms and then charge them for every customer that walks through the door, for instance.

But, you must get the idea muscle in shape. The idea muscle is like any other muscle. Within 2-3 weeks of no use it atrophies. If you don’t use your legs for two weeks you won’t be able to work. Same thing here.

So every day get to work. Come up with ideas. For yourself, for others, for other companies. Give it a few weeks before you suspect that you might be in shape. Then a few months before you’re ready to start sharing your ideas.

At this point your ideas will be good enough to help other people make money. When you make other people make money, then you will make money. Then you repeat that and it’s a business.

Don’t forget that when you come up with an idea, the idea is no good unless you also have the “next step” and perhaps even the next step after that. Anyone can come up with the idea: I want to set up a small airline between every city in the New York/Connecticut region. But what would the next steps be? Can you do them? This is a gut check to make sure your idea is realistic enough to pursue, whether it’s for yourself or others.