Your Million-Dollar Business May Be Closer Than You Think

TG tells me he has accepted a job selling water-purification systems. He will visit homes bearing gifts — turkeys around Thanksgiving, Easter baskets in April, etc. — and demonstrate the wonders of water filtration.

“I figure I can close two presentations a week. At a thou a close, I can make a hundred grand a year at this.”

“That’s great,” I told him.

“But I don’t want to do this forever,” he said. “I don’t want to work that hard. So I’m studying AWAI’s copywriting course at the same time.”

TG is on the right track — but some of his thoughts about making money and creating wealth don’t jibe with my experience. What I told him might be useful to you:

1. Whenever you are making more than $100,000 a year, you are working hard. You may not be working harder than a guy drying windows in a car wash, but you can’t make that kind of money — even at copywriting, which is one of the most potentially lucrative home-based businesses I know of — without hard work and a certain amount of stress and frustration.

2. Whenever you can make $100,000 a year working for someone else, you can make twice that much working for yourself. If you are getting paid $1,000 per close on water filters, I can assure you that the business is making the same . . . or more.

3. The easiest way to turn a $100,000-a-year sales job into a $250,000 wealth-building bonanza is to study the business you are working for and then either take over as a division manager or start your own “knock-off” business. Find a way to provide better value or pricing and then hire salesmen who are as good as you . . . or better.

In other words, there is no free lunch. If you want to make money — a lot of money — you’re going to have to work hard. The good news about hard work is this: If you like what you do, it doesn’t feel hard. You come into the office charged up and ready to go. You create a daily task list that is probably more than you can handle. (You realize this because you use the ETR system, but you can’t control the urge to do more . . . it’s just so exciting!) You get to work and before you look up, a full day’s work has been done.

TG can turn his job into a very lucrative business, but — in the beginning, when he doesn’t have much income — it will take the guts to make the transition and the persistence to keep pushing. Then it will take a lot of work.

But if he manages his business correctly and learns to become a good leader, he can pass on the tedious work to subordinates and keep his own work interesting. As his business grows, the jobs he’ll do will become more interesting. Eventually, he’ll be going out to lunch and playing golf with his buddies — getting rich and talking about how hard he used to work.