If I had to boil it down to one phrase that would be it. What is the shortest road to wealth? Impact millions to make millions. For better or worse there is no other way around it. Even from the prehistoric times the guy who had the most impact on the people of his tribe, was able to collect the most resources for himself and his family. To be honest things have not changed that much since then.
Look at all the great examples from a few years back like Donald Trump, Richard Branson, Bill Gates or even Michael Jordan, to more modern legends of wealth like Mark Cuban or Mark Zuckerberg. All these people made millions or even better billions, by having a huge impact on the lives of millions of people. Actually every time you track down the source of millions on money, you will always find millions of something.
[bctt tweet=”Impact Millions to Make Millions”]
The concept of this article is inspired by the book “The Millionaire Fastlane“, by MJ DeMarco, who goes in a more in depth analysis, but apart from that, this very fundamental concept is used from many successful entrepreneurs around the world in almost every well executed business model, I happened to study these last years.
By the end of this article, I will cover all the theory behind the “impact millions” way of thinking and moreover – because I love you so much – I will also show you some very simple yet practical examples on how we can achieve that in our modern business environment – you will have to read this article through though in order to get to that point, oh my God I really like carrots!
Scale and Magnitude
So is it absolutely necessary to impact millions in order to build my wealth empire you will ask – Short answer is: Yes and No. Let me explain myself by introducing two very simple, yet powerful concepts to you.
Scale
First one is scale. I can come up with many not that useful definitions, but I am not going to give you a headache with all these. I will only use a simple one we can all remember (I know how you like simple stuff). By scale we simply mean “how many units of something we have sold”.
Yep that really is so simple. Whether it is a physical product we talk about, a service, a subscription or whatever you can come up with, scale means by simple terms how many units of that something we can sell. So it makes perfect sense that in order to earn millions we need to sell millions. By now I think I can hear that little voice inside your brain saying: “big news”…with a grain of irony, but things are not so simple (luckily, because otherwise we would have a hell lot of millionaires around).
So the million dollar question here, (see what I did there?) is: “how do I sell millions?”. The not so obvious answer to that, is by creating value. The word value is always the cornerstone when you want to sell something to someone. All living animals (humans included) can create value if something is useful to someone else. Therefore the shortest road to sell millions of something is to have something of value for millions of people, which will need in order to satisfy one – or more – of their needs.
Let’s look at a very classic example here. Let’s say we have a very famous football player, one of the best in his generation. Although the “value” he has to offer is not actually tangible – you can’t really touch it – it is pretty much there to feel it. He entertains and inspires thousands if not millions of people each day by his performance in the field.
There are many professions like these, driven from people that have the talent or skill to have a big impact on the lives of millions of people. This kind of people like famous athletes, actors, rock stars, even politicians, have made it to the point to be able to impact so many people that society perceives their value to be immense.
Magnitude
Besides scale though, we have one more major factor to count in when we talk about money making. We also need magnitude. (That’s why I said Yes and No in the question before). Here again I will try to make is as simple as possible to you. By magnitude we mean “the profit we make out of each sale”. Like scale before, the profit can be on ANYTHING we sell. It does not have to be a car or a toilet (or a car with a toilet). We can make a profit when we sell a service to someone, like being someone’s personal coach or counselor or the best salesman in town.
Magnitude is a very important concept as well because it can not only create significant amounts of money, but that could be achievable with a few sales as well. The most classic example I can think of, is when someone sells for example houses or luxury apartments. He doesn’t really need to make a lot of sales (in terms of scale) to earn a lot of money. A few very targeted sales of several million dollars each will suffice.
The Magic Bullet of Wealth
Remember the “how to” I promised a few paragraphs before? Well, I think it’s time to give you the carrot now – after all you have earned it.
So please cut the crap and tell me how am I going to get rich dude?
I only have two pieces of advice at this point and I am going to analyze them one by one just below. I always try to keep these simple guidelines in my mind for every new business opportunity which may arise before me.
I am not implying that being done otherwise is impossible but, my experience – and more importantly the experience of very successful people in business dictates these two very important principles.
Leave Middle Class Out
That’s right. When you try to create a new product or service, always aim for low income class or rich people. Middle class is dead and as time passes it will become even “dead-er”. Middle class is a very tricky group to target because of some specific characteristics:
- They don’t like cheap stuff, therefore it is very difficult to use this target group to scale.
- They don’t have enough money to buy expensive stuff, so the impact or magnitude of each sale won’t make a big difference to your business.
If you really want to scale, you really need to look at the low to very low income class. People in this financial bracket will buy all kinds of things as long as they don’t cost much like lighters, chocolates, cigarettes etc. Even better try to give them free stuff by providing the value of entertainment and happiness. Remember the famous football player example? Facebook is another great example of “free” entertaining value giving, that made Mark Zuckerberg one of the youngest billionaires ever.
The second angle to approach this issue, is to aim the wealthy, if you want to leverage your profit per unit or else magnitude. Rich people have the spending power to buy exclusive, usually expensive goods. Their numbers (scale) might not be that big, but their money can be a lot non the less. This second road can have its advantages as well. It could take less effort to convince fewer people and it is considered to be of higher status sales policy.
Actually there is not right or wrong as long as you try to aim at these two target groups. If you want to sell a lot (scale), aim for the masses. On the other hand if you want big profits per unit (magnitude) go for the rich ones. As an added bonus sometimes middle class will either “drop” their standards and use your “cheap” product, or will struggle financially to buy this new expensive gadget, just to look cool at their friends and impress the ladies – between you and me, it is always about the ladies, but you can’t tell anyone, alright?.
My point here is: Always try to find ways to give “cheap value to the masses or “premium value” to the wealthy ones. Both groups are gonna love it. You can make millions by selling pencils to everybody or a few Ferraris to the have ones.
Remove Yourself
My second requirement – and absolutely necessary this time – is to remove yourself out of the money equation. Unless you are Tiger Woods or Silvester Stallone – odds are that you aren’t – you absolutely need to remove you out of the actual money making process. The reason is very simple to imagine, if you have actually read this article, and you have not scrolled down just to drool over this Ferrari.
You Sir are not scalable at all! No matter how many hours a day you work you cannot really scale to impact millions of people, at least not directly. What you really need to do, is to *leverage* your talent in order to impact millions indirectly. You can add tons of value to anyone as long as you use other people’s talent and time, by working with real stars, but most importantly by solving other people problems.
There is nothing more valuable in this world than some smart, talented individual who can solve another person’s problem. Please keep that in mind at all times if you really want to be successful. Other people needs can be your ticket to financial freedom. No matter how hard I try to think, I cannot come up with a single case of someone who made it for good, without adding massive amounts of value to the lives of millions of people.
As a first actionable step try to come up with an original idea of:
- A new product that will help people to solve a very specific problem
- An existing product that you could improve somehow to become better in a significant way
- A new service to help people save time and effort for some specific task they repeat a lot
- An obsolete service that can be revived to add value again
Conclusion
About 1800 words later, I am confident by now that you have imprinted this very simple but ultra important formula in your heads. When we try to make millions – by the way if you don’t care about making millions, you read the wrong blog – we always start by thinking how we can impact as many people as we can in a big way. We can make a lot of money by having a small impact to millions of people, or having a large impact to a few. Either will work, but we, like perfectionists we are, we always aim for both.
The golden formula of wealth is:
NET PROFIT = Units Sold (Scale) x Unit Profit (Magnitude)
Scale creates millionaires. Magnitude creates millionaires. Scale and Magnitude create Billionaires…
Could you really think of any real life examples that someone made millions without using either scale or magnitude? (Lottery and treasure hunting don’t count).
