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So come up with an idea. Find something that you can do in the American
economy that would make people's lives better and that they would be
willing to pay money for. Build a simple business around it. Start making
a profit.
What you have created is called a "cash cow." You have a business that
generates excess cash. Now, either you milk the cow, or you sell the cow
to someone else. That's it. Suddenly you have become an entrepreneur. Then
either you go relax on your Caribbean island, or you try to start another
one. And it will be a lot easier the second time because you have been
practicing.
Let me emphasize that the
idea does not have to be complex. Domino's is not a complex idea: "We make
pizza and deliver it to people's houses." How simple is that? Yet it has
made millions and millions of dollars. Here are a couple of other
examples:
- Netflix -- "You send us $20 a month, and we will mail three DVDs to
you. When you mail one of the DVDs back to us, we send you another one."
That's pretty simple. The genius behind Netflix is that they got rid of
all the little niggly problems that make you hate video stores. People
liked it.
- Advo -- Now it does not get any simpler that this. What Advo did was
they took a piece of paper. And they folded it in half. And they stuck
some flyers in it -- you know, like grocery store coupons or whatever --
and mailed it to people. That's it. Advo is a HUGE company now -- over
$1 billion per year in revenue.
- Southwest airlines -- This is a little more complicated because it
involves jumbo jets and the FAA and drink carts and such, but at the
start Southwest was a still pretty simple idea. They picked three cities
in Texas and flew from one to the next in a circle. They picked people
up at one city and dropped them off at the next. That's it. Once that
was working, they started adding more cities, and pretty soon Southwest
was changing an entire industry.
- Refrigerator Filters -- I have a friend who makes a very comfortable
living with a little company that sells the filters that go with your
refrigerator. You know -- the little carbon filters that take the
chlorine out of the water before it gets to the ice maker. He takes
orders on the web, ships out the filters and makes a nice profit on each
one because it makes things easy for people.
Look at the
companies all around you. What is McDonald's? "We sell hamburgers." What
is Wal-Mart? "We put stuff on shelves and people buy it." These are not
complicated ideas. All that you need to do is create your own idea, get it
going, turn it into a cash cow and then either milk it or sell it.
Here's how you can get started...
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