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Article Contributed by Francis Kier
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Leverage Is The Only Way To Wealth
To build any serious income you have to use leverage. You
accomplish this by spending your time creating and managing
levers. I'd bet that if you are creative enough, you could
probably create a lever on anything that can provide an income.
Let me explain this with several examples.
If you do not have an employee, you are not leveraging your
time. Start leveraging your time in a tiny way with something
that doesn't require complex skills, like a dog walking service.
But get other people to walk the dogs. You never walk the dogs,
you focus on marketing and increasing the number of dogs to
walk, and more walker employees. Then you hire an employee to
handle the marketing and sales duties, and then you'll have a
business that runs on its own without you. You'll have an
absentee ownership model where you have the free time to start
another business to leverage. You have to learn that you can't
run an empire if you are doing everything yourself. The old
quote for this situation is, "The more I do, the less I
accomplish."
If you are not saving money every month, you cannot leverage
your money. Start tiny, take 3% of any income into your checking
account, and move it into a savings account. How are you going
to work your way up into big deals, if you don't have any money
to buy-in to smaller deals? There are ever larger playing
fields, but saving money is necessary to get into the
entry-level business game.
If you haven't converted your ability into products, you are not
leveraging your skills. Start tiny with something that doesn't
cost anything. Like writing an article or a song, whittle an
animal figure from wood, record a speech. Any start will be
helpful that gets you thinking about creating products from your
skills. If you only know services, they can also be turned into
products: books, tapes, software, newsletters, subscription
services, etc. If you only have service skills, you can leverage
them like step one above. But beyond that, you can start
marketing to new market channels by developing your own
proprietary products that I just mentioned.
If you don't have business contacts, then you are not leveraging
a social network. Start talking to people about what you want to
accomplish; I can't remember the source of the quote, but it is,
"He who has the bigger rolodex wins." The more entrepreneurial
business people that you know, the more business opportunities
you will hear about, and thus more financially successful you
may become. More reference material for this article is
available at http://investing.real-solution-center.com.
You can employ non-physical assets that can be leveraged. This
is one area that I use a lot. For example, I have offered my
credit to purchase an income property for a partner to manage,
but we split the income by 50/50. You can offer your credit and
be paid to co-sign on a loan. By having good credit, you have
access to loans that you can use to buy investments.
When you've worn yourself out on those exercises, you can start
figuring out how to leverage everything you have done toward
what you want to do next. This is a critical phase. If you have
an idea, do you start thinking like this, "I don't know what to
do, so I guess I can't do that." Or, do you start to think like
this, "Get my rolodex, and find three people already in the
industry that may be able to point me in the right direction.
Then call my bank and let them know I'll be asking for some
money in the next couple weeks for a new project."
Now, who would you bet on to make quick progress that will lead
to success, and who won't be able to move beyond their own fears
and drop the idea altogether.
About the author:
Francis Kier has an MBA in finance and shares his two decades of
experience with investing and personal finance. More of his
articles are available at
http://investing.real-solution-center.com
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