Starting your own business is often said to be the only path to wealth, but it’s not for everyone. If you prefer to keep your job, don’t despair, you can still get rich.
When I was a future First Generation Millionaire, much of what I read about building wealth made me worry I was missing out by not quitting my job to launch a business.
At the time, starting a business just wasn’t for me, so I had to find another way. And I did.
I accumulated my first liquid cash million by age 43, while keeping my job.
You can get rich from your career.
Many go to work every day not realizing the tremendous wealth building advantages their jobs provide.
Some get trapped in the idea that they’re ‘working for the man’, and therefore they believe they can win the game by doing the minimum to get by.
Regrettably, this causes them to actually lose out because they forfeit two major wealth accumulation gifts, beyond just a steady income, that their jobs can provide.
The first financial gift is that a job diversifies your overall wealth risk.
If you run your own business as your sole means of income, you put your cash, time, and career all into a single enterprise.
If you succeed the benefits can be massive, but failure might mean that you lose your job, wealth, and professional momentum all at once.
Holding a job, and investing your cash to generate more cash outside of work, divides your risk.
If you lose your job, you still have your wealth. If you lose your wealth, you still have your job.
And in terms of your career, the maximum risk is well defined since the worst that can happen is you get let go.
If you’ve kept your skills current, and you can demonstrate how you can create value for a new employer, you’ll very likely recover quickly.
In some cases you might even find a better employer. Who will help you get rich even quicker.
The second financial gift your job provides is much bigger than the first.
At Millionaire Foundry, we believe a key driver of wealth accumulation is to Maximize the Value of You, which involves delivering continually increasing value to someone who’s willing and able to compensate you.
Through professional development, you have the opportunity to learn and hone skills that can increase the quality, quantity, and impact of your output.
This development comes from the daily trial and error of successfully doing your job, as well as formal training opportunities your company may offer.
The second exceptional financial gift from your job is the opportunity for learning and professional development, which is at zero cost to you. You learn on their dime, and on their time.
The company you work for may entrust you with its valuable resources, assets, intellectual capital, and customers, in order to enable you to create value through your job.
In doing so, they take a huge risk.
If you make a mistake, it could cost them thousands or even millions in lost opportunity, resources, profit, or reputation.
By comparison, your personal risk of losing your accumulated cash due to an on-the-job mistake is exactly $0.
The gift of on-the-job professional development is like walking into a casino and playing a game where, if you use the advantages that are in plain sight, you can win big. And you have no chance of losing.
There’s nothing but upside!
With their resources in hand, you get the incredible chance to learn on their dime. Your growing skills can then be used to create more value for them, for a future employer, or eventually in your own business.
And the more value you create, the more personal income you will eventually generate.
Many employees get the chance to: develop, test, or launch expensive new systems, services, or products; learn how to bring in revenue; support teams who bring in big revenue; provide post sale service for the customers who are the organization’s lifeblood; use expensive assets to do their job; optimize the profit from the company’s revenue.
Free professional education. No risk to your cash.
All you have to do is to seize the opportunity and work hard to hone your skill set, and then advance your career.
And the phenomenal news is that this free education happens on their time, not yours. You learn on their dime AND their time!
College is important to personal and professional development, but you pay tuition and you attend on your own time, representing two significant outlays.
During college you may also forego generating income, which represents a huge opportunity cost, a third major outlay.
When you get a job after graduation, you are enrolling in a university of life long learning, where there’s no tuition and you get paid every day to learn.
What could be better than that?
Amazingly, some refuse to enroll in this university as they feel that by doing the minimum and still getting paid, they win.
In reality, they actually lose BIG.
They lose daily training opportunities to increase their output and their income.
They lose the chance for trial and error using someone else’s resources.
They may have 10 years of time spent in their career, yet they’ve experienced only two years of progression five times over.
They miss the exhilaration of delivering big results and being seen as an indispensable part of the company.
They squander a no-lose situation that can never be recaptured.
Ultimately they may forego the chance to get rich by leveraging the many advantages of their job and career.
I’m embarrassed to admit that, early in my career, I lost out on a lot of valuable on-the-job learning.
My reasoning was completely sound, at least in my own mind.
I was working full-time, earning my bachelor and master degrees at night. An entire decade of work and college.
How could I possibly take on that extra project or seize an opportunity to learn something completely new, when I barely had time to work, go to school, and study?
Fortunately, as college wound down, I wised up.
I volunteered to manage that new piece of business that had technology no one understood. Or to do the special project the boss wanted. Or to take on that business segment or department that seemed hopeless.
By volunteering, I unlocked incredible opportunities to rapidly increase the value I was creating. These were learning opportunities that simply were not available any other way.
I discovered I had usually overestimated the pain and suffering associated with such gifts, and underestimated their potential to simultaneously advance my career and income.
And even when there was difficulty involved, I was typically granted great flexibility and understanding, because it was widely understood that the project had certain challenges, and that I still had my core responsibilities to manage.
As a result of seizing these new learning opportunities, my career AND income accelerated, and so did the speed along my wealth accumulation journey.
What I also found is that the self discipline, goal setting, accountability, priority management, and organization skills I gained from all my on-the-job learning would also be foundational to wealth accumulation.
What I learned on the job would help me get rich even faster. Win Win.
Are you using your job to grab this tremendous work benefit?
If you haven’t seized your opportunity to learn on their dime and on their time yet, don’t feel bad.
It’s understandable because life gets in the way. And few employee handbooks highlight this unspoken benefit.
But if you’re serious about building wealth quickly, with the objective to eventually get rich, commit today to leap at the many learning opportunities your job provides.
I promise that if you do, you’ll look back 18 months from now and see the tremendous progress you’ve made in accelerating both your career and your wealth accumulation.
So when you wake up tomorrow, before you head to work, reflect on the two great wealth gifts of financial risk diversification and free professional development that your job offers.
Then commit to making the most of each.
Learn even more about You as your greatest asset for generating wealth at Maximize the Value of You.
Wealth is Freedom!
A First Generation Millionaire