What would you do if you had a magic wand that spits out over $300million every day of your life for you to spend to your heart’s desire? This is not utopia.
Officially Jeff Bezos’s net-woth is $124 billion as at today (Wikipedia April 10, 2020). The naked truth is, no one knows the man’s real worth for sure because Bloomberg put it at $130 billion the same day. To put that within context, Bill Gates was worth $102 billion and Warren Buffet, $74 billion.
Jeff Bezos together with his ex-wife MacKenzie Bezos founded Amazon on July 5, 1994. The world was just entering the era of the internet bubble (1995 to 2001).
No one really knew for sure how eCommerce would evolve. The bulk of the technologies were still rudimentary. It required a ton of faith to jump in.
While the fly by night internet millionaire wannabes had all fallen by the way side, as at the time of writing, Amazon’s market capitalization was $1 trillion (CNBC). So what did Jeff Bezos do differently?
When asked why he dropped out of Harvard, Bill Gates said the opportunity the computer era presented was so huge it would never happen again in his lifetime so he had to be part of it rather than stay at Harvard.
Bill Gates set out to become the master of the computer era. In 2007 Harvard awarded him an Honorary Doctorate Degree.
So it also was with Jeff Bezos. He set out to become the master of the internet
Jeff Bezos was already earning over $500,000 per year at a high flying investment firm, D.E. Shaw, when he started researching the internet, circa 1990.
In Winners and Losers, author Kieran Levis recounts that when Bezos was doing the cashflow projection to gauge the feasibility of the yet to be formed company, what he saw was mind boggling.
The company would be growing at over 1000% per year. No matter how he tweaked his cashflow using a technique financial analysts call stress testing, the company would still be growing at a mind numbing rate of 1000% per year.
A strategist who could see 20 years into the future, indeed seeing what others couldn’t, he grabbed his then girlfriend, MacKenzie, jumped into his Chevy Blazer, and headed to Washington to set up Amazon.
He chose the name Amazon so that the company would rank high on yet to be formed Google. As the cliché goes, the rest is history.
So this is what Jeff Bezos did. Just like Bill Gates before him, the Amazon founder noted the trends. He discerned the humongous potential of the internet long before others could even awaken to what it portended.
He concluded the internet or online business was the future and such an opportunity may not present itself again in his lifetime so he had to seize the moment, and he did with ironclad conviction.
While others, including his ex buddies at D.E. Shaw considered him “mad” for throwing away all the opportunities he had at the investment firm. He was the youngest senior vice president at the firm at age 26. But Bezos knew better.
While you may not be able to set up a another Amazon and become the richest man in the planet just yet, there are certain strategies and tactics you can adopt to position yourself for stupendous wealth and success.
My Ultimate Guide To Making More Money Online Than You Can Use In A Lifetime – And Be Happy With The World will show you how.
Three Strategies To Make More Money Than You Can Spend
- Watch And embrace Trends
We are not talking about any trends here but massive trends, the type that alter industries, trade, society and how people live. This is the number one key.
All empires were built on trends. Colonialism, slave trade, apartheid (all sad but true), Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, Ford, General Electric (GE), Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Ali Baba were all built based on trends.
Take Ford as your typical example. Ford got his start as the horse-drawn cart era was giving way to the auto-mobile. The internal combustion engine had been invented. He latched onto the trend and became the richest man of his era.
Bill Gates latched onto the computer era as the type writer gave way to the computer and became the richest man of his era.
Jeff Bezos aware of history latched onto the internet revolution and became the richest man of his era.
Now, another era, the Internet of Things (IoT) is brewing. Will you latch onto it?
- Embrace the “Mind of the Strategist”
I would equally call this strategy the “philosophy of take no prisoners.” The strategist sees in his mind’s eye what others cannot comprehend and goes all out to achieve it. The strategist will do everything lawfully within his power to win. He takes no prisoners.
Again, take Bill Gates as an example. He was willing to jump ship from Harvard to learn coding until his fingers went numb.
According to legend, Gates sometimes learned coding for 18 hours nonstop. He was so determined that some of his buddies left him accusing him of being “too intense.”
The same can also be said of Jeff Bezos. He was willing to invest and run Amazon at a loss for close to 14 years because he could see what others couldn’t.
Not to forget Steve Jobs. He voluntarily left (others say he was sacked) the company he co-founded because others couldn’t comprehend his wishy-washy vision of “leaving a dent on the universe.”
He did go back to safe Apple.
So strategists stay the course and they are glued to their cause. They are like messiahs. Even when their disciples abandon them, they cling to their faith fully convinced of the righteousness of their mission.
Warren Buffet epitomizes this philosophy in spades. He has built and grown his Berkshire Hathaway based on this philosophy since 1965 (55 years).
- Focus on the Customer
Without a customer there is no market. Without a market there is no business. And without a business you can’t make money.
This idea is uncannily simple. You can count companies that pay attention to it in your finger tips. Amongst them is Amazon.
Jeff Bezos builds his empire on the lofty mantra of “it’s always day one” and the vision “to build the most customer-centric company on the planet.” He says it and sticks to it.
With the vision “computer on every desk”, Gates designed software that made using the computer a breeze so you don’t have to be a geek to use a computer.
Technically, it’s called GUI (graphical user interface) but every layman knows it as Windows.
Whether Gates invented Windows or not are straws in the wind.
When Ford took his eyes off the customer by insisting on “they could have it in any colour so long as it’s black” he stumbled massively and GM leapfrogged Ford within a few short years.
You can be insanely wealthy if you can focus on the customer and give her everything she wants.
It was not for nothing that Harry Gordon Selfridge coined the phrase “The customer is always right” way back in 1909.
This is what the late Sam Walton of Wal-Mart fame, who at his time became the world’s richest person, said about customer-care, “The two most important words I ever wrote were on that first Wal-Mart sign: ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed.’ They’re still up there, and they have made all the difference.’’
The customer may not always know what he wants when there is what Andy Grove of Intel fame called an “inflection point”, but you take the customer for granted at your own peril.
Jeff Bezos as we earlier affirmed has built Amazon from day one on the single philosophy of “building the most customer-centric company on the planet.”
You may sometimes spend three hours trying to buy a book on Amazon and get frustrated, but that experience doesn’t detract from Amazon’s business philosophy.
These are Jeff Bezos’s most famous quotes on customer-centricity and how he runs Amazon:
- “If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word
of mouth is very powerful.”
- “We expect all our businesses to have a positive impact on our top and bottom
lines. Profitability is very important to us or we wouldn’t be in this business.”
- “There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and
those that work to charge less. We will be the second.”
So there you are, the three immutable strategies that position you to make more money than you can spend: Watch And Embrace Trends, Embrace the “Mind of the Strategist”, and Focus on the Customer.
The most successful and wealthiest business people of all time, not in any particular order: Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Bernard Arnault, Warren Buffet, Larry Ellison, Amancio Ortega, Mark Zuckerberg, to mention seven, all embrace these three immutable strategies.
A Brief on Tactics
We have covered in broad stroke the three immutable strategies that position you to make more money than you can spend in a lifetime.
The question in your mind now will be, what of tactics? In reply, I’d say, tactics will vary according to the type of business you wish to run or are running.
At any rate, if you wish to dig deeper into the minutest details how to serve the customer with passion, grace and élan, grab Kindle version of my book, Bridges to the Customer’s Heart, dubbed the Customer Service Bible, right here. The paperback retails at $17.57 on Amazon but if you want the Kindle edition, grab it for less than $3 here.
Most people mix up tactics with strategy. You hear about the five forces model, first mover advantage, the six-sigma framework, being technology driven, and the Kano Model.
All these are elegant names for understanding the market. You would not hear business rock stars like Sir Richard Branson talk about models. The only language you’ll hear from Branson is “what’s in it for the customer?”
In this pantheon of contrarian icons is Ted Turner of CNN fame, Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airline fame, and Oprah Winfrey of Oprah fame.
So if you really want to understand the customer and accordingly the market, here are four questions you should ask and continue asking day in and day out:
- Who is the customer?
- What does she or he want?
- How should the service or product be best packaged and delivered?
- What is the path to continuous improvement?
The Japanese perfected these ideas in the 1970s based on the teachings of three masters: Dr. W. Edward Deming, Dr. Joseph Juran, and Philip Crosby.
The uber guru, Tom Peters, popularized the ideas in his “In Search of Excellence”, written with Robert Waterman Jr., and the idea of customer service caught fire all over the world.
So while vision is about seeing the unseen and bringing it into fruition, strategy is deciphering how to get from here to there, and tactics is about how you will shine before the customer, or in broader terms, how you will excel in the market through your everyday action.
Tactics shows you how to bend and dance with the wind. It’s about the day-to-day execution of your goals and plans. How do you wish to add and continue adding value to the customer? How do you want to be perceived?
Experts call this positioning. In summary, focus on the customer and you’ll be fine. No need to complicate anything here. Grab my book Bridges to the Customer’s Heart here and learn everything you need to know about customer-centricity, formerly called customer service.
What You Should Do Right Now?
As you can see, all the billionaires and millionaires, indeed the wealthiest people in the planet are business people.
If you want to be wealthy beyond your imagination, jump off your couch and start implementing that business idea that has been in your head all these years. Jump in with both feet.
Legend has it that when Hernan Cortes, the Spanish land grabber, first arrived Mexico in 1519, he burned all his ship and turned to his co-adventurers, see there is no means of escape, we either fight or perish.
He fought and overthrew the great Aztec Empire. Jump in with both feet. As the Ibibios would say, you can’t be clearing a forest and think about life.
Ah, it doesn’t flow well in English but I believe you understand. In simple terms, you can’t eat your fish and have it.
Let’s be clear, business or entrepreneurship is not for everyone. If you’re not cut out for business, don’t worry, you can still be wealthy beyond expectations.
Download my eBook, Wealth Beyond Your Imagination – It’s Up To You right here to get more. It’s a book that will shock, awe and inspire you.
So if business is not your cup of tea, as Nigerians say, you can still make it BIG. Remember the co-founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak, was not the business type.
He was the tech guy. He left Apple in 1985. His networth today is estimated at $100 million, whereas Steve Jobs was worth $10.2billion at the time of his death in 2011. Steve Wozniak preferred to remain a teacher and a scientist.
Steve Ballmer was hired by Bill Gates in 1981 and is today worth $66 billion.
In the same vein, Steve Jobs hired John Sculley as CEO of Apple in 1983 from his post as the senior vice president sales at PepsiCo. His networth today is $20 billion.
In effect, you can amass stupendous amount of wealth even as an employee through various incentive schemes such as share ownership.
But you better be good to attract the attention of owners or founders. You see, founders may know a particular aspect of a business and may require an outsider with depth to take the reins of a company to take it to the next level.
That is where you come in if you don’t like dirtying your hands by forming a business. As I earlier said, you better know your onions.
However, this blog post is for those who never say die. It’s for those who are willing to jump onto the arena of entrepreneurship and make things happen. Not just anything, but something BIG.
More importantly, this blog post is for those who want to crush it online because that’s the future. And you know what? Nigerians are already crushing it online.
Take the case of Linda Ikeji. One of the few bloggers that saw farther than others about what online news broadcasting or blogging was all about. She started her blog in 2006 and it’s today worth $40 million.
Think about that. If you started as an employee in a bank in 2006, you’d probably be hitting a deputy manager position in your 14th year, earning about N2.5mm per year.
So these are the four things you should do right now:
- Make up your mind to go into online business full time now – no half measures.
- Learn everything there is to know about online business – get my full beginner’s guide here.
- If you’re impatient, get the beginner’s guide summary here. It’s only three pages.
- Be willing to invest a little amount – all you need is a laptop, a smartphone, and data. Get details here.
Here are a few things you need to know about online business. The internet is huge and you can do virtually anything and make it BIG.
Indeed, you’re limited only by your imagination. Remember you must focus on what the market wants – on the customer.
Having said that, here are some models you can consider:
- Market places – like JiJi , eBay or Cars45, Hotels.ng
- A marketing platform – like Jumia, Konga, Amazon.
- Sell things you don’t own – called drop shipping such as AliExpress, Doba, SaleHoo.
- Start an online business – to train and coach others such as I Will Teach You – Earnable .
- Start a blog – to market news, information products, certifications etc. such as Smart Blogger.
Do not dabble into a business that requires lumpy capital outlay at the beginning. Start small and scale up rapidly as your customer base grows. So your best bet is to focus on:
- Online course creation
- Blogging
The two are almost similar, but there are subtle differences. For both instances, this is the summary of the things you need to know as my mentors and teachers Ramit Sethi and Jon Morrow keep drumming into my ears.
We call this THE WINNING INTERNET STRATEGY.
- Create remarkable content.
- Share it with the right people.
- Find what works and do more of it.
You will agree with me it’s not nuclear science. If only you can make up your mind because it all begins with the right mindset.
An African proverb says, no matter how short a person is, he or she can still see the sky. My friend, you can see the internet sky if you can just take the first step: BEGIN.
If you do, you’ll make more money online than you can use in a lifetime like Jeff Bezos – and be happy with the world. Is that too much to ask?
Here is the link to test my online course. If you don’t care, fine. Just do what you can to make it BIG online.