BRIAN SHER

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 HOW TO
MAKE MONEY
OUT OF
THIN AIR

BRIAN SHER
UK Edition Published by:
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First Published in the UK 2005

Copyright © Brian Sher 2002

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 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OFTHIN AIR ili

MONEY-BACK
GUARANTEE
The ideas contained in this book are timeless and
foolproof. They have been tried and tested over and over
again by thousands of people all around the world. I am
confident they will work for you as they have worked for
me, if you are prepared to honestly go on and have a go.
If indeed you have done this and can demonstrate
these ideas did not contribute to improving your
financial prospects, I will be happy to personally refund
you the purchase price of this book.
Life is about constant learning and I look forward to
hearing any comments or other thoughts from you. I can
be reached directly at [email protected]
I hope I can include your success story in my next book.
Dedicated to those who have travelled their own journey, who
have suffered pain, loneliness and defeat, but eventually have
experienced the joy of achievement, success and happiness.

Most ofall, though, this book is dedicated to Fi — you have

a beautiful heart and are rich beyond your dreams.
 Contents
Introduction

Learn from the rich

How rich are you?
Making money in the twenty-first century
If you want to be rich don’t go to school
The fastest way to make money
My business successes and failures — two
very different outcomes with the same effort
You need a rocket to reach the moon
If you can’t sell it, it’s not worth a thing
Twenty habits of the world’s least
valuable businesses 45
10 Twenty habits of the world’s most

valuable businesses 58
11 The world’s most successful and
unsuccessful habits 82
Twenty-eight habits of the world’s least
successful business people 87
13 Forty-Two habits of the world’s most
successful business people 89
14 Twenty-six secrets to making money
out of thin air 159

i) The road to riches audit 194

The beginning 199

Selected reading 200

‘The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena ... who,
at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that
his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew
neither victory nor defeat.’

THEODORE ROOSEVELT, in a speech at the

Sorbonne, 1910
 Introduction
Make Money ... and out of thin air!
I can hear critics sharpening their pencils and cynics
saying, ‘Oh sure, we’ve heard this all before’
This is perfectly understandable, as on the surface
making money out of thin air seems like an unbelievable
claim. To be honest, I was cynical myself when I first
learned of this practice. But what made me look
beyond my initial distrust was that I did not want to
work hard for a living. I wanted to work smarter and
less — to enjoy the finer things in life and to have the
time to enjoy them.
While deciding how to do this, I remembered a
statement my father once made: ‘Never work with your
hands — it will never make you rich!’ Although I was not
literally working with my hands, I knew I was not far off
this in the wealth-creation stakes, as I was working hard
and was not exactly rich. I had a head full of great ideas
and concepts, and was-working at a frenetic pace,
running around selling these ideas. I earned a good
living, but that was all.
So, I needed to learn more. I needed to learn how and
what the rich were doing that I wasn’t. There was
obviously a difference in the way we thought and how
2 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

we operated and, while they loved my ideas, it was still

them making the money and me just earning it!
I set out to try to change all that by studying what
they did, the way they thought and the way they
operated. After a while I realised their habits were not
rocket science and it was entirely possible to make money
out of thin air.
Please don’t think I am suggesting a get-rich-quick
scheme of any kind in order to make money. Nor 1s it an
easy path to success, but it is certainly easier than
working hard for years and years with nothing to show
for it in return. Too many people find themselves in this
situation far too late in life.
If you wish to attain success, it requires nothing more
than changing your attitude as you approach your next
business venture. And this change will be worth millions
of pounds to you.
How do I know, with such certainty, that it is
possible? Because what I am about to teach you is what
the rich and super-rich do every day.
I have encountered it many times in daily life, and
read stories about it every day in the newspapers. The
rich are masters at it. And if you read this book and take
it all in you can become a master, too.

WHERE TO FIND GOLD

It took three years to get around to writing this book, after
many requests to follow up my previous book, Whar Rich
People Know and Desperately Want to Keep a Secret.
 INTRODUCTION 5]

I did not succumb to these requests as I felt I could not

add to what I had said in that volume, or to what
thousands of other business authors have said over the
years. Literally billions of words have been written since
Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich was first published
in 1960, and if you were to go back and read this
outstanding book, it’s all there — nothing more could be
said about acquiring wealth. Until now.
As I met new challenges in my life over the
intervening period, it became obvious to me that there
are new ideas that can help making money a little easier.
And although every success principle has already been
written about ad nauseam, becoming rich is obviously
still a complex topic or everyone would be successful and
rich.
The world is a fast-changing place, and riches are to
be found not necessarily in knowing the principles, but in
the clear, strong and definite application of those principles.
The chronic failure rate of start-up business is a
testimony to how important the application is. This is the
focus of my book, as there are always new ways to apply
timeless ideas.
Welcome to making money out of thin air.
4 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

chapter 1

LEARN FROM THE RICH

‘JUST MAKE MONEY?
How many times have you heard people use the words
‘make money’? I just want to make money. Or, I need to make
more money. Thousands of times, I'll bet, and you've probably
said them to yourself.
Although the words spoken might be identical, what
‘poor people’ (that is, people with a ‘poor’ mentality) mean
when they say them is completely ditterent to what the rich
mean. The ‘poor person’ looks tor ways to do the only thing
he or she knows how — that is, to sell more of their ime. And
this can mean only one thing: working longer or harder.
When a rich person speaks about making more money,
what they mean is very different from the poor person.
When rich people use the words ‘make more money’ they
are talking about ‘creating wealth’. They never mean selling
their time.
By the time you reach the end of this book I am certain
you will agree that there are millions of pounds ditference
between these two identical statements — ‘making more
money has a double meaning, and that meaning depends
on who is saying the words.
 LEARN FROM THE RICH 5

UNLEARN A ‘POOR’ MENTALITY

Most of us are prepared from birth, by our parents and
our schooling, simply to conform. Society teaches us
nothing more about money other than to go and get a
job — that is, to sell our time.
Whether we join one of the so-called professions
(law, medicine, accountancy) or whether we sweep floors
in a factory, it amounts to the same thing: when we stop
working, it (the money) stops.
We spend thirteen years at school and leave knowing
how to do little more than survive financially. Since the
majority of us are employed and have ‘jobs’, the majority
of us will simply sell our time for the whole of our lives.
This ‘time sale’ keeps us ‘poor’ (or unrich). It is passed
on to us by our parents, and we will pass on to the next
generation and the next ... And so the ‘poor’ mentality
continues.
Ironically, though, every day we wake up and dream
of being rich. We observe the guy or girl in the new car
that ‘costs more than our house’. This sparks our desire to
become rich. We imagine what it would be like to have
more money than we know what to do with and, for a
brief time, relieve ourselves of reality by playing make-
believe and becoming_a child again.
For most of us, this is as close as we’ll ever come to
achieving riches. We soon snap back to the reality of
mediocrity, held back by a fear of stretching the
boundaries. But the relative few who do not lose their
dream in this way will set off on a different journey — a
6 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

journey like no other they have ever experienced, a

journey so challenging, so demanding, and yet so exciting,
that it brings new meaning to the way they live their
lives... They decide to go into business for themselves.
Unfortunately, in the end many of these dreams are
shattered too, when a business ends in failure. The majority
who fail do so not because of a lack of dreaming, not even
for a lack of desire, but for the lack of one simple thing ...

KNOWING WHAT RICH

PEOPLE KNOW
Those who go on to succeed, do so because they know
one thing that others don’t, and that is how to make money.
What’s more, they don’t make money the hard way; they
seem to do it effortlessly — out of thin air.
Making money out of thin air is possible if, and only
if, you believe it is possible.
And I will demonstrate to you
throughout this book how this can be done, by anyone
willing to practise the ideas that have made many people
millionaires.
Many people never stop to question what they are
doing. They simply get up in the morning, go to work and
do the same thing as they did yesterday. Then suddenly
one day they get the idea that they can become overnight
millionaires by investing in shares or property or get-rich-
quick schemes.
The fastest way to make money and become rich is
in fact not through shares or property investment — these
are slower methods to create wealth. The fastest way to
make real money is through starting or building a
successful business.
 LEARN FROM THE RICH uf

Here’s an illustration of the average kind of return

you can achieve from various types of investments per
annum. Notice I have listed both income and asset
growth, as it is not the income but asset growth that
creates wealth for you.

Investment Income return Asset growth

Bank 6% O% p.a.
Property 2/70 10% p.a.
Shares 10=15% 20-2070 pia.
Own business = 100—200% 500-1000% p.a.
or more
There is no doubt that the fastest way to get rich is
by making money out of thin air through building your
own business asset. But not just any business will be
profitable: some businesses are not worth anything,
although they are undoubtedly successful. The business
you start or build must become valuable to someone else in
order to make you rich.
Take, for example, a brain surgeon who has his own
medical practice. People go to this surgeon because ofhis
or her skill and reputation. The surgeon may turn over
many millions of pounds per year and live well, yet this
business is worthless to someone else and therefore not
going to make the surgeon rich.
Just going into any business for yourselfisnot a sure-
fire way to achieve wealth. Indeed, for many it a sure-fire
way to quick failure and the loss of everything they have
ever worked for.
8 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

Statistically, about 90 per cent of people who start up

a business make an elementary mistake, and this mistake
is made well before the business ever begins. At best, this
single error will end up costing hundreds of thousands of
pounds, at worst it costs the entrepreneur everything.
But this costly mistake can easily be avoided by learning
from the mistakes of others before you.
By the time you have read this book, you will know
how two people can go into business at the same time,
and even expand their businesses at the same rate, yet
within two to three years one business will be worth
millions and the other worth virtually nothing. The same
time, effort, energy, focus and care have been expended
by the founders of the businesses, yet one will be millions
of pounds richer, the other a lot poorer.
This single idea is worth millions of pounds to
anyone in business or contemplating going into one. The
secrets of making money have never been like this
before, and have been kept a carefully guarded secret by
those who know how to make money out of thin air.

STEALING FROM THE RICH TO

GIVE TO THE POOR
This book is based on my observations of rich and
successful people. I have written it to provide you with a
wealth of insights into the thought patterns, ideas and
habits that are common to all those who have made a
success of their business lives.
It 1s different from every other book on creating wealth
in one very important respect: it not only exposes you to
multimillion-dollar ideas and ways of conducting your
 LEARN FROM THE RICH 9

business and life that will richly reward you, it also provides
you with a unique opportunity that no other book has ever
offered before... It gives you a step-by-step formula so you
can apply these ideas for yourself. It will not just leave you
hanging in the air by telling you that you can and must do
ite
This book will specifically lead you to the only
conclusions you can make — that if you wish to achieve
your goal of making more money in life, you have no
choice but:
* to think differently
* to know what rich people know well.
And what do rich people know? That working
harder is not the answer to making money — it’s learning
how to make money the fastest way you can ... and that
is out of thin air.

AGSEGREISEITE!
Michael Wrubleski (founder of the Sydney Kings
basketball team — the man who revolutionised the sport
of basketball in Australia) on one occasion said, to my
surprise, ‘Brian, there are no secrets in life. Everything 1s
out there ... If it’s a secret it’s just that you don’t know it
yet, but others do.’
As the founder and managing director of Vision
Publishing, a major Australian business publisher, I came
across timeless ideas that have directly and indirectly added
greatly to my life. Over the past eleven years I have been
fortunate enough to come into contact with almost all the
great business writers and self-development educators
working in the field today. I have read hundreds of books
10 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

on business success, and met many of their authors. I’ve

created international seminars with some of the leading
business and management thinkers in the world.
It’s not just meeting great minds and reading their
books that has given me inspiration. I’ve also been lucky
enough to build a successful business myself from
scratch, to make it grow, and in the process to work with
some of Australia’s leading business people — and, of
course, make money out of thin air.
I have had successes and failures on a daily basis, as I
still do today. (People are shocked to discover I still fail.)
These great experiences mean that I’ve lived and worked
both in a world of ideas and in the practical world of
business. I’ve had the chance to taste both, and to take
what I can to make my life as successful as I can. This
experience has allowed me to move on to new and
exciting projects and opportunities as a person, with
greater knowledge and fewer boundaries.
All the while I have been making notes, collecting
ideas and keeping them in a secret file (Gt’s a-secret
because only I know about it). Because of these
opportunities I feel fortunate to be able to bring together
my ideas in a new way in this book. I have connected
these ideas — ideas of enormous value — share them with
you in a form that will hopefully give you a fresh way of
thinking about money and success.
So, let’s begin right now with a critical important
question...
 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR 11

chapter 2
HOW RICH ARE YOU?
‘We are, all of us, richer than we think we are.’
MICHEL De MONTAIGNE
I wish to re-state my position on becoming rich so you
understand my priorities in life. While being rich is
important, it is not the most important thing — if you
doubt this ask anyone in a cancer ward in hospital.
What does being rich mean to you?
Are you rich if you have more money than your
parents? Your friends? Your neighbours? Or do you have
to be as wealthy as Richard Branson — or Bill Gates?
Would you be rich if you could afford a new car, or
would it have to be a Porsche? If you could pay all your
bills every month? Perhaps you wouldn’t consider
yourself rich until you never had to worry about
spending money ever again. Being ‘rich’ can — and does
— mean very different things to different people.
Almost everyone you know wants to be richer than
they are at the moment. Almost everyone wants to make
more money. But it is important to understand that being
rich in life isn’t simply about making more money.
Many people mistakenly believe this is the case.
12 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

Money is something you can use to get things done

and the more money you have the more things you can do.
Many things are more important than money: a
loving partner, a supportive family, friends you can trust
and depend on, a career you enjoy ... You might be rich,
but without these things you won’t enjoy life as much as
you could. Happiness is largely based on non-material
things: your health, your attitude to life, your feeling of
self-worth and your core values and beliefs. And living
life to the full is about focusing your emotional energy
in positive channels, and directing this energy into
everything do you, at work or play.
I’ve often heard people say, ‘If I had more money, I'd
be happy. But they are wrong. Don’t misunderstand me —
of course money makes life easier. With money you won't
lie awake at night worrying about the bills and you will
feel more secure. Money can give you opportunities, too,
such as the freedom to move in circles barred to poorer
people, or to have experiences out of the reach of others.

MONEY CANNOT BUY HAPPINESS

Many people lose sight of this. They make enough money
to afford an enormous house, but it doesn’t feel like a
home. They can throw a successful party for dozens of
acquaintances with expensive food and wine, but have no
one to confide in when they feel lonely. In the end they
may realise — far too late! — that they have wasted their
lives pursuing riches, when they wanted happiness instead.
There is a big difference between being rich and
being happy, and the difference is:
 HOW RICH ARE YOU? 13

* being rich is Getting What You Want!

* being happy is Wanting What You’ve Got!
If you think accumulating money will bring
happiness, think again. If you are rich in possessions but
poor emotionally or spiritually, you are a bankrupt soul.
Happiness is about a balance in all aspects of your life,
material and emotional. Each individual must find the
balance that is right for them. Only then will you be
rich. If you are ‘financially rich’ you can pretend that you
are happy, and may even mislead others into believing it,
but you cannot kid the most important person: yourself.

WHO IS RICHER?
This book has been written for those who are looking
for a balance between happiness and wealth, who are
willing to work to achieve this, and who commit
themselves to the effort necessary to become rich. Just
remember, right now before you go on, that the world is
full of people who are much poorer in material things
than you — but who are extremely happy nonetheless.
A wise man once said, ‘I do not envy people who
have more money than me, but I am envious of people
who are happy, but you may not necessarily be happy if
you are rich.
People who pursue happiness through a mistaken
belief that money will deliver it, not only never reach
their happiness goal, but the acquisition ofriches actually
takes them further away from this goal than they ever
could have imagined. You can recognise these people, I
am sure — their friends and family are usually also
muddled about money and happiness. Such people have
14 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

very little understanding of true values, equating

spending money with emotional satistaction.
Kenny Rogers, the famous country and western singer,
said in an interview that to be rich you need to ‘love what
you do, have somebody to love and have a future to look
forward to’.A very powertul formula for everyone, | think.
Remember that other people’s goals are not your
own. However well-meaning another person may be,
you must follow your instincts about what is right tor
you. It is easy to adopt somebody else’s dream but, unless
it is also your dream, it will not lead to happiness.
It can be hard to reassess your life in such a way. You
may find you have to retrace steps along your lite’s path
as a result, leading to financial or emotional dithculties,
before you can strike out for your goals once more. But
such difficulties will be temporary hiccups if you are able
to put your life back on track towards your true goals.
I stress, though, that profound emotional happiness is
the only goal worth striving for. Nothing else matters.

A DARING ADVENTURE
Helen Keller said: ‘Life is either a daring adventure or
nothing at all!’
There is no doubt that life is a daring adventure. And
this is how the rich approach lite. They see life as a game
— a game they wish to win. They are never left
wondering ‘what if?’.
You must decide how you wish to live your life. This
is your God-given right, and every day you wake up you
make that choice for yourself. |
 HOW RICH ARE YOU? 15

Some people choose to take the safe road, and life for
them is good when it is constant, structured and
predictable. Others choose to look on life as an adventure,
hoping and praying — even needing — that each day will
bring them new and ever more exciting challenges. This 1s
what “turns them on’, this is what makes them tick, this 1s
what gives them life and a reason to get up in the morning.
For those who choose the predictable path, nothing
could be more crazy, or stressful, than to live this way, yet
for those who choose an unpredictable existence, a life of
structure and predictability would be worse than a prison
sentence.
Each to their own. However, I assume you are
reading this book because you are one of those restless
souls, who needs to seek adventure, although you will
have regretted it many times, wishing you had not
embarked on such a risky course and promising yourself
it would be the last time — yet, given half a chance, you
will jump right into the next one.
To some this is a burden they carry around their
whole lives, while to others it’s just what they have
to do. Either way, these people are the ones that
‘make things happen’, risking failure, criticism and
ridicule throughout their lives. Just a few hundred
years ago they would have been burned at the stake,
or excommunicated: —
The world needs these people, as without them no
progress would take place. If they were not prepared to risk
everything to create something that nobody has envisaged
needing or wanting, we would not have many of the great
comforts and conveniences we take for granted today.
16 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

Consider this.
The chief engineer of the British Post Office said in
1876:‘We don’t need a telephone, we have plenty of
messenger boys.’
In 1943 the chairman of IBM, Thomas Watson,
predicted a world market for just five computers.
The chief engineer of IBM in 1968 commented
about a microchip: “But what is it good tor?’
Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, said in 1970 that
home computers would be a waste of time.
Both Atari and Hewlett-Packard turned down the
idea of a personal computer presented by the
developers of Apple and told them to go back to
college.
The great Bill Gates forecast in 1981 that personal
computer memory of 640K should be enough for
anybody.

Be daring or be nothing at all.

 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR iy

chapter 3
MAKING MONEY IN THE
215? CENTURY
WHAT YOU NEED TO SUCCEED
To achieve success fifty or sixty years ago, even ten years
ago, required a completely different way ofthinking than
it does today. Why? Fierce competition.
Competition is everywhere now and it’s growing fast.
Today, business works more like the ‘law of the jungle’ than
ever before. Only the fittest will survive. There is no room
for complacency or second best. If your business 1s weak it
will die or be chomped up by a stronger or more aggressive
competitor.
To make matters even worse, customers are more
educated and demanding, and indeed your competition
may not be who you believe it 1s any more. Your competitor
is not just the rival business on the opposite side of the road
that sells the same products as you, but every other business
out there, whether or not they sell the same products as you.
In the twenty-first century, ‘retail’ competes for the
consumer’s dollar with ‘entertainment’.
‘Your competition is Disneyland, McDonalds or
Sears’. Your reaction to this may be the same as mine was.
18 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

How can anyone suggest these companies, thousands of

miles away, are competing with me when my business 1s
absolutely nothing like theirs?
The answer is simple. Disneyland, McDonald and Sears
(and thousands of others) set an incredibly high and ever-
increasing standard in customer service and expectations.
Once your customer has experienced their level of service,
the service they were once happy with from you is no
longer good enough. And your customer has thousands of
other choices — unless you continually lift your game.
‘Yesterday’s world records are today’s qualifying times.
This is as true in business as it 1s in sport.

We can no longer afford to be close enough

to be good enough.We need to be good
enough to be good enough.

HOW TO MAKE MONEY

There are only five ways to make money that I know of.
You can:
* inherit it or marry it — if you are lucky enough
* obtain it illegally, either by theft or fraud, both of which
are risky as well as unethical
* invest your savings — usually profitable, so long as you
have the right financial skills, good advisors and plenty
of patience
* work — but this won't make you rich without leverage,
which I will cover later (see page 61)
* go into business for it — which won’t make you rich
either, unless you know the right rules.
 MAKING MONEY IN 19
THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

John Paul Getty set out the basic rule of wealth creation
in his book How to Be Rich: you must be in business for
yourself. He made it clear that you will never end up rich
if you are an employee. People who have amassed wealth
through a business have always understood this. But there is
more to the point than meets the eye, and this is the entire
purpose of my book:

Going into business won’t automatically

make you rich, but it is the fastest way
to achieve this goal — if you get it right.

WHY SOME PEOPLE NEVER

GET RICH?
Statistics predict that of those in the workforce at present,
about five per cent will be independently wealthy at
retirement. Think about that statement: only five per cent of
people aged sixty-five will be able to support themselves
financially without a government pension or other
assistance. How depressing! Age creeps up on you, especially
as you approach forty or fifty and, in panic, you suddenly
realise that you are not going to be in that 5 per cent.
What are the reasons behind such a low percentage
being able to retire comfortably? Why is financial
independence so hard to achieve? The answer is simple —
education has failed the vast majority of people. They have
never learned.
¢ how to make enough money
¢ how to keep it
¢ how to use it wisely.
20 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

chapter 4
IF YOU WANT TO BE RICH
DON’T GO TO SCHOOL
In high school there was a migrant boy in my class who
quit school at thirteen.We all thought this kid was crazy.
He was destined for a low-paying job, we all agreed! I
had the good fortune to meet him later in life. I was
happy to discover he was far wealthier than my peers at
school who had remained within the education system —
including those who had joined the various professions.
I discovered through this serendipitous
meeting that if you finish school, get a
degree, join the workforce at twenty-four
and stay there, you will never financially catch
up the ten years you would have had if
you had begun work at fourteen!
As children everyone — in Western democracies — is
given a basic education. We learn reading, writing,
mathematics.We are not taught many important life skills.
However, we're expected to take our place in the world of
industry or commerce and get a job — or join the dole queue
if we're unlucky. We have no skills in entrepreneurship; no
ideas of how to set up our own business.
 IF YOU WANT TO BE RICH 21
DON'T GOTO SCHOOL

The education system doesn’t prepare us to make our

way in business. Schools require kids to learn formulas,
not to do any independent thinking. The topics of
making and keeping money just aren’t addressed at our
schools and universities. Even so-called ‘business courses’
concentrate on management skills and_ reading
spreadsheets rather than the nitty-gritty of making
money.

HOW DUMB PEOPLE BECOME RICH

Is there any link between wealth and education? All the
evidence seems to show that there isn’t. A university
graduate may command more money in his or her first
job than a sixteen-year-old apprentice, but when it
comes to making serious money, education isn’t a factor.
Never confuse lack of formal education with lack of
intelligence or knowledge. People who make a lot of
money, enough to be financially independent, are
educated. They may not have been taught what they
know at school or university but there’s another way of
gaining an education, and I call it attending the School
of Wealth.

IT PAYS TO BE A DROP OUT

There are numerous stories of people who have become
fabulously successful in business without a formal
education beyond school.
Take Tom Monaghan. Tom opened a small pizza shop
in 1962 when he was just twenty three years old. He had
no degree, no experience and just enough money to get
started. Initially things did not look good: his first week’s
22 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

sales were just £99. By 1987, however, Tom’s business

had grown to 2500 stores around the world, and turned
over £2.5 billion in sales. This grew to 5500 stores and
£3.5 billion in sales in 1997. In 1998 Monaghan sold 93
per cent of his business — now a chain of 6100 stores —
and still had no ‘education’.
So where did he get the knowledge that made him
successful? Wealth education is about going out and
trying things, not being afraid to take risks, learning from
your mistakes — and your successes.

SUCCESS IS SO SIMPLE
Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy’s hamburger chain, left
school after year ten. He began his education at the age
of twelve, working at a lunch counter.
He spent time as a cook in the army, worked in several
restaurants and as a manager of a KFC store, which led him
to open his first Wendy’s store in 1969. His stores today
number more than 4020. Yet one thing he notes about
education is that many people, especially those with
degrees, outthink themselves. He maintains that success is
not about complicated theories found in university lecture
rooms. Success, he believes, is sumply knowing what people
want and helping them get their money’s worth — simple!
‘I know how to make a great hamburger, he says.*We
give customers good food, clean restaurants, polite
service at a good price.
Really! Do you need to go to university to know
this? Of course not, but success is about knowing this
deeply and intrinsically and building your whole
business based on these principles.
 IPYOU WANT TO BE RICH 23
DONT GOTO SGHOOL

How can you learn the principles? Study the

successes. Successful people write autobiographies, and
they generally set out their business principles clearly
there. It’s not an ideal way to learn. Face-to-face is better,
but it is a place to start. As time goes by and you gain
more experience, you will manage to meet your role
models and learn more.
It isn’t a secret: throughout history students have
assimilated what their masters have done, branched out
on their own and improved on past practices. And it’s the
only way you can fast track your education.
Don’t just concentrate on the successes of others.
Learn from their failures too. Study how they spend their
money as well as how they make it. Use their experience
— it can be invaluable.
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 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OFTHIN AIR 25

chapter 5
THE FASTEST WAY TO
MAKE MONEY
You can make money by playing the stock market or
investing in property, yet the fastest way to get rich is by
going into business for yourself.
But going into business for yourself is not enough.
You need to go into the right business and set it up in the
right way from the start, or there is a 90 per cent chance
that you will fail.

WHY PEOPLE DON’T MAKE MONEY

-— IN FACT, MOST LOSE MONEY
The statistics published about new businesses are
damning: four out of five of such enterprises fail within
five years. And of the remainder, four out of five of them
will go under within the next four years.
This means that of the one million or so businesses
now operating in Australia for example, only about 40 000
will still be open for business in nine years! It seems
unbelievable, doesn’t it? But the rest, 960 000 of them, will
have closed their doors — (voluntarily or through a
liquidation), merged with a competitor, been bought out or
in some way have moved into another business.
26 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

But that’s not the most worrying statistic: of those

remaining businesses, most of them aren’t making a
profit. It has been estimated that of the 40 000 still
operating, about 15 per cent or so — remember, that
means just 6000 businesses from the original million —
will be making a significant profit. The other 34 000?
Hanging on, breaking even, or losing money.

Before you can ever hope to make money,

you must understand why people lose
money — so you can avoid repeating
their mistakes.

WHY DO SO MANY
BUSINESSES FAIL?
I’ve seen it all before. Probably so have you. People
full of energy, full of dreams, who decide to give up
their job, start their own business, become their own
boss, and become rich in the process. They know they
are good at what they do, they understand the
marketplace they are pitching their product at — why
shouldn’t they succeed?
They are full of enthusiasm and the desire to create
wealth. That’s their dream, usually to make a million or
two, enough to live comfortably, with a beach house, a
boat and)tast came.
It’s not unusual. Many thousands of people set up
their own businesses every year. They start a company,
offer a product or service and wait for success to roll
their way. All too often, it doesn’t.
The dream evaporates
in front of their eyes.
 THE FASTEST WAY TO MAKE MONEY 27

What goes wrong?

The new entrepreneur sees others succeed, so
believes that he can too. It can’t be that difficult, can it?
Michael Gerber examined the reasons why businesses fail
in his insightful book The E Myth, and concluded that
many were due to a condition he called ‘entrepreneurial
seizure’.
People who succumb to entrepreneurial seizure, are
often those who are very good at their job. They are
excellent plumbers, architects, pastry cooks, computer
sales people. They had been trained to do their jobs and
had acquired skills through years of experience. But being
the world’s best plumber doesn’t mean you have the skills
to run a business. In business you need to cope with
employing others, to find a niche in the marketplace, to
deal with the resultant paperwork, and to keep your
vision alive and the business growing. Running a business
is a skill, one that must be learned, and all the budding
entrepreneur’ previous skills and experience may be
worthless when it comes to this new challenge.
And those who suffer an “entrepreneurial seizure’ take
big risks. Businesses don’t just need a telephone: they
need premises, equipment or stock, furniture. All the little
things add up — entrepreneurs need to consult lawyers
and accountants, getting letterhead paper and business
cards designed and printed. To get the business off the
ground they use their savings, borrow the money. And the
only good security the bank will accept? Their home.
It’s an exciting time and they get carried away with
the setting up of the business, but haven't thought
through the most critical points:
28 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

¢ how they will attract customers in the first place

¢ how they will keep them, and
¢ if they do manage to succeed, is this business one
they can sell profitably?
The result: very quickly the budding tycoon realises
that they haven’t got a viable, expanding business. They
have a job with no prospects. And it’s a job where they
have to work harder, for less reward, than they would
ever have dreamed of doing for an employer. They can’t
take holidays, not even proper weekends off. If they don’t
keep working at this increased pace, the result may be
financial meltdown, bankruptcy, the loss of their house.
Family life suffers from this stress.
And there’s no way out.
It’s usually far too late to start learning how to run a
business when you’ve already made fundamental
mistakes. But if you don’t learn how to do it properly —
and quickly — the business will fail.

ONLY THE BRAVE OR FOOLISH

GO INTO BUSINESS
We've established that success or failure will depend not
on how well you know your job, but whether you can
master the skills of running a business. Let’s now take a
realistic look at what “being in business’ really means.
Most people who go into their own business simply
have no concept of the problems that will arise. They
have had no experience of running a business, so cannot
prepare themselves for it. The skills are not taught at
school! Coping with the day-to-day running of a
 THE FASTEST WAY TO MAKE MONEY 29

business will be the most difficult challenge they have

ever had in their lives.
However successful a business looks from the outside,
it will have problems. No business runs itself, and these
problems have to be addressed constantly. And the health
of the business will depend on how you address these
problems, and being able to move on despite them.
Being in business is not all glitz and glamour. It’s a
constant battle to overcome problems and obstacles. This
is the reality and don’t for one minute think it’s any
different. That’s why it’s called business and not sport.
However, it doesn’t hurt to think of the challenges of
business in a similar way to how we view sporting
challenges. This can help alleviate some of the seriousness
and negativeness that can creep into your day when you
focus solely on problems. If you approach your business
with a sense of problems. If you approach your business
with a sense of fun as you would a sport, you will find
you will enjoy the challenges more and find creative
solutions a lot faster.
30 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

chapter 6
MY BUSINESS SUCCESSES
AND FAILURES
TWO VERY DIFFERENT OUTCOMES
WITH THE SAME EFFORT
Let me share my experience with you. I put in the same
effort into two businesses but experienced two very
different outcomes: one success and one failure. Some
important lessons may be learned by contrasting these
personal experiences.
Having begun a career relatively late in life, after first
studying at university and then travelling, I found myself
behind my colleagues in the ‘getting a job stakes’. It was
1989, and there was a recession. People my age who
managed to get the jobs that were available had more
hands-on experience than I had.
After months of doing the rounds, I felt I had little
hope of getting a job, which led me to despair. The
conclusion I came to, after trying conventional avenues
of seeking employment, was that the only alternative was
to set up my own consulting business and to become
self-employed. Many people who find themselves in my
situation do just this.
 MY BUSINESS SUCCESSES AND FAILURES 31

It was great! I went from being unemployed to being

self-employed — a better option. Very soon, however, I
realised that I did not have a business after all, but simply
a job working for myself. This had some benefits, yet
none of them were immediately going to help me reach
a position of financial security or make me rich.
This ‘business’ gave me much-needed cash flow, yet the
income I earned was dependent on personal effort and the»
selling of personal time, which was no different to being
employed in the conventional workforce.

A SINGLE CHOICE THAT KEEPS

PEOPLE POOR
I did what many people do, and it keeps them in the
cycle of poverty or running faster on the treadmill oflife.

The worst possible option you can take in

choosing how to become financially
independent is to sell your time.
It makes no difference if you are selling your time
because you are employed in a job, or have your own
consulting business, or any business where you sell your
time to anybody else. This includes many professions,
such as doctors, dentists, lawyers, plumbers, accountants —
all well paid yet very poor at being able to get rich from
their activities.
People in consulting businesses can earn up to
£500,000 per annum or more, and live well, yet are not
wealthy. They depend on their ongoing ability to sell their
time in order to maintain their expensive lifestyles. A nice
car (leased) and nice house (heavily mortgaged), kids at
32 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

private schools and maybe a little money left over to buy

some shares — these people are no better off than someone
earning less who is employed in a job. The consultant may
drive a new BMW and the wage-earner may drive a new
Ford but, frankly, there’s not a lot of difference in their
financial situation.
Having had this life-changing realisation, I made a
conscious decision that my consulting business was going
to be short term until I could find a business that was
time leveraged. By ‘time leveraged’ I mean a business
where the income that was earned was not directly
linked to my personal effort.
After approximately two years of looking I came
across an opportunity, which I named Vision
Publishing.
This idea behind Vision Publishing was to
summarise “business =bookss and “sell” thesey “by
subscription to busy executives (busy selling their
time). This was a great business, as it had many of the
attributes of some of the most valuable businesses in
the world. (Much more on this later.)
I built up the business, and five years later sold my
shares to my partners.
This single event taught me the biggest lesson about
making money out of thin air,and one I wish to ram home
to you throughout this book. It is a lesson that up to
that point — even while expanding the business — I was
not aware of.
 MY BUSINESS SUCCESSES AND FAILURES 33

The number one principle in creating

wealth is: Never build a business — build a
valuable asset to sell.

This is how you make money out of thin air.

The payment I received was the biggest cheque I had

ever seen in my life. Receiving the money brought this
point home to me loud and clear.
34 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

chapter 7
YOU NEED A ROCKET TO
REACH THE MOON
Can you fly to the moon? Of course not. Or you can?
If you had a rocket, and years of training, then
perhaps it would be possible to fly to the moon.
However, without a rocket it’s impossible. In fact, you
cannot even fly next door without some sort of vehicle.
And it has to be the right one. Imagine trying a moon
launch in a 747 jet. It’s a great vehicle, but no matter
what you do a 747 just won't make it into space.
In order to make money you need the right vehicle
and that vehicle needs to be a business, but — as I have said
before. = not just any. business, Yow=need to be im 4
business that has many of the right attributes, one that
will absolutely maximise your ability to make money out
of thin air.

THE FATAL ERROR THAT

KEEPS PEOPLE POOR
Throwing off the shackles of a job, taking control of your
life by becoming an entrepreneur and going out and laying
it all on the line with your own business is not the answer.
Not all businesses are equal and businesses do not get
YOU NEED A ROCKET TO REACH THE MOON 35

up and make money on their own. There is a lot more

to it. This is like trying to reach the moon with a kite.
Making money requires you to have the right skills
and the right vehicle. The fatal mistake many people
make, either due to a lack of money or not thinking the
process through, is to go into a business that requires
them to sell their time or to make money from their
personal effort.
If you are contemplating going into business, there is
only one reason to do this — to create wealth. The
successful achievement of this goal will give you absolute
personal freedom, something everybody aspires to. In
other words, essentially you want to get rich not for the
sake of being rich but so you can choose how and when
you work and how you wish to spend your time, freeing
you for the things you really want to do in life. You could
spend more time with the kids, your partner, play golf or
tennis, relax, travel, or whatever it is in life that fulfills
you.
It is hard to argue that anyone wants to go into
business for any other reason other than to create wealth,
in order to gain personal freedom to do what they choose.

WHAT DOES ‘MAKE MONEY’ MEAN

‘Make Money’. Let’s get down to it — what does
this mean?
As I outlined earlier, ‘poor people’ get making money
confused with earning money. The rich do not!
There is a big difference between the two. Making
money is not achieved by focusing on earning an income.
It is done by focusing on building an asset. Anyone can
36 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

start a business. But building this into a valuable business

asset requires a totally different mindset, which you need
to have from the outset.
What is the difference between a Business and a
Business Asset? It is simple.
¢ A Business is a money-producing organisation that is
centred on a single individual and his or her personal
efforts. My consulting business fell into this category. Any
business selling time or products that is based on a single
person’s effort — or unique skill — falls into this trap.
¢ A Business Asset, on the other hand, is a money-
producing organisation that is not centred on a single
individual and his or her personal eftort. It 1s centred
on built-in systems that anyone can operate and
administer. It is thus easily transferable or saleable
without the purchaser needing special skills. My
publishing business fell into this category.
There is a world of difference — and the ditterence is
massive 1n terms of the wealth you will create and the lite
you will enjoy.
Why am I spending so much time on this point?
If you are going into business and about to make the
biggest decision of your life — to throw off the perceived
security of a job, with its predictable weekly income, in
favour of going out on your own and risking everything,
working longer and harder, with more stress and financial
risk then ever before, you may as well get paid as much as
you can for this risk. Many people, however, do not!
And the best way to get paid for this is to build the
most valuable business asset you can.
What you do and how you do this is up to you. I will
provide you with a powerful step-by-step approach to
 YOU NEED A ROCKET TO REACH THE MOON 37

maximise your chances of success and to minimise your

risk in the following chapters.
At this stage the point I do wish to make is ...

The only reason to go into business is to

make money out of thin air.
You must not accept any other reason for embarking
on this perilous adventure. It is an adventure, after all,
that can sap your energy, drain your emotions and put
you into bankruptcy quicker than anything else if you
get it wrong. Your goal in going into business is not to earn
money. It is to make money out of thin air by doing two
things simultaneously:
* generate an income; and
¢ build a saleable asset.
At first, it’s not even important to make a profit. Take
Amazon.com: since its inception, Amazon.com has never
made an annual profit, yet it is valued, as of February
2002, at £4-6 billion.
Obviously, in order to build a saleable asset you need
to generate an income. This means you must sell
something for a profit and continue doing this. Most
importantly, though, you need to ensure you are building
your business in a way that means it is fully systemised,
by which I mean it does not rely on you or your personal
effort to keep it running and generating the income.
If you are able to do this you will have successfully
built a saleable asset.
38 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

chapter 8

IF YOU CAN’T SELL IT, IT’S

NOT WORTH A THING
Consider this: what would your house be worth if no
one wanted to buy it? What would it be worth if you
discovered it had been built over a toxic waste dump?
There would be no buyers — your house and land would
be worthless.
If you were going to build a house from the ground
up you would look for a piece of land that was in a great
position, with views, close to transport, shops and
schools, convenient for friends and family to visit. Then
you would build a house that was appealing in looks, size
and living areas and had all the modern conveniences.
Why? Because you know houses like this are in good
demand and, if and when you wanted to sell it, you
would get more than it cost you to build, making a great
capital gain.
Just as you have a choice about where and what type
of house you will build (or buy), the same thinking must
be applied to your business. And in making this choice
you need to consider upfront how you build a business
for maximum resale.
 IF YOU CAN’T SELL IT. 39
IT’S NOT WORTH A THING

For your business to become a saleable

asset it needs to be highly tradeable, and
for it to be tradeable it needs to be fully
systemised — able to run without your
personal effort — or, better yet, without
you being needed at all.
Sounds simple? Yes, yet very, very few business people
manage this, as not all businesses have this ability to be
leveraged. Therefore you need to be careful about the
type of business you select. For example, how do you
systemise what a dentist, doctor or barrister does? Not
easily. Therefore it is unlikely they would get much for
their business so, by definition, these businesses are not
good saleable assets, and I would advise you not to go
into these sorts of businesses.
Contrast this with Microsoft. Do you think Bill Gates
goes in to work to develop the latest version of
Windows? Microsoft is a great example of a business
with huge saleable — 1.e. tradeable — value.
Many businesses have great cashflow yet the owners
are unable to sell them as they rely on, or are perceived
as relying on, the efforts or reputation of one individual.
This makes them almost worthless.
Beware of falling into this trap, as it will cost you
a fortune.
I had a client who owns a chain of very successful
jewellery stores that were worth far less than they should
have been. Why? Because it was successful due to the
reputation and the perceived personal touch of the
owner. The whole industry knew this and admired my
client for his success and sales productivity, yet it was
40 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

difficult to find a suitable buyer. No competitors would

buy the chain, nor would venture capitalists, as they
knew that under their management the stores would not
produce anywhere near their current turnover. So,
despite its success, the client has been unable to sell this
business at the price he works.
The net result is that the owner has an exceptionally
good income as long as he continues to put in personal effort,
but he has built an asset that is less valuable than he
hoped it would be. Eventually he will sell this business,
but for far less than it is worth.

YOU MUST NOT SELL TIME,

YOU MUST SELL BOXES
The world’s most valuable businesses all just make a
product once and then sell it over and over again.
They sell ‘boxes’. I do not literally mean boxes,
although in many cases this is what you get. What I mean
by this is that they all just make the product once and sell
it many times over again.
Now consider musicians or sportsmen and women.
They sell their time, right? Wrong! They package and
leverage their time and sell boxes. Musicians record their
songs and sell these hundreds of millions of times over, and
receive royalties. Rod Stewart has sold over 100 million
albums. It would be impossible for him to have earned the
type of money he has made by selling tickets to concerts.
Paul McCartney is the top UK music millionaire, with an
estimated £500 million fortune, again made up almost
entirely of royalties.
 IF YOU) CAN'T SELL Tr 41
IT’S NOT WORTH A THING

Boxers get paid tens of millions of pounds for a one-

hour bout. How? Through leverage of time by the sale of
the syndicated TV rights.A single world-title fight can be
televised and viewed by hundreds of millions of people
around the world — again, an example of highly
leveraged time.
Packaging and leveraging time is the quickest and
smartest way of making money out of thin air. Making the
product once and selling it again and again allows you
to earn ten times, 100 times, even 1000 times what you
could earn by selling your time and, most importantly,
your business becomes a very valuable, saleable asset as
a result.
When I explain this concept at seminars, I always get
strange looks and asked about only ever making the
product once.

You should only ever design or make your

product once, then let the system make it
over and over again.
You must ask yourself: is the system making your
products, or are you? McDonalds makes millions of
hamburgers each day, yet the production of these
hamburgers is fully systemised and it is the system that
makes them, not the founder Ray Kroc or the new
owners today. Now, contrast this with our brain surgeon.
The surgeon is obviously a brilliant person and gets well
paid, but every time he or she operates, the product
needs to be tailor-made for the patient. There is no asset
created and therefore no ability to sell his or her business,
nor the opportunity to make money out of thin air.
42 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

I hope you are getting the picture. If you take an idea

and build it into a business that is systemised and saleable
because it is tradeable, and you do this in just a few years,
consider what you have done.
Correct! You have just made money out of thin air
because you have taken nothing but an idea and turned
it into an asset for which someone is prepared to pay you
hundreds of thousands — or millions — of pounds.

BECOME RICH BY EARNING LESS —

EARN £20,000 RATHER THAN £100,000
Let’s assume you are earning £60 000 a year in a job, and
you give this up and go into your own business, but now
you are only able to draw, say, £20 000.
Many people would feel far worse off. You might
think your venture into business has been a failure.
However, if you are able to sell your business after three
years for 240 000 you are im tact far, tam better oll:
You have now earned £100 000 per year, not £60 000
per year. What if you are able to sell your business for
£,2.4 million after three years? You do the maths. This
is entirely possible if you adopt the advice in the
following chapters.

WHAT IS YOUR EXIT STRATEGY?

This is a vital component of the value of your business.
The last thing that goes through anyone’s mind when
looking to start a business is how they are going to sell
it. There is enough to think about just trying to start it
up and make it survive the first couple of years. Not one
in a thousand people who start or go into their own
 IFYOU CAN’T SELL IT. 43
IT’S NOT WORTH A THING

business have any plan of how they might sell it until

it’s too late.
This is a very big oversight. It is somewhat
understandable, yet unforgivable if you are seeking to
make money out of thin air. From a ‘making money out of
thin air’ perspective this question needs to be addressed
not when you are in business but before you get into
business.
If this is not considered up front, you will find it
more difficult to attract seed or venture capital, as no one
is going to invest in your business without an ability to
get their money out in a two to five year period. Of
course, once you have started your business you may
decide that you never want to sell; however, if you
structure it well from the outset, at least you have a
choice, and at best you have a very valuable asset if you
decide to change your mind.

AT THE END
Begin where many people don’t. Begin with the end
in mind.
What this means is that you need to look at
businesses that are the most saleable and the most
tradeable — and therefore the most valuable. And ask
yourself: What do the most valuable businesses have
in common?
You can, as I have done, study the world’s most
valuable businesses and produce a list of the traits or
attributes they have in common, that make them the
most valuable to a purchaser or investors. If you look at
businesses such as Microsoft, McDonald’, Telstra,
44 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

Starbucks or Wal-Mart, you will begin to identify traits

or habits that make them so valuable.
In contrast to this, you should also study businesses
that are difficult to sell and therefore have no real value.
These will not help their owners make money out of thin
air. And it 1s precisely these businesses that are the most
common and are for sale everywhere. Just look in the
classified section of any newspaper. It’s full of them.
 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR 45

chapter 9
TWENTY HABITS OF THE
WORLD’S LEAST
VALUABLE BUSINESSES
The bonsai shop in Bellingen has recently gone broke.
Let me tell you about Bellingen. It is a small town
35km inland from Coffs Harbour in northern New
South Wales. The local population is 11 420 and, apart
from a few celebrity neighbours, like Russell Crowe and
George Negus, it is not a high socio-economic area. It is
therefore screamingly obvious that opening a_ bonsai
shop reflected very little other than the owner’s interests,
not the needs of the typical local customer. It certainly
went against everything I am teaching in this book. So,
one wouldn't need to be a genius to predict the demise
of this business even before it started.
In my opinion, to make such a shop work you would
need a far larger population catchment, one of at least
100 000 people, with a greater cultural diversity, as a bonsai
business is addressing a niche market. Niche markets
typically only work in heavily populated areas — this 1s why
we see extremely specialised stores in places such as New
York, with a massive population base to sustain such a level
46 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

of specialty. The smaller the population, the greater the need

for diversity in the product or products you're offering.
Now, while I am making an example of the bonsai
shop that no doubt left its owner financially worse off, this
example is no different to literally thousands of businesses
all around the country that end in failure. Over the years,
I have seen quite a bit of business failure. According to the
Insolvency and Trustee Service of Australia, more than
26 000 people filed for bankruptcy in 2001, making it the
worst year on record, and many of the bankruptcies will
have been caused by business failure.
Failed businesses are always forgettable and have no
real excitement or brand. And they all make the same
mistakes, have the same bad habits (there are, of course,
exceptions to every rule and you may find there are
businesses that defy my findings, but this is not
common). These are the habits you must avoid in your
own business if you wish to make money out of thin air.
So let’s look at these mistakes and at the world’s least
valuable businesses. Their bad habits essentially fall into
about twenty different categories.

1. SMALL MARKET
There is nothing wrong with identifying a good niche
market, as outlined above. In fact, that’s how the best
small businesses get a toe-hold in their marketplace, but
there’s a world of difference between a winner — like the
Stanley Street Butcher in the Sydney suburb of St Ives —
and the Bellingen bonsai shop.
Whereas the bonsai shop had no target market, the
Stanley Street Butcher sells kosher meat and brands quite
 TWENTY HABITS OF THE WORLD’S LEAST a7
VALUABLE BUSINESSES

familiar to people from South Africa which they can’t

purchase anywhere else, and St Ives has a very large
South African population. This gives the butcher a point
of difference, which has enabled him to survive outside
the mainstream.
However, the world’s least-valuable businesses focus
on a very small market segment, with very little upside
potential. Examples may include your local motor
mechanic, clothes shop, solicitor, watchmaker, shoe
repairer and hamburger store.

2. COMMUNITY ‘ME-TOO’
PRODUCTS
The world’s least valuable businesses are usually sellers
of products or services that have no real differences or
advantages (or certainly none perceived by the
customer) from commonly available big brands. They
can only ever capture a relatively small percentage of
the market and they can’t compete on margins. For
example, you'll always be struggling if you are
producing a cola drink, however pleasant, in a
marketplace over-run by Pepsi and Coke.

3. POORLY LEVERAGED PRODUCTS

SELL TIME
Poorly leveraged businesses sell products that are made
over and over again, or they will be businesses that sell
their time. Here are a few examples.
* It takes twenty minutes to give a £6 haircut. And
thirty to forty-five minutes to do a shampoo, cut and
blow-dry.
48 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

¢ It takes a real-estate agent approximately six to eight

weeks to clinch a sale of £300 000 or less.
¢ It takes one month to hand-make a £400 patchwork
double-bed quilt.
¢ It takes six months to build a house — three months
of paperwork and council negotiations, and three
months to build it.
¢ It takes seven to ten minutes for a chef (in an Italian
restaurant) to prepare a £10 dinner.

4. NO RESIDUAL INCOME
Some businesses always ‘look for the next sucker’. The
examples come from big cities like New York and Hong
Kong, where the owner-operator has to close a transaction
fast because they know they will never see you again. There
is no plan or ability to make repeat sales and the focus 1s on
one-time-only sales. It might work in the USA with a
population of 260 million, but it won't work in the UK.
I call these transactional focused businesses, where they see
their customers as a transaction, not a relationship. These
businesses have to bear a very high cost of acquiring new
customers — they have to be situated in high-traffic and
thus high-rent areas. Repeat business is a foreign concept
to them, yet that’s where the value of a business lies.

5. POOR SYSTEMS, LABOUR

INTENSIVE
I have mentioned this before in the book and will
mention it again, as it is so critical. Businesses that create
no value for their owners are ones that have no — or poor
 TWENTY HABITS OF THE WORLD’S LEAST a?
VALUABLE BUSINESSES

— systems in place to handle the processes of their

business. It becomes far more time consuming and
therefore costly to run and operate such a business, as it
generally results in people with high skill levels
performing tasks that could be done by less skilled,
lower-paid people. It therefore requires a business to
become far too dependent on a higher skilled labour
force.

6. USUALLY DEPENDENT ON ONE

OR TWO PEOPLE
Businesses with no value are usually one or two person
dependent for all or most functions of the business. I
have heard people use the term ‘chief cook and bottle
washer’. This is not far from the truth. If you plan on
setting up a business that ends up like this, ask yourself:
who would buy this from you?
I think the answer is obvious.

7. PEDESTRIAN CUSTOMER SERVICE

Poor customer service is the end result of the sort of
business described above. In businesses that are
unleveraged, and therefore unsystemised, customer
service eventually suffers as the owner gets overrun with
so many details that he or she forgets — or does not have
the time — to attend to the customers.

8. NO BRANDS
Low-value or no-value businesses have not built a brand
or have no brand recognition. These businesses are
50 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

usually known only by their generic type, such as ‘the

pizza shop down the road’ as opposed to Pizza Hut, ‘the
bread shop’ as opposed to Bakers Delight, or the ‘chicken
shop’ as opposed to Nando or Oporto.
I saw one of these nondescript bread shops going
broke once, in Melbourne’s Glenhuntly Road, Caulfield.
The owners ‘did a runner’. They had sold cheap bread
and they had no point of difference with other bread
shops. There was no merchandising and no attempt at
brand recognition. If there is any branding associated
with such businesses it is usually signage provided by big
companies whose product they sell. The small business
covers their point-of-sale area with free promotional
material provided by big corporations: this might make
Coca-Cola even more famous, but the business loses its
identity in doing so.
9. FOLLOW THE LEADERS
These businesses are characterised by their lack of
outstanding features. They never seem to stand out. Instead
they simply react, following their competitors’ lead, and never
innovate or take the lead themselves. They don’t understand
the dynamics of business and usually end up in the same place
as the ‘horse and buggy’ — sooner rather than later.
10. ATTRACT ANYBODY STUPID
ENOUGH TO WORK THERE
Low-value businesses place no or little value on their
employees, if they have any, and don’t spend much time
training or attracting them. They usually have high staff
turnover and low morale. These businesses see their staff
 TWENTY HABITS OF THE WORLD’S LEAST St
VALUABLE BUSINESSES

as a necessary evil and an overhead they don’t want but

put up with because they have to. They only have staff to
do things they don’t want to do —‘the dirty work’ — and
offer no motivation or career opportunities. They usually
end up with students, backpackers or transient staff
looking for some short-term cash so they can move on
as fast as they can. Such companies don’t realise the huge
cost of this to their business.
11. REWARD POORLY
This very much overlaps the point above, as low-value
businesses don’t want to pay much, so end up staffed by
people that can’t get a job elsewhere — 1.e. with ‘someone
nobody else wants’. This is not a great way to run a
business. ve heard these business owners complain they
can never find good staff and there are no good people
out there. This is simply a poor mindset. Think about it.
Why would talented people want to work in a dead-end
job that is poorly paid and going nowhere? They don’t.
If your business can’t afford to reward well, perhaps you
should be thinking about the business you are in.
12. LOW MARGINS
Low-margin businesses have nothing special that attracts
a customer to shop there particularly. They sell mostly
‘me-too’ products and therefore price becomes
important in the customer’s decision to purchase. Such
customers have no loyalty: they can — and will — simply
switch to a competitor, as quick as a wink.
Here’s a great example we see every day. Think about
your last petrol purchase. You probably made your
52 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

decision to buy fuel where you did because it was one

cent lower than another service station’s price fifty
metres away, saving yourself a whole fifty cents on your
purchase by making a switch. Low-value businesses lose
customers for just a few cents, which forces them to cut
their prices to keep customers returning. Being in this
position drives margins lower and lower, until a point
where a business is living on margins that are virtually
break-even and the owners are working for free.

13. MANY COMPETITORS

Using this service station example (don’t you think it’s
ironic we still call them service stations when you get no
service at all?), you can see the point becoming clear.
When you buy petrol you will generally go to your
closest or most convenient service station. You don’t even
think about the brand because you don’t care as long as
it is cheap or cheaper than anywhere else.
When you do shop there, you barely get greeted
by the poorly paid cashier or owner who hates his
business. This service station looks and feels the same
as every other place you might visit. There is no
attempt at up-selling or cross-selling (getting the
customer to buy something extra on impulse by
suggesting they might like to try it). When was the
last time you went to a service station and they tried
to sell you other products in the store you didn’t pick
up yourself?
These low-value businesses have many competitors,
are generic and customers will simply go anywhere to
buy their fuel.
 TWENTY HABITS OF THE WORLD’S LEAST 53
VALUABLE BUSINESSES

14. STAGNATION
When was the last time you drove into a service station
and said to yourself, “Wow, I’m impressed’?
I'll bet it wasn’t in the last ten years. They usually
look a bit tired, dirty and run down. Many of them end
up being bought by developers, as the land is more
valuable than the business. This is the only way service
station owners have made money out of thin air in the
past — if they were smart enough to become real-estate
investors by owning their land and sitting on it long
enough to realise a capital gain.
Wouldn’t you be surprised if you drove into a
station and someone ran over to fill your petrol tank,
cleaned your windscreen, topped up your water and
asked you if you needed anything from the shop before
you got on your way? Would you pay a little more for
that, or at least tip them and definitely go out of your
way to buy there again?
Sure you would! But unfortunately it does not
happen, as these owners are so busy shaving their prices
they see staff giving service as something they don’t want
or need.

15. NO THOUGHT ABOUT EXIT

STRATEGY
Let’s say you are an accountant who has realised you've
got little chance of becoming a partner in a Big-Five
firm. So you decide to open a practice in Warragul,
Victoria. How are you going to create a saleable asset out
of this, especially if the business depends on your
54 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

personal effort, or if the clients you have are there

because they like you?
The answer is you won't. You will feel good about
having clients as friends but will have a business that is
virtually worthless, with no chance of making money
out of thin air.
There are businesses like this peppered all over the
UK. The owners have to work like mad to make them
viable. The business pays a marginal wage, keeps the
owner-operator in food and rent, with a simple lifestyle,
but turnover can never build to a significant sum.
16. NO CUSTOMER BASE
Like petrol stations, newsagencies have no brand loyalty.
They cannot determine their fate. They have no identity.
Newsagents are literally not ‘allowed’ to put special-
interest newspapers or magazines ahead of the Murdoch
or Packer press. And no one would want them to.
Furthermore, they have no unique selling point.
When was the last time you went into a newsagency
and the person behind the cash desk collecting £1.20 for
a newspaper attempted to get you onto their mailing list?
Even if they did, they would not know what to do with
it. The poorest businesses simply don’t know who their
customers are, so ask yourself: what have they go to sell?
17. POOR MARKETING
The poorest businesses’ idea of marketing is to open up
their stores in the morning and hope people come in.
They don’t have the budget, or the knowledge, to
develop their marketing. In fact ‘marketing’ is a word
 TWENTY HABITS OF THE WORLD’S LEAST 55
VALUABLE BUSINESSES

they have heard of, but they have never really bothered
to find out how it can help them.
It often amazes me, especially when I see it
happening with bookstores. The owners have access to
some of the greatest books in the world on business and,
guess what? They never even read them. This is like
going into your local fitness centre, meeting the owner
and discovering he or she is completely out of shape and
in poor health — it just doesn’t make sense.
18. CUSTOMERS ARE A HASSLE
I have heard people in business saying, “Business would
be fine if it weren’t for those damn customers’.
And they don’t mean the odd one. These people are
usually in low-value businesses and are overworked
because they have no systems to handle any sort of
volume. Even normal customer requests for ‘service’
seem to be a hassle for them. They resent giving service
as it saps their personal energy and they begin to hate
their customers. They know it’s time to get out, but can’t.
They are trapped. They cannot simply leave, as their
life savings are tied up in their business. Sooner or later
their business will be forced to close, as the business
owner will run out of energy or customers — or both.
19. DON’T BUILD RELATIONSHIPS,
JUST ‘DO TRANSACTIONS’
Would you be surprised if you bought a new car and
received a follow-up call or visit from your car dealer six
months later to ask if everything was still all right and
whether you were enjoying your new car?
56 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

I would. In fact, if Iwas sitting down I would fall off

my chair. | have bought both cheap and expensive cars,
and I can tell you this has never ever happened and
probably never will. It’s no coincidence, then, that I have
never bought a new car at the same place twice.
Why does this happen? The sales culture of these
organisations is not focused on building a relationship.
The sales staff are purely interested in their commissions,
getting the deal done, and moving on. The salesperson
who sold you the car does not care that in two to five
years you will want a new one and would return if a
relationship had been built, because by this time he or
she is long gone from the dealership, selling something
else as a one-off deal.
20. HARD SELL OR NO SELL
Finally, in low-value businesses there may be a ‘hard-
sell or no-sell’ strategy. Because low-value businesses have
no great competitive advantages they usually need to
employ such tactics: they try to sell quickly but if this
doesn’t work, they then ignore the customer. These
tactics are used by short-term thinking people who are
desperate to make a sale. Alternatively, they may just play
the numbers game, not bothering to sell at all, just
waiting for a customer to buy simply because of the
cheapest price on offer.
A car salesperson using such tactics can be
characterised by a cheap suit and shoes that don’t look
right with it, or as someone who does not attend to you
when you walk into their showroom, summing you up as
Just another ‘tyre kicker’ there to waste their valuable time.
 TWENTY HABITS OF THE WORLD’S LEAST 57
VALUABLE BUSINESSES

CONCLUSION
I am sure by now there is not a single person who has
not experienced all or some of these twenty habits of
low-value businesses.
Every time you are out shopping or come into
contact with these sorts of businesses, you will be able to
immediately identify one or more of the habits for
yourself. Keep a look out, as they are not hard to spot,
and when you see them consider how much business
their owners are losing by continuing to persist with
these habits, what it must be costing them in sales ... and
in building value into their businesses.
58 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

chapter 10
TWENTY HABITS OF THE
WORLD’S MOST
VALUABLE BUSINESSES
In contrast to the previous chapter, let’s take a close look
at the habits of the world’s most valuable businesses and
what makes them so valuable.
The wealthiest companies in the world are capitalised
in the hundreds of billions of pounds, which places a
huge value on these businesses, and brings great wealth to
the owners. However, total capitalisation is not the most
important thing to look at when you are assessing how
valuable a business 1s: look instead at the price earnings ratio
(p/e ratio), printed beside the stock price in the business
pages of newspapers. You will see that most of these ratios
are somewhere around 15—20, but some are much higher,
even reaching the hundreds. At February 2002, Microsoft
had a p/e of 55.26, Alliance Data Systems Corp a p/e of
141.10, SmartForce a p/e of 461.47, Precise Software
Solutions Ltd a p/e of 544.75.
What this means is that these companies are valued at
55, 141, 461 and 545 times their earnings. What this really
means is that people are prepared to invest in or buy these
 TWENTY HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 59
VALUABLE BUSINESSES

companies at 55 or 545 times the current profit they are

making. Investors are prepared to invest on the basis of
waiting 55 or 545 years to get 100 per cent return on
their money.
Now, why would people be willing to do this, when
many such investors won’t even be alive long enough to
get the money they put in returned? The answer is the
theme of this book. It is the principle about making
money out of thin air, and is one that you must learn well.
These investors are not after income return. They are
after asset growth, and are investing their money believing
they will be able to sell their shares in a short period and
make a capital gain. In other words, they buy and sell
shares to make money out of thin air.
That’s the game. That’s what it’s all about. This is what
stock traders do. They shuftle paper and make money out
of thin air. Yet this is exactly what many people who sell
their time or start a small business do not do — and
therefore never get rich.
To make money out of thin air as a stock trader is a
good way of getting rich, but you need to be very skilled
at it and be prepared to risk losing a lot, too, as even the
best cannot predict market sentiment and other factors
affecting stock prices. Making money as a stock trader can
be a lucrative business, yet nothing can beat the returns
you will get by starting and building your own business
from scratch.
Going into your own business, you should be doing
what stock traders are doing with other companies’
shares, except do this with your own shares. Set your
business up to become valuable and tradeable, and one
60 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

day soon these stock traders will be buying your shares

from you. And guess who would have made money out
of thin air from these very traders? You, of course!
Let me now share with you in this chapter some of
the attributes that I have studied in the world’s most
valuable businesses. We are going to look at many
examples of big companies and successful products, to
illustrate the points being discussed.
You may think these companies and examples don't
apply to you, as they are so big and well funded that you
cannot emulate what they are doing. If this is your
thought process it is completely wrong. These companies
were not always big. At one stage or another they were
exactly the same size your business is now. They have
simply grown big precisely because they have addressed
the following habits.
The world’s most valuable businesses have all or many
of the following attributes in common — and your
business should, too.

1. OPERATE IN LARGE MARKETS

OR GROWTH MARKETS
You should not simply go into a business because you
like it and think it is a good idea — and your friends do,
too. (Having said this, this strategy can work and has
worked for others, but they have been fortunate and the
growth has usually occurred by accident in most cases.)
You must think of your idea in context of the market
you are entering and ask yourself: is this market a growth
market that has worldwide potential? If the answer is
‘no’, then you’re probably already limiting yourself and
 TWENTY HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 61
VALUABLE BUSINESSES

your ability to make money out of thin air. If, on the

other hand, your answer is ‘yes’, then this is an exciting
place to start.
The world’s most valuable businesses have in
common the fact that they are operating in large and
generally growing markets. So should you.
2. HAVE UNIQUE, TIMELY PRODUCTS
Once you have considered your market potential you
need to look at your products or services and ask
yourself, are they unique or timely or are they
commonly available already?
If your answer is that they are not unique or timely,
you will find your ability to capture a large market share
is limited and this will thus limit your tradeable value. If
your answer is yes, however, it will allow you the
Opportunity to charge premium margins, attract many
customers and allow you to expand rapidly.
Let’s look at examples of this. Viagra is a drug that
helps men with impotency problems. This product is
unique — there is nothing else quite like it. It addresses a
worldwide market and is timely. When this product was
first offered for sale it became the biggest-selling lifestyle
drug ever sold, enormously adding to the value of its
owner, Pfizer Inc., a pharmaceutical company.
3. SELL ONLY LEVERAGED
PRODUCTS
The world’s most valuable businesses only sell leveraged
products.
62 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

Generally they do not sell time as their prime

offering. They usually sell packages or packaged
products they have only made once — the system takes
over from there.
It is essential that you heed this advice, as it will not
matter how big your market is or how unique your
products are, if you do not sell leveraged products there
will be a limit to how much you can sell and therefore a
limit on the value of your business.
Take Microsoft again, as an example. They design
unique state-of-the-art software (making it once) then
sell as many copies as their factories can burn onto disk.
The disk costs a matter of a few cents, yet Microsoft sell
the software for hundreds, even thousands, of pounds.
What an outstanding business. You have no choice but
to pay this price if you want the latest Windows product,
as you can’t get it from anyone else.
Now, contrast this with our service station example
in the world’s least valuable business section (page 51),
and recall how quickly customers will shop elsewhere
because they will save 10 pence. Which business would
you rather be in?
4. HAVE RESIDUAL INCOME
This habit of the world’s most valuable businesses is what
helps make them so valuable — having a residual income.
If you want your business to be extraordinarily
valuable, tradeable and saleable you must have products
that you not only sell once but can sell over and over
again. Better yet is the situation where you only need
to sell them once and after that your customers
 TWENTY HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 63
VALUABLE BUSINESSES

continue to buy at regular intervals from you: this is

having residual income.
Companies that do this make millions, if not billions,
in profits and are worth huge sums of money. Let’s look
at a few.
* BT, or any well-run telecommunication company,
supplies you with a phone and a phone line, then you
pay them rental every day for having the right to use
the phone line. They don’t have to sell to you again
for years, and if they decide to put the price up, you
just complain a little but pay their fees and charges.
Having competition now in the market has made
little difference to this scenario.
¢ Banks. Open an account with your money, which you
give to them, and they charge you every month for
this, as well as charging you every time you want to
make a deposit or withdrawal. What a great business!
Bank loans are similar. The bank sells you a loan
product once, yet you end up paying them for 20-30
years.
¢ Credit card companies. They sell you their card
product once and you pay them every time you use
it, for years and years.
Now you know why these companies have thousands
of employees, make huge profits and are able to pay the
big-city rents. Speaking of rents ... landlords do the same
thing. You buy the right to use their home or office space,
and you pay them every month, for years in many cases.
I am sure you can see the pattern here.
Now, contrast this with the sales strategy of a car
dealership, shoe shop or burglar alarm company. I am
64 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

certain you are beginning to see the difference — and the

resulting difference in values these businesses attract.

5. HAVE GREAT SYSTEMS

Many people are confused about systems. What
exactly are they and why are they so important?
Systems are the only way that will allow you to guard
your valuable time and use it to build the business,
instead of using your time to just to keep the business
going. Systems move you from being paid for your
labour to being paid for your ideas. They allow you to
expand comfortably, or to step back from the business
and let it run itself. Systems bring you the freedom that
probably attracted you to the idea of business in the first
place. And with that freedom comes true success.
Great systems are what ultimately make companies
valuable. It is the fact that everything in a company is
systemised that makes it possible for the owners to
leverage time and skill.
By having great systems companies can get a
predictable result with higher quality and lower costs.
Great systems mean less-skilled people can be employed
to perform higher-skilled tasks — and this is what builds
value into these businesses.
The most valuable companies have everything
systemised. Nothing is left to chance or guesswork. They
will have systems and procedures documenting just about
everything for design and production, for administration,
distribution, hiring and firing, for customer service, sales
and marketing ... nearly every aspect of the business is
systemised 1n one form or another.
 TWENTY HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 65
VALUABLE BUSINESSES

This is so important as it not only lowers the cost of

running the business, but it also ensures that the business
is not dependent on any one individual. Everyone is
replaceable and dispensable, so the show will go on no
matter what. Freeing a business from reliance on any
individual is the goal, and this goal should be worked on
from the very start.
I mentioned earlier the success of Tom Monaghan of
Domino’s Pizza. Now anybody can make a pizza. Yet
what Tom set out to do was not to sell pizza at all, but to
set up a world-class pizza-making system.
There is a huge difference. Monaghan made a good
product at a good price, yet his marketing — ‘there in 30
minutes hot, or it’s free’— and distribution system — being
first in home delivery — when others were just selling
pizza in sit-down restaurants, gave him all the edge he
needed and a big head start in making money out ofthin
air, in the pizza market.
When you run a business, you need a wide range of
skills. Your time is valuable, you’re highly productive.
What systems free you up to do is pass those skills on
to others, through procedures and processes, so they
too can perform high-value, high-revenue work at a
much lower cost than you could. This in turn frees you
up to develop your-systems further, to make your
business more profitable, and to bring in new business
and more revenue.

6. GREAT CUSTOMER SERVICE

No company can grow big, become great and succeed
66 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

without great customer service, especially early in their

life cycle.
It’s one of the main reasons customers prefer to deal
with a small company rather than a large one, as
generally small companies can excel in the area of
customer service. When you call a small company you
usually get the phone answered by a person, not a
machine. When you have a problem you usually speak to
a person who can make a decision to fix it, rather than
someone who listens but does not have the authority to
make a decision and adds to your frustration.
Unfortunately, in many cases this area of business
does slip when companies become big. The world’s most
valuable businesses still need to offer great customer
service, because this 1s what keeps their customers
coming back and adds to their value. As your business
grows, this aspect must never be forgotten or it will cost
you millions.
Not all large companies lose their focus on customer
service: look at the legendary examples of excellent
customer service given by major businesses such as
Disney, the big US retailer Sears and the Ritz-Carlton
hotels, among many others who have gone to great
lengths to ensure customer satisfaction. There have been
examples of customers coming back to Sears
complaining about a product and receiving a refund,
only to discover they did not even purchase the product
from Sears in the first instance.
You don’t have to go this far. However, your level of
customer service needs to equal, if not better, that of great
world-class companies in whatever business you do.
 TWENTY HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 67
VALUABLE BUSINESSES

7. POWERFUL BRANDS
The world’s most valuable businesses have powerful,
instantly recognisable brands. In fact, many of the most
valuable businesses have brands that can contribute as
much as 50 per cent of the value of their entire company.
Billabong is one such brand where the name
comprises 50 per cent of its value. Hey, you can buy an
unbranded T-shirt for £5—-10 at Asda. The Billabong
name increases the value at least fourfold. This is the
power of building a brand.
Telstra’s brand is valued at approximately US $9.4
billion. Talk about making money out of thin air.
A brand is thin air. It’s nothing more than the
cumulative meaning that a particular product or service
has achieved in a customer’s mind. Coca-Cola is one of
the world’s most valuable brands. In 1993-94 its value
stood at US $35.9 billion, while Nescafé was valued at
US $11.5 billion, Kellogg’s US $9.3 billion, Gillette US
$8.2 billion.
Harley-Davidson, Rolls-Royce, Xerox, Kleenex,
Nike, Sony, Honda, Harvard, Kodak, Mercedes-Benz and
Levi’s are amongst the world’s most powerful brands, yet
people forget these businesses were not always this way.
Many of them have emerged only in the last 40 years,
built from one-man businesses into companies that have
enormous value.
Now, how does this help you if you are just starting
out and don’t have millions of pounds to spend on brand
building and advertising?
Even when starting out you need to develop a brand
of your own, and to be very clear what that brand stands
68 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

for and why you think customers will want to buy your
brand. If you are not clear about this from the start it will
only confuse your customers and lessen the value of your
brand. There is an excellent book by Al Reis and Laura
Reis called The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding which
covers this topic at length. | recommend you read it.

8. NOT DEPENDENT ON ONE

PERSON
This point has already been discussed and at this stage it
should be clear that there are enormous advantages in
building a business that is not dependent on one person.
This does not only apply to small businesses,
although they are the most susceptible. Even large
businesses that are seen to be heavily dependent on one
person can have major shifts in their value from one day
to the mext
Newscorp, for example, was made enormously
successful by Rupert Murdoch, and is certainly one of
the world’s most valuable businesses, with a market
capitalisation of nearly £32 billion. Murdoch’s influence
on the future of the company results in massive stock
price shifts at the first sight of his ill health.
This is a bad sign for this company and companies like
it, as it affects their value greatly. Many great companies
have this problem and the owners’ work hard to ensure
they let the market know their heirs and successors are
equally capable. Sometimes, however, even this does not
have the full effect they are looking for and does not
protect the company’s value.
 TWENTY HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 69
VALUABLE BUSINESSES

9. USUALLY FIRST IN THE MARKET -

MARKET LEADER
History has proven that the first established company
into the market usually remains dominant for years to
come. Once you are the established brand leader it is
hard to lose your leadership.
A widely publicised study of twenty-five leading
brands in twenty-five different product categories in the
year 1923 compared with the present situation showed
that twenty of the same twenty-five brands are still
leaders today. In the last seventy-eight years only five
have lost their leadership.
Most new customers naturally gravitate toward the
leading brand. Federal Express? The first in overnight
delivery. Domino’s Pizza? The first in home-delivered
pizzas. These are great examples of companies who were
first in the market, or who created a new market
category and dominated it. They have become worth
billions of pounds in a relatively short number of years.

10. ATTRACT THE BEST AND

BRIGHTEST PEOPLE
The world’s most valuable businesses are usually places
that are dynamic, exciting, stimulating places to work,
with changes happening all the time due to growth.
This provides endless opportunities for people
joining the company to learn and grow personally. They
are offered ongoing training, promotion opportunities
and clear career paths over a number of years.
Employees are trusted, given responsibility and
70 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

encouraged to make mistakes without fear of failure or

punishment. These are places where people say they love
their jobs, and they do. They come to work early, leave
late and are respected and appreciated for their
contribution. This type of environment attracts the best
and brightest people.
Why is this important to help you make money out
of thin air and why should you develop this type of
culture in your business from day one?
Your people are your “greatest asset, not your
equipment or products. They are the ones who make
your products or services, find your customers, sell to
them, and do everything else that makes your business a
business.
Yet at about 5 p.m. each night your assets get up and
leave, and may not even return the next day. When you
realise this, you realise business is all about people —
nothing else. Look after your people and the business will
look after itself. This sounds quite fundamental, I know,
but not one in a thousand businesses does this well.
No matter how good your product or service is, your
entire business depends on people creating, producing
and delivering it to the customer. In this process many
things can, and will, go wrong. It’s only the skill and care
that your people take in your business, that will give your
company the edge. If your people are sloppy, careless,
underskilled or unmotivated, this will show up in the
way they deliver your product or service, and in the way
they deal with your customers. A state-of-the-art
 TWENTY HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 71
VALUABLE BUSINESSES

manufacturing facility is worthless if your receptionist

doesn’t answer the phone properly, or upsets customers.
What good will the best-looking storefront be, if your
sales assistants are ignoring the customers?
If your people are switched on, motivated and totally
focused on serving the customer, you are way ahead.
Your competitors will never copy the effect of a business
whose staff enjoy their work, have fun and genuinely
care about customers.
No matter what your competitors do, they can’t go
out and create this just because they’ve seen you have it.
Getting and keeping good people is one of the most
difficult things in business. It’s also one of the most
valuable, because it puts you so far ahead of your
competition and helps keep you there.
Giving someone a job 1s easy. Making sure they are
the right person for the job is much harder, but much
more important. Those people you employ create your
business. They create its culture, its service, its quality, its
reputation and, ultimately, its profit.
The basic principle is: if you hire someone great, you
become great, and your life will become easier. But if you
hire the wrong person you undermine your lifestyle and the
value of the business. Hire people with better skills and a
bigger vision than you have, and you create a great business.
To be able to hire the right people, you have to know
how to select them, how to test their qualities and how
to get the most from them. Like marketing, hiring
(especially for key positions) is too important to leave to
other people — make sure you do this yourself.
72 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

11. REWARD BASED ON

PERFORMANCE NOT
LONGEVITY/TIME
This is one of the most important habits ofa successful
business: rewarding people based on performance and
responsibility, not on their period of employment.
In other words, there should be no such thing as
automatic annual pay rises or Christmas bonuses.
Increased pay, or for that matter any basis of pay, should
be based on performance, attitude and contribution. This
should be explained to all employees before they start
and they should understand what behaviour will reward
their performance and what behaviour will relocate
them back to the dole queue.
In Michael Leboeuf’s book The Greatest Management
Principle in the World, he talks about rewarding only those
outcomes you wish to achieve. Now think how simple
yet powerful this is, yet so many companies do not do it.
Paying someone an hourly rate is huge mistake. It is
the exact opposite of what Michael Leboeuf suggests,
and indeed opposite to what many of the most valuable
businesses do.
Your people should be incentive driven and paid as
much as humanly possible for achieving a result, not for
taking an action. Achieving results is what customers pay
for. You should never pay someone simply for showing
up and going through the motions.
You must have them set goals or you must set these
for them, so everybody knows what is expected. Paying
someone on an hourly basis is simply rewarding him or
 TWENTY HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 73
VALUABLE BUSINESSES

her for showing up and working slower. Think about

this: if someone is getting the same amount to process say
ten applications that they would get if they processed
eight, why would they work up a sweat trying to process
the ten?
Sounds simple, yet very few businesses understand this.

12. HAVE HIGH MARGINS

If your business addresses worldwide growth markets and
offers unique and timely products, then this makes you
something of amonopoly, albeit a small one at first. This
monopoly status means that if your customers want your
products, they have no other choice but to go out of
their way to buy them from you.
It allows you to charge higher prices due to the
demand and supply equation working in your favour and
this means healthy margins, which allow you to afford to
fund your rapid growth.
Conversely, if you do not select to go into a business
with the habits I am outlining for you here, you will
find it difficult to grow because you cannot afford to,
and it will greatly affect your ability to make money
out of thin air.

13. HAVE FEW REAL COMPETITORS

Being a monopoly by pure definition means you do not
have many real competitors, and the most valuable
businesses structure and protect themselves to hold this
position, through continually innovating and keeping
ahead of the game.
74 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

When you first start out you may have a competitive

edge if you are the only one in the market doing what
you are doing — your only competition is customer
apathy. However, as you get bigger and more successful,
you must expect competition and you will need to
ensure you are always leading and your competition 1s
always playing catch up. Holding this position makes
your business far more valuable.

14. KEEP INNOVATING —- A FLOW OF

NEW PRODUCTS
The best companies make this intrinsic in their growth
strategy from day one. Their motto is innovate or die, as
this is exactly what will happen sooner or later.
When you first start out you may appear to have a
competitive edge because no one can be bothered
challenging a tiny niche business — until it starts
making inroads into the marketplace. No matter how
unique your products are at the beginning, as soon as
the market realises the speed at which you are growing
and the profits you are making, competition will arrive
Srclaiist:
In an attempt to emulate (or steal!) your success, they
will begin by trying to copy you. It is important that you
anticipate this happening before it occurs and have
version or model two, three and four ready to go before
they have launched their model 1.
This thinking will secure your market dominance
and leadership position, and still offer you the
Opportunity to maintain margins and growth.
 TWENTY HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 75
VALUABLE BUSINESSES

15. HAVE AN INVESTOR ENTRY AND

EXIT STRATEGY
Most start-up operators have no idea what they will do
with the business once it is profitable. They have no exit
strategy.
This is one of the weakest aspects of most start-up or
small businesses. I have said this before but I'll say it
again, as it is the key point in making money out of thin
air. Making money out of thin air requires you to build
a business asset and sell it for a profit. However, if you
cannot sell it you cannot enjoy getting rich this way.
The world’s most valuable companies have built this
strategy in from day one.
Furthermore, if you need investor money to start and
build your business, remember that investors will never
put their money in if they can’t get it out at a profit
within a reasonable number ofyears. If you don’t have an
exit strategy I can assure you no one is going to invest in
your business, and neither should you.
This does not mean you have to sell your business, or
that investors will want to exit. It simply means you must
always have this option from the very start.
Very, very few start-up or small business do this, or
even think about this, and that is why they find it difficult
to attract investors or make money out of thin air.

16. HAVE A BIG CUSTOMER

DATABASE
Generally, if you are addressing worldwide growth
markets, you have the potential to attract a large number
76 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

of customers. Most small businesses do not have

customer information, or their customer information 1s
not in a ready-to-use, accessible form.
The world’s most valuable businesses know at a
minimum who their customers are, where they live and
what shopping preferences they have. They have a
relationship with these people whereby they are repeat
selling them products or services each month.
If anyone is interested in buying your business once
you have set it up and expanded it, this is what they are
primarily interested in. This is where the great value 1s,
yet so many small businesses do not do build up such
customer databases.
That is why they remain small.

17. HAVE GREAT MARKETING

I see advertising and marketing campaigns on a daily
basis, and see thousands of pounds being totally wasted
due to their ineffectiveness and misalignment.
If you want to take a simple idea and expand it into
an extraordinarily successful business, creating enormous
wealth for you and your shareholders/partners, you need
to make sure you have great marketing going on all the
time. This is one of the big limiting factors that stops
many small and start-up businesses from reaching their
full money making potential: a lack of great marketing
skill and knowledge in their business.
Marketing it is the machine that drives your business.
Good products can fail, yet second-rate products can
monopolise a market. Why? The power of marketing.
 TWENTY HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST ne
VALUABLE BUSINESSES

Good marketing brings people to your door — people

who are happy to part with their money in exchange for
your products or services. Marketing is the key function
that can quickly make or break any business. And
because of this power of marketing, it is too important to
overlook or delegate — it’s something you have to
understand for yourself.
The, reason sereat «marketing «will give you 4
sustainable competitive advantage is that if it is executed
well, it is yet another thing that your competitors cannot
just copy. Not many people realise this.
Unfortunately, much marketing is wasted and youre
probably paying for the mistakes of so-called marketing
experts right now, by under-utilising this important part
of your business. Badly managed marketing is the single
biggest waste of money you will ever experience, and
one ofthe single biggest frustrations and causes of failure.
Most of us continue to accept less-than-acceptable
rates of return on our marketing pounds. Or we throw
up our hands at its ineffectiveness and stop using it at all.
That is the most fatal of all business mistakes!
Let me give you an example of what I mean.
Two advertisements costing exactly the same
amount can pull a hugely different number of
customers and hence generate hugely different profits.
A simple difference in one ad can make tens of
thousands of pounds of difference a day, a week or a
month to your business — depending of course on your
business. And that’s only looking at one part of your
marketing strategy. Marketing that is used well is so
rare, yet so powerful!
78 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

What impact does this advantage have on your

business? Simply put, you can be five, ten, 50 times more
successful than your competitors just through effective
marketing. Isn’t that where you’d want to be?

18. ANTICIPATE CUSTOMERS’ NEEDS

Have you ever walked into a great hotel or other
business and everything you need seems to have been
anticipated, as if someone had read your mind?
‘Tl have a shower when I get to the room ...’ and
there’s the bathrobe all laid out. “I think ’ll wash my hair
.. and there’s the shampoo. ‘I think I'll dry my hair ...’
and there’s the hairdryer, | think Pll havea beer ..--and
there in the fridge is your favourite brand.
I know it doesn’t happen often, however I am sure you
have had this experience at least once. Think back and I
bet you this was a great brand, or a fast-emerging one.
The world’s most valuable businesses make a habit of
doing this. You see, it’s not that hard really. Just listen to
your customers and you will discover there are patterns
in their behaviour. By understanding those patterns you
know what a customer is likely to do or want next.
All you have to do is build this into your systems and
it will appear as if you have anticipated their needs. The
best companies do this, the worst do not. No matter how
big or small you currently are, this works.
For example, someone contemplating buying a
Harley-Davidson motorbike is thinking about cruising
down the highway with the wind in their hair. This
person is not thinking about things like insurance,
helmets, gloves, jackets, bike locks, alarms, satellite
 TWENTY HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 719
VALUABLE BUSINESSES

tracking systems, maintenance, cleaning and so on,

which they will need.
But you should know (anticipate) all or some of these
needs almost immediately. So why not put systems in place
to offer, sell and service the purchaser with these? It does
not have to be difficult to do. McDonald’s do this by simply
asking, ‘Would you like some fries with that?’ So can you.
This is guaranteed to add thousand or millions of
pounds to the value of your business, and your customers
will be grateful to you for looking after their needs.
Sounds obvious, yet it still does not happen in nine out
of ten businesses.

19. ALWAYS ADD VALUE TO

CUSTOMERS’ EXPERIENCE
If you want to add value to your customers’ experience,
why not throw in a couple of things as an added bonus
to them for shopping with you?
The new Harley-Davidson owner would probably
love the fact that you offer them a free cleaning service
(because you know it’s not cool to be seen driving
anything but a shining, well-kept Harley, and this is quite
a laborious outcome to achieve). So invest in a high-
pressure steam-cleaning unit, and every Sunday employ a
student to give your customers a free clean for their new
pride and joy. This won’t cost you much at all, and yes,
you've guessed it, every week they return to your store
and you have the opportunity to offer them something
new they have not bought yet.
This is the reason why, when staying in a five-star
hotel, you get free shampoo, conditioner, bubble bath
80 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

and bath salts, and if you’ve forgotten your toothbrush or

toothpaste, socks or stockings, they will ‘send it right up’.
It’s all about adding little things to the customer
experience that don’t cost a lot, yet make a big impression.

20. EDUCATE BEFORE THEY SELL

You might recall I covered the fact that low-value
companies hard sell. This is because they have no other
choice if they are going to make a sale.
High-value companies don’t have to. They have the
advantage of owning unique products with large market
opportunities and take the high road in sales. That is, they
do not sell at all, but choose to educate their customers
before they buy.
Why go to the time and trouble of doing this? By
educating before you sell (or your customer chooses to
buy), you are creating a very important bond with your
customer, and that bond is the start of a relationship
between the customer and you, and more importantly
with your brand.
Fundamental human nature and society is based on
building relationships, and in business this needs to be
fundamental to your strategy. John C. Maxwell summed it
up when he said, ‘Never underestimate the power of
relationships on people’s lives. This is great business advice.
Similarly, in Ernest Hemingway’s story ‘The Capital
of the World’ a teenage boy named Paco squabbles with
his father and runs away from home. Subsequently the
father goes on a long and fruitless search for the boy.
Finally, he places an advert in a Madrid newspaper that
reads, ‘Paco, meet me in front of the newspaper office
 TWENTY HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 81
VALUABLE BUSINESSES

tomorrow at noon. All is forgiven. I love you. The

next day, when the father arrives at the newspaper
office, he finds 800 men named Paco, all eager to
mend a broken relationship.
People yearn to have honest, trusting relationships.
This is so rare today at any level, and companies that
work hard to develop these sorts of relationships with
their customers will be well rewarded in the long term,
with loyalty and very valuable brands.
This relationship-building process begins with ‘edu-
marketing’ — educating the customer to buy your product.
It is essential you do this. If you do, your customers
will buy from you because you have taken the time to
educate them and started a unique relationship that they
perceive as trustworthy.
Very few companies take this approach, yet those that
do build enormous value into their business.

CONCLUSION
The above habits are not just a random list of‘nice’
things that have been plucked out of nowhere. These
habits are indeed what makes the businesses that practise
them so valuable and tradeable, what makes the owners
of these businesses successful and helps make money out
of thin air.
It is these habits that others will pay a premium for
when buying or buying into a business. Indeed, this 1s what
investors look for in making their investment decisions.
And if you have taken an idea from nothing, and created a
business with these habits, you would have created a very
valuable asset and successfully made money out of thin air.
82 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

chapter 11

THE WORLD’S MOST

SUCCESSFUL AND
UNSUCCESSFUL HABITS
There is one thing we did not discuss in the previous
chapter and which is most important ... and that is the
person or people creating this business.
The people behind any business are equally essential
in the process ofbuilding success, so much so that I have
written a whole section of the book (pages 89-152) on
this alone, looking at the 42 habits of the world’s most
successful people.

WHAT ARE SUCCESSFUL HABITS?

There is no shortage of business ideas or opportunities
around. I get a hundred ideas floated past me a month.
But there is a shortage of good people to take advantage
of these ideas. You can give two people the same business
idea and put the same resources at their disposal — and
one will fail while the other will succeed. Without
doubt, it’s the person behind the business that makes all
the difference to its success or failure.
 THE WORLD’S MOST SUCCESSFUL AND 83
UNSUCCESSFUL HABITS

One common theme that teachers of personal

development have been espousing for years is that
successful people have common traits, and these traits are
their daily habits.
In order to make this book complete and to fully
demonstrate how to make money out of thin air, we
cannot afford to omit this factor and must now take a
close look at the people who start and drive successful
businesses. Remember, these people are masters of
making money out of thin air. It takes smart people to
do this. Even better, it takes a very special kind of person
to become successful by taking nothing and turning it
into something of real value.
Making money out ofthin air is about people — more
accurately, it’s about what these people know and what
they do, the things that makes all the difference. If there
is any short cut to success and making money it is to
study the habits of the world’s most successful people.
You can learn volumes by observing and studying
them. They have consciously developed daily habits to
serve them in achieving their single goal of making
money out of thin air.

THE HABITS YOU HAVE TODAY WILL

MAKE OR BREAK YOU
‘Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.’
Aristotle
The habits you have will make or break you. Therefore
you need to become very aware of your habits and how
you think. The difference between people who succeed
and those who do not has nothing to do with
84 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

intelligence, but has a lot to do with how they think

about themselves, the world and the habits they develop.
This is such an important part of making money out
of thin air, as everything you do and create begins with
a single thought, and your thoughts are influenced
directly by your beliefs, which with constant
reinforcement quickly become your habits.
For example, if a child believes they are ‘stupid’ because
he or she has been told this by a parent or teacher, or teased
by other ignorant kids, whether it is true or not they will
most likely carry this belief around with them for the rest
of their life. No matter how smart they are in reality, they
will always believe they are less intelligent than others. If
they continue to believe this, eventually they will make a
habit of it. This has far-reaching consequences on the career
they may choose, and the aspirations they have for
themselves, which will affect them for the rest of their life.
Therefore I cannot emphasise strongly enough that
you must closely examine your beliefs and habits right
now and challenge them, asking yourself continually
why you have these habits and whether these habits
continue to serve you in a positive way.
You already will have developed bad habits and
beliefs that limit you, as a result of your upbringing,
education and social conditioning. If, however, you are to
stand a chance in life, you must break these bad habits
and replace them with good ones.
I am not suggesting this will be easy. There will be
much resistance from within yourself and from others
around you to ensure you do not do this. You see, when
you make a decision to develop new habits, you will
 THE WORLD’S MOST SUCCESSFUL AND 85
UNSUCCESSFUL HABITS

naturally begin to behave differently. It will be

uncomfortable at first, like trying on a new pair of shoes.
People around you will notice a difference and begin to
comment (perhaps not helpfully).
This will naturally make you feel uncomfortable. But
you must persist and feel good about it. It’s the only way
to break those bad habits.
Bad habits do not simply go away through hoping or
sheer willpower. As much as you would like to and will try
to change, you are destined to fail if you just try to stop the
bad habits. Bad habits need to be replaced with good habits.
Getting rid of bad habits 1s a little like a bucket full
of dirty, murky water. You cannot simply throw out the
dirty water. You need to get a hose into the bucket and
begin to fill it with clean water. If you get enough water
pressure into the hose it will force the dirty water up and
out over the top of the bucket. Soon enough your bucket
will be full of clean, clear water.
How you do this practically is by filling your head
with positive, inspiring thoughts and surrounding
yourself with positive, inspiring people. You can also read
books about success, listen to tapes and go to seminars.
Every time you are exposed to these positive messages
helps you develop a new thought pattern that will result
in good habits forming.

SO, WHAT ARE GOOD AS OPPOSED

TO BAD HABITS?
Bad habits are any thought, feeling or behaviour that
does not serve to achieve your goals. Many times you
may not even be aware of them, as they are so ingrained
86 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

in you and your thinking that they may seem normal.

You must become conscious of these.
Instinctively you should know what they are: if you
are not happy with some aspect of your life and are not
achieving your goals in this area, then this is the first
level of awareness that you have some bad habits that
need addressing.
Good habits may be wide and varied depending on
your goals. However, in the following pages I will help you
identify what these are and allow you compare them to
your own. I have first listed the 28 habits of the world’s least
successful people to contrast them against the 41 habits of
the world’s most successful people — and to highlight these
differences. One thing I guarantee is that there is a direct
correlation between these habits and the respective bank
account balances of the people who have them.
So, let’s begin by looking at the habits of people who
don’t generally make a success of themselves.
 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OFTHIN AIR 87

chapter 12
TWENTY-EIGHT HABITS
OF THE WORLD’S
LEAST SUCCESSFUL
BUSINESS PEOPLE
The world’s least successful business people:

Are unsure what they want to do.

Have no real passion.
Fear failure.
Procrastinate.
Have no vision.
Think small and are sceptical due to past failure.
Sell their time.
Underestimate their value.
Xe
S|
1S
Is)
cS
Fs
Cal
8
@ Demand respect.
10 Are inconsiderate, don’t respect staff or customers.
Don’t read or learn much.
Don’t spend time or money on their education.
Don’t begin with the end in mind — or don’t even
begin.
14 Are poor communicators
88 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

Undervalue and underestimate staff.

Give poor recognition and rewards to staff.
Don't set goals.
Are not discerning about whom they spend their
time with (positivity rubs off ... so does negativity).
Undervalue their time.
Don’t know their weaknesses.
Criticise customers and staff in public.
Lose composure at the first sign of problems.
Let fear overcome their desire to succeed.
Blame others when things go wrong.
Work hard (and let everybody know it) and are not
smart.
Are poor leaders.
Think they know it all because they’ve ‘been
around’.
28 Are lone rangers — because everyone’s ‘incompetent’.
Now, let’s shift our focus and look at the habits of the
world’s most successful people.
 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OFTHIN AIR 89

chapter 13
FORTY-TWO HABITS
OF THE WORLD’S
MOST SUCCESSFUL
BUSINESS PEOPLE
1. THE RICH ARE RICH
BEFORE THEY BECOME RICH
Over the years, two of the most outstanding features I
have discovered of all highly successful people are that
they know what they want to do and they have a burning
desire to succeed.
It seems the more successful someone is the more
they know what they want to do, and the earlier in life
they seem to know it. They are rich and successful in
their minds well before the actual event takes place.
hey see it, feel it-and can even taste it, long before it
ever happens.
This makes them quite unique and very much in the
minority, as most people seem lost and have little
direction. Successful people know their purpose and
mission and are singularly focused on achieving these.
90 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

This applies equally to any field of endeavour in life, not

just business, and it is even more apparent in sport.
Lleyton Hewitt, the world number-one tennis player
by the age of twenty, did not decide to take up tennis at
nineteen. He has been refining his craft since he was five.
By the age of 20 he’s a veteran! That’s what it takes, ten to
fifteen years of dedication and focus, with no guarantees
you will succeed, and most of those years spent in lonely
practice sessions out of the limelight, while everybody else
is warmly tucked up in bed or out partying and having fun.
There is an Ashanti proverb: ‘One cannot both feast
and become rich’. This sums up the point nicely — to
achieve something great you must be prepared to make
sacrifices. Those who never achieve anything and simply
go through life being average are the opposite. They don’t
seem to know what they want to do and are confused
about their direction. As such, they don’t have a burning
desire to do anything. They seem to flip-flop from one
thing to another and as soon as the new thing gets too
hard off they go again looking for the easy way out.
Champions 1n business, life and sport know there is a
price to pay for success, and have no doubt about their
willingness to pay this price. It is not a difficult choice if
you have a burning desire to achieve your goals.

2. THE RICH BECOME A MASTER

OF SUCCESS
If you study successful people, you'll discover that they all
have one secret: learning. A commitment to learning has
given them the knowledge and tools to succeed. It will
do the same for you.
 FORTY-TWO HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 91
SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS PEOPLE

Successful people don’t waste their time learning

things that take their focus from achieving success. They
decide on what they want to succeed at, and become an
expert by studying everything they can on this subject.
They find somebody to help them — and not just
anybody. They look for the world’s best and become
their understudy, hungry for knowledge, carefully noting
everything they can in every situation that arises. They
become a master craftsman in this field and then practise
and practise to get this perfect.
A great example of this is Bob Lapointe, the founder
of KFC Australia, who has successfully sold this business
on and established a number ofother food chains such as
Lone Star steakhouses. He was an understudy of Colonel
Sanders.
Go into the luxurious home of any self-made
success, and chances are you'll find a library containing a
complete range of books on business, success and wealth
creation. The question you need to ask yourself is, which
came first: the library or the luxurious house?
I'll bet it wasn’t the house.
When you have learned the rules of making money,
success is a lot easier. And when you keep learning,
success builds on success. With knowledge you can
maximise your opportunities and minimise your
mistakes. With knowledge you can create opportunities
you otherwise may not have seen. With knowledge you
can do things you couldn't do before.
It’s so simple it’s almost embarrassing to write it. But
when you think about succeeding, how often do you
think of working harder, meeting more people, or having
92 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

more capital? And how often do you think about sitting

down and reading a book, or asking someone questions
about their business? It seems that the common idea of
success doesn’t include learning — and that’s where many
people go wrong.
It is a sad fact that the average businessperson reads just
one business book per year. And that 95 per cent of all
business books that are bought are not read past the first
chapter! However, it’s not just the lack of reading books that
is the problem — less than 12 per cent of businesspeople
attend any training programs in a given year.
So, where do most people get their sources of
inspiration and new ideas? The short answer is that they
don’t get very many new ideas or inspiration. They go on
doing exactly what they did yesterday, hoping that things
will miraculously get better. This behaviour is what
makes average business people average.
You don’t need to go to seminars and formal courses
to learn, although they are great for education. If you’re
observant, interested and committed to learning, any
event, person or situation is a potential teacher.
Everything you try that fails is a chance to learn and
move on to better things. Anyone you meet could be a
mentor who can help you.
An employee of mine while at university heard about
a rich UK businessman looking for a babysitter for his
children. She volunteered for the job just so she could get
the opportunity to spend some time observing, meeting
and talking with him, not to look after the kids. She claims
she learned more about business in those three months
than in the three years she spent at university.
 FORTY-TWO HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 23
SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS PEOPLE

Become rich in learning and in experiences, and then

all the other riches will follow. Spend time learning
something new every day. Not only will you be a more
fulfilled person, you'll be miles in front of your competitors
who just stay ‘comfortable’ and do the same thing.
Read business books, read business magazines, listen
to tapes of successful people, watch business videos,
attend seminars, go out and see what the market is doing.
Get involved. Get educated — every day.
It’s not the hand you’ve been dealt, it’s the way
you play the cards.
Life can be like a game of cards: the hands we are dealt
are random, some good, some bad. But in cards you'll find
that over a game generally the best player is the one who
comes out on top. Not the one with the best cards.
So you have to work at being the best player you can.
Learn how to play the cards life has dealt you so that you
can win the game. That means constantly looking for ways
to improve: by learning more, and by growing personally.
Personal development isn’t just about what you know, it’s
also about developing your self-esteem, your confidence.
But always bear in mind that your achievements are
personal, not to be compared to the achievements of
others. Some people won't be satisfied if they manage to
climb Mount Everest, or run a full marathon, while for
others it is just as big an achievement to be able to walk
around the block.
Make sure you are playing the game as well as you can,
and don’t worry about the hand you have been dealt. Your
personal skills are the important thing to focus on here. And
to develop those skills, keep working on your personal
94 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

development. Any improvements you make will stand you

in good stead for all your life, not just in your work.

3. THE RICH THROW ROCKS

IN PUDDLES
Many people grow up not knowing what to do with
their lives. They have been so used to being told by their
parents, teachers and spouses what to do that they don’t
know how to make things happen for themselves.
Successful people know how to take action — the
bigger the better. I describe this not as dropping a pebble
in a pond, but throwing a rock in a puddle.
The simple decision to take action creates energy and
gives life and momentum to any project. This energy to
make things happen in turn attracts people, as it is a rare
commodity, and people are attracted to energy and action.
The most successful people know that to do nothing
is worse than doing something, even if ‘something’ turns
out to be the wrong thing. You are better taking any action
rather than none at all. You will learn nothing from doing
nothing. Doing something will at least teach you one
more way not to achieve the outcome you want.
Take action, as without both action and the
preparedness to fail your ideas will not manifest
themselves as success. There will be no results and no
rewards for you to enjoy.

4.A MILLION-POUND MISTAKE

People do not succeed because they are lucky or make all the
right decisions all the time. They realise one thing that others
don’t, and that is that there is no such thing as a perfect decision.
 FORTY-TWO HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 95
SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS PEOPLE

Most decisions that are made are made with less than
full information and the probability exists that their
decision may be the wrong one.
The best decision makers are those who make
decisions quickly, with the understanding of the
consequences of their decisions, and have a back-up plan
in case this decision does not produce the outcome they
desire. They are aware that if they make the wrong
decision they can always make another, change tack or
completely set a new direction if they have to. And even
if this new decision is wrong they simply make a new
one and change yet again.
A small warning: this flexibility is not possible unless the
business environment in which they operate allows it. For
example, if a person is in a position to make decisions yet
fears for their job, financial future or survival — real or
imaginary (and it takes wisdom to know the difference) — it
becomes extremely difficult to make decisions.
What stops people from moving fast and making
decisions is fear. When people operate out of fear, they
can’t make good decisions. The normal reaction to fear is
to ‘batten down the hatches’ — both for the business and
for the individual. This is an attitude of no risk, no
change, no future. Fear causes people to lose their
optimism and positive attitude, and lose sight of the
dream that is driving them.
Although it is a natural reaction, it isn’t one that will
take you towards success. This is why is it important to
create a culture where mistakes are tolerated and
expected, and are not punished, and there 1s a willingness
to acknowledge and learn from these mistakes.
96 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

There is a great example of an executive working for a

large computer company in Australia a few years ago, who
cost the company a million pounds through making a
mistake. When facing the board, the executive naturally
expected to get fired. However, with nothing to lose he
pointed out that the company had just invested £1 million
in his education — and that made him the most qualified
man for his job, as his replacement would probably need
another million-dollar investment to get this same
education. He was allowed to continue in his job.
It makes great sense to me.

5. RICHNESS AND ABUNDANCE

IS HIDDEN
An abundance mentality is rarely found in leadership.
What is more commonly found is motivation driven by
a fear of shortages! A scarcity mentality.
We are not born with a scarcity mentality, we develop
this through social conditioning and fear. Such people
develop the belief that there is a limit to just about
everything, and they only have a limited number of
choices in life. Much of the time they make one decision,
and if it does not work, they go to a second option. Ifthis
does not work, then there is only decision left... go back
to option one.
Abundance mentality people are those who realise
that there are countless options. There is no limit.
Abundance mentality people are not smarter or luckier
than everyone else, they simply have a different belief
system about the world and their place in it.
 FORTY-TWO HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 07
SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS PEOPLE

Almost all self-made successful people have this

special quality of abundance mentality. They still believe
the world is a fertile place full of opportunities for having
fun and making money.
It is not easy to believe this, especially when you have
had a few failures or not reached your personal level of
success, but it is important that you hang on to
abundance and believe in its existence when you have no
evidence of it at hand.
Why? It pays handsomely.

6. THE RICH DO THINGS YESTERDAY

Make it a habit: do every task as if it was urgent.
Moving fast and getting things done has many
hidden or intangible benefits. It allows you to grab
opportunities that would be impossible otherwise. You
can also communicate this sense of passion — and
urgency — to your staff, thus improving their
performance. It means you have the ability to develop
new products and marketing opportunities, and it gives
you the chance to tackle ongoing problems.
Moving fast isn’t an optional extra if you want to be
rich. It is what will drive your success. If you take life,
and work, at a relaxed pace, then your business will not
move forward and your customers will go elsewhere.
Make a resolution: if something needs to be done, do
it now. What needs to be done tomorrow? Do it today.
Then think about next week’s tasks and do them
tomorrow. Keep moving fast.
In business you can’t just move fast. You also have to
think fast, decide fast. Making fast decisions can be
98 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

difficult for some people, sometimes it almost seems

physically painful. But you will better off making a
decision than doing nothing — ifit’s the wrong one you
can always try again. Someone who does nothing will
stagnate personally, and so will their business.
Observe successful people and you will see how they
seem to make big decisions — even ones costing millions
of pounds — at a speed that may look reckless. Why does
it look reckless? Because the decision has been taken so
fast. But successful people know that they will never have
complete information on which to base their decision,
so they have to go ahead with the knowledge they
already have. There are only disadvantages to not making
a decision, for it means nothing will be done.
Even if the decision turns out to have been wrong,
you'll have moved in a direction. And from your new
position you may have new opportunities to explore that
wouldn’t have been available if you had done nothing.

7. P.C.D. — THE SECRET WEAPON

OF THE RICH
‘All we need to make us really happy is something to be
enthusiastic about.’
Charles Kingsley
Never be fooled into thinking success is an overnight
phenomenon. Almost all the ‘overnight’ success you see
is, in fact, the hard-won result ofyears of effort, offailures
and restarts, of obstacles overcome in the pursuit of a
vision. It really is a long way to the top, and there are
three essentials you must have to fuel your journey -
passion, commitment and discipline (P.C.D.).
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SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS PEOPLE

When people first go into business for themselves

they pour all their excitement and dreams of freedom
into their new venture; their passion is a given. Yet in
many cases I’ve found that, within a year, people get
swamped by the stress and sheer hard work that is the
reality of any business. They lose focus on what’s
important. Even worse, they start to lose their passion.
And what rushes in to replace the passion? Often it’s
self-doubt, anxiety, depression, a gradual diminishing of
that initial grand vision. Around this point, a salaried,
stress-free job starts to look pretty good again. People
start operating in survival mode, struggling to keep
afloat. They're often running short of capital, short of
time, and horribly short of personal satisfaction.
The fact is, you can't do your job well without
passion: you can’t think creatively, seize chances, enthuse
your staff or manage the business efficiently. If you lose
your passion, the business is doomed. It’s only going to
be a matter of time before it fails.
That’s why it is so important to keep your passion
alive, especially in the tough times that all businesses go
through. And the only way to do that is to love what you
do from the very start.

8. THE TRUE CURRENCY

OF THE RICH
If the passion is gone, if you’ve lost sight of your vision,
you have to ask yourself if you're in the right place. If
you're not, don’t hang on. Don’t be afraid to give up
what you are to achieve your dreams of what you can
become. This will not serve you.
100 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

Estate Agent expert John McGrath holds seminars at

which he asks participants to estimate their commitment
to and enjoyment of work, using a scale of one to ten,
where one means you hate your job and ten means you
absolutely love it. He finds most people rate themselves
about five or six on the scale.
Isn’t that amazing?
It means most people are going through their
working lives openly accepting mediocrity. They're
working without passion. I guess this is why so many
people would also rate their income, even their
happiness, in that average zone of five or six. It’s the ones
with the excitement and passion, the eights, nines and
tens, who end up with the lot.
Here’s something else to take on board: passion 1s
meaningless without commitment. A passionate dream
remains just that — a dream — without the commitment to
make it real. Commitment is what propels you forward,
despite obstacles that may seem at first to bar your way.
Commitment helps you to accept that you must do
whatever is required to make your dream a reality.
We all know that you don’t get something for
nothing. Anything worthwhile comes with a price. And
you pay the price of success with your time, sweat, tears
—and your discipline.
Jim Rohn, a leader in the personal development field
and an inspirational speaker, tells us we must all choose
between two pains in our lives: the pain of discipline, so
that we can achieve what we want, or the pain of regret
we will feel at not achieving it. The difference, he says, is
that the pain of discipline weighs ounces, where the pain
of regret weighs tonnes.
 FORTY-TWO HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 101
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Film director Michael Curtiz puts it another way:

“The only things you regret are the things you don’t do’
Fast forward yourselfin time, towards the end of your
life. Can you imagine yourself carrying that weight of
regret? It’s not a pleasant prospect. But you can choose to
shift that weight. All it takes is some passion,
commitment and discipline - P.C.D. This is the only
currency successful people deal in.

9. THE SEVENTH SENSE - IT’S

WORTH MILLIONS

‘The future belongs to those who see

possibilities before they become obvious.’
John Sculley, former CEO of
Apple Computer
Making money out of thin air starts with identifying
opportunity.
Successful people learn the habit of doing this. They
see things others don’t, almost as if they have a seventh
sense. For instance, a normal person driving along the
road might notice a retail store going out of business.
Successful people see something different, they see a
brand-new store offering unique products, one that is
well stocked and well merchandised, with great service
and a great atmosphere ... and this is at 7.30 a.m., before
they’ve had breakfast. By 9.30 p.m. they will have seen
another twenty or thirty great opportunities to create
something out of nothing.
I have a partner in a property business. Gary is a
genius. We are always on the lookout for the right
102 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

property to buy. When we walk into a property for sale

I see two bedrooms, a bathroom and a living room, and
that’s about all. He sees brilliant opportunities to make
changes that will realise magnificent capital gains,
opportunities that most people just would not see. We’ve
made 10-20 per cent gains in just a few weeks through
this seventh sense.
There are no shortages of opportunity, but there is a
shortage of people who can identify these people with a
seventh sense combined with the courage and vision to
do something about it.

10. THE PLAYGROUND OF THE RICH

When you are in business for yourself, there are no rules.
The world’s most successful people see the world as
their laboratory and playground. If you have forgotten
how to do this, simply go and observe children playing.
Even though there isn’t a fortress for a thousand miles, it
does not stop them from playing soldiers and escaping
into the fortress as if it was as real as Fort Knox. If they
don’t have swords, sticks will do. They use their
imagination, try new things, experiment and have fun.
Unfortunately, when we get into business we have
the threat of failure looming present and large all of the
time. This removes the fun and creativity so necessary to
keep you ahead of the game. Successful people treat life
— and business — as a game, as this helps them to
constantly look for better ways of doing things, and they
do not let limitations or barriers stand in their way.
We tend to stifle creativity even before it is born,
because we let the fact that we don’t have ‘swords’ stand
 FORTY-TWO HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 103
SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS PEOPLE

in the way of us considering possibilities and trying some

new things that have not been done before.

Tey OU RECGRAZY TEsyOUsDON 71.

HAVE A VISION
Having a vision, seeing what others do not see, has
brought more men and women to the top of their
profession than any other quality.
Why? Because the vision leads them onwards. It
keeps their eyes on the prize, fires them up and gives
them the energy necessary to reach the goal.
Unfortunately, though, no one can give you a vision —
it must come from inside yourself. So, if you don’t have a
vision for yourself, here’s how the rich get theirs ... They
don’t focus on what 1s, but on what could be! Once this
becomes a crystallised ‘vision’ they sell the message to their
staff and customers, and begin putting the right people and
resources in place to bring their vision alive.
Remember, businesses are nothing more than a
group of people with a common goal and a feeling of
purpose. To become successful you must have a clear,
powerful vision and be in a position to unleash it. To
ignite a common purpose you may have to sell and resell
it ad nauseam to your staff and customers.
Selling your vision means:
¢ having your people buy into the company’s future
¢ showing them how the culture of the company
works, and how you expect things to be done
¢ helping everyone to share in the excitement, the
satisfaction and the rewards if the vision is fulfilled
104 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

* getting a commitment from your people — and making

one yourself — that they will take and accept
responsibility
¢ sharing the stress and the workload
* creating a fun environment to help everyone enjoy
the struggles of the journey
¢ celebrating success and rewarding good work — even
small wins
¢ showing that you respect your people, care about
them and appreciate what they do.
Your employees — irom the cleaners to the top
executives — need to share in your vision. They need to
know that their job, no matter how big or small, 1s
integral to the team’s eventual success.
If people feel they are creating something bigger than
themselves, if they have something to believe in and a
leader who inspires that belief, they will give you the
very best of themselves.
So share your goals and your dreams with all your
people. Tell them where you are now, and where you plan
to go. Explain how you intend to get there. But, most
importantly, make sure they know how essential they are
in that process. Clearly outline the vital roles they'll play
along the way, and the rewards and satisfaction they will
receive when you all achieve your goals.
Always remember that you must be realistic, and you
must be genuine. The goals you describe need to be
achievable — or the excitement you've created will
trickle away. (If your people discover you’ve sold them a
load of bull they will lose their faith in you, and you’ll
never get their commitment again.)
 FORTY-TWO HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 105
SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS PEOPLE

People who love their jobs come to work happy to

contribute. People who feel trusted, challenged and
important are creative workers, happy to stay until the
job is done. It’s your job to motivate your people and let
them know how valuable they are.
It’s not good enough just to assume everyone knows
what your plan is. You must sell your vision again and
again, and you must sell it with so much passion and
conviction that your people will not believe for a minute
that it could fail. Do this, and you will achieve the
impossible.
The huge cost of not dreaming
Do you want to spend your life fulfilling someone
else’s dream? Because that’s just what will happen if you
don’t have a dream of your own.
Without your own dream, you have no vision, no
ultimate goal for your life. Without a goal, you can’t take
positive action. And if you can’t take positive action, how
are you going to create the life you want for yourself?
Dream big, because the bigger and more exciting
your dreams are, the more motivated you'll be as you
start down the road to achieving them. Big dreams can
inspire us when the going gets tough — as it always does,
sooner or later. If you have your dream uppermost in
mind, you can make it through those tough times.
Everything you do will take you closer to your goal.
Whatever you think of multi-level marketing
companies, they’ve got one thing exactly right. Every
person who joins such an organisation is encouraged to
set their direction, build on goals that take them where
they want to go — in other words, they're taught to
106 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

dream. And the company recognises and supports the

necessity of successful dreaming.
You can easily see the effect of this strategy in
people’s creativity, and their commitment to and passion
for their work. Not everyone likes the way these
companies recruit, but we could all follow the example
they set in encouraging people to dream.
Remember, dreaming costs you nothing; not dreaming
may cost you everything.

12. WATCH OUT FOR

DREAM THIEVES!
Children all have terrific imaginations. They are pirates
or princesses, astronauts or circus performers.We all had
these dreams once, played make-believe games, even
lived in fantasy worlds.
As we turn into teenagers and young adults, we come
across people who do us a lot of harm. They may not
intend harm, but the result is the same: they stifle our
imaginations.
Tom O'Toole, the famous Beechworth baker, calls
them “Dream Takers’. Dream Takers are people who have
lost their own visions and who, as if in revenge, attempt
to steal the dreams of everyone else.
Watch out: you will find the Dream Takers
everywhere. They may be your parents, friends, teachers
at school or, later, your colleagues at work.
Dream Takers are those who imply you cannot
succeed, so should not try, as failure has to be avoided at
all costs. They undermine your confidence. Dream Takers
are the ones who say:‘Oh, no one in our family has ever
 FORTY-TWO HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 107
SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS PEOPLE

been able to do maths’, or, ‘You did very well in the

school play, but you’ll never be a movie star’
It is vital you ignore them. Don’t let them influence
your life, ever.
It’s unlikely that you have reached adulthood without
having had people make fun of your dreams. It happens
all the time. But you have to ignore the Dream Takers,
believe in your dreams and have the confidence to share
them with others. Psychologists know that sharing a
dream provides the impetus to make it happen.
Surround yourself with Dream Builders — positive,
successful, affirming people who will encourage your
dreams. Avoid Dream Takers or, if you can’t avoid them,
recognise them for what they are and ignore their
negative jibes.

13. ‘RISK AND WIN’ — THE GAME

THE RICH PLAY
Remember the rush of a roller-coaster ride? |
wonder how you felt afterwards. More alive?
Exhilarated? Already planning your next ride?
This is the same kind of rush experienced by those
successful people who have overcome their fear, taken a
chance, and won. Consciously facing and accepting risk
gives you a sense of purpose; it’s an incredible feeling that
adds a whole new dimension to life. And it can spur you
on to greater heights, seeking that next rush.
Starting your own business means accepting full
responsibility for your life and your actions. Rather than
waiting for someone else to make things happen, you're
taking charge and doing it yourself. Of course, this usually
108 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

involves some risk on your part. But you must take that
risk, because without 1t you won't get off the mark.
Even if you work for someone else, this principle still
applies. Work with all the fervour and responsibility you
would adopt in your own business. Everyone will
benefit, but you will benefit most of all because, with this
attitude, you will have self-respect and the power to
determine your own path.
So be brave! Go out there and live — have fun, take
risks, get excited. You'll be pleasantly surprised to see
what happens when you take this approach.

14. HOW TO EMPLOY TIGER WOODS

The rich use a trick that works like a charm, yet is
underestimated in its power.
I have never seen this written about anywhere else,
but it is one thing I have seen that most successful people
do well. It’s perfectly legal and ethical — they lease, rent or
buy credibility to fast-track their success.
You observe this going on every day, yet don’t realise
its significance. The smartest people do it as a matter of
habit. Yet many people starting out in business do not, and
this limits their attempts at making money out of thin air,
Sometimes it may require money, but it can also be
done without any cash. You will, however, still need to
give something away. Ifit’s not cash it may be equity, but
it is worth every share you have to offer.
So, what is leasing, renting or buying credibility?
No doubt you have seen sports stars supporting
company logos. The logos may be seen on their shirts
or hats, or they may wear branded shoes or use
 FORTY-TWO HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 109
SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS PEOPLE

specific sporting equipment. They get paid millions of

pounds for it.
But why do companies pay sports stars all that money
Just to support a logo or use their tennis racket? Simply
because these stars have earned enormous credibility and
popularity, and have built a very strong and popular
brand of their own.
Greg Norman is reported to have just bought himself
a private luxury yacht, custom-built for around £100
million. How is he able to do this? Over the last ten years
he has become one of golf’s biggest stars and biggest
brands, and companies pay millions to be associated with
him and his brand. Tiger Woods is another person in the
golfing world who will no doubt eclipse Greg Norman’s
endorsement earnings by the time he 1s through.
This process is all about employing a strategy of
leasing, renting or buying someone else’s name and
credibility to build one’s own brand and sales. This is a
very successful marketing strategy that earns companies
many more millions, and that’s the reason they do it.
If you are starting out and have not got access to
these stars and the huge cash needed to secure their
endorsements, how do you make this work for you?
As I mentioned earlier, you don’t need cash to do
this. You can offer shares or equity instead. You also don't
need to start seeking credibility as big as Tiger Woods or
Greg Norman. It may be as simple as getting the right
people on your team to give you and your ideas
credibility. Getting people in your team who already
have credibility in your industry or business will make
things much easier for you. It will open doors for you
110 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

which might otherwise have remained closed. It will

give you access to markets, distribution or customers
you may otherwise not have been able to access. It will
add massive value to your company, value that you
cannot measure.
Yes, you will end up owning less of your business.
However, 80, 70 or even 50 per cent ofa business that is
successful and worth something, is always better than 100
per cent of something that is worth nothing.
Don’t get confused, there is no point in getting the
wrong credibility either. Just because you know
somebody whom you think has credibility doesn’t make
it a good decision. It must be the right credibility. For
example, there is no value in having a football player
involved with you if your market is ballet clothing.
Credibility must be appropriate. If you are starting a
publishing business, go out and find someone who has a
name and reputation as being a successful publisher and
offer him or her a board position and some equity for
helping you expand your business.
The credibility you sare looking {for may be
experience, itmay be contacts, 1t unay ibe capital tor
access to capital, it may be reputation. All or any of
these things help enormously, especially when you are
small and unknown.
It’s about getting the right people on board or as
partners. The people should have a passion or interest in
your business, and will help your business with its
growing needs.
So, if you are looking to make money out of thin air,
before you begin your business you must look to use this
 FORTY-TWO HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 111
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strategy from the start. This advice alone is priceless to

you if you do it right.
How do I know this? Because I use this strategy all
the time and it will work for you as well as it has for me.

15. THE RICH ‘TOUCH’ THEIR

CUSTOMERS
The world’s most successful people make it a habit to
never lose touch with their customers.
Every business has two types of customers — internal
and external. Your staff and your traditional customers.
Richard Branson, arguably one of the world’s most
colourful and successful business people, is reported to be
seen regularly flying on his own airline, talking with his
passengers and staff. This 1s not just a PR exercise, it’s
essential to stay in touch with the mood and sentiment
of the customers and people employed by you.
Even if you don’t own an airline it’s important to
keep putting yourself in your customer’s shoes. This is
easy at first, yet as you get more involved in your business
and the details begin to consume you, it requires
constant vigilance to keep yourself customer and market
focused.
Many executives or people in management positions
feel it is beneath their status to talk to the customers, and
certainly not etiquette to ask their staff for advice on
how to improve things. They are wrong.
There is a great story about a company that owned a
very large manufacturing plant which worked
continuously and automatically — there were no workers
on the production lines. The company was looking for
112 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

ways to cut costs and improve efficiency. The

management had cut costs as much as they could and felt
there was no more they could do. To their credit they
called for suggestions from the staff.
They received a few suggestions, yet surprisingly one
of the most productive and lucrative came from none
other than the janitor. On a corporate ladder one might
say that the janitor is on the bottom rung — the last place
most management executives would look for advice.
His suggestion (obvious to him yet completely
unexpected to those in the ivory tower) was to turn off
the lights that were burning constantly. Machines don’t
need light to work! This saved the company £48 000 off
their power bill.
Being customer focused is more important now than
ever before as the market is accelerating in its rate of
change. During the Internet boom, things moved so fast
that people were equating seven normal years to one
Internet year — referring to the rate of change and speed
with which the industry was moving.
The fact is that every year the rate of change speeds
up. Business leaders and developers must be constantly
aware of the subtle market shifts going on and changing
consumer needs. The only way to do this is to keep close
to the action.

16. A BACHELOR OF CONFIDENCE

When you meet a truly successful person one thing I am
certain you will notice is their degree of confidence and
self-belief. It is so strong and unwavering that it can
sometimes be misinterpreted as arrogance.
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Successful people have no room for self-doubt. For

them self-doubt is like a cancer that spreads quickly and
uncontrollably. They are constantly vigilant — not
allowing self-doubt to creep into their lives, as that might
risk it all coming crashing down.
Confidence is nothing more than a complete and
total belief in oneself and one’s ability. The difference
between successful people and unsuccessful people is
that the successful are prepared to bet on themselves and
their own ability, because they understand one thing: if
they don’t believe in themselves, who will?
It’s a contagious attitude. It is a self-fulfilling
prophecy. The more you believe in yourself the more
others will believe in you too, and you will believe in
yourself even more.
You must, of course, be realistic about what you can
deliver and at all times be honest about what you say you
can do — what indeed you can do — as otherwise your self-
confidence will seem nothing more than confidence.

17. WOULD YOU DO IT FOR FREE?

The world’s most successful people also have another
very noticeable difference from ordinary people. They
obviously enjoy making money — however, they usually
didn’t get involved in their business for the money.
Sting, the famous British singer and songwriter, was
quoted in an interview with Michael Parkinson saying
he would ‘do this [singing] for nothing’.
This is not unique to Sting. It is common to many of
the world’s most successful people. They do it because
they love it. Find any rich or successful person and I'll
114 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

show you a person who absolutely loves what they do. It

is impossible to achieve long-term success otherwise.
Every person I have met, interviewed, read about or
listened to that is rich, famous or successful, all sing the
same song. They would happily pay to do what others pay
them to do! They find it quite amusing that they get paid
to do a job that they would do forfree.
If you don’t absolutely love what you do, if Monday
mornings are not a positive experience for you — well,
perhaps you're in the wrong business.
You can't fake this! If you love what you’re doing, it’s
obvious, it’s infectious.
If you're just going through the motions, people
notice. You'll be flat, have no energy — it flows on to your
staff, to your customers and to your profits.
Sure, not every day can be an over-the-top fun day.
But if you are inspired to make a difference, get a kick
out of serving your customers, helping your staff to grow
and achieve, you are enjoying the things that are essential
to business success.
life rewards excellence. You can never be excellent
or rich unless you absolutely, passionately, love what
you are doing.
Here’s a question that you should ask yourself each day.
You only have one life — why would you want to spend
one minute of it doing things you don’t love doing?

18. THE SHERLOCK HOLMES

TECHNIQUE
This success habit is a little less obvious, yet something I
know successful people do religiously:
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* they look for clues all the time in what is going on

around them
* they listen, not only to what people are saying but
they read between the lines and analyse where the
motivation is really coming from; the information
they gather is sometimes immediately used or can be
Just stored away for future reference
¢ they always seem interested in others, almost as if
they are conducting research all the time about
demand, trends, opinions, customer reactions, staff
feedback and so on
*) schangessin) the world “excite, and anterest them,
because change means opportunity; they’ve always
got their antennae tuned into everything, looking for
ideas and clues and storing these away as ‘market
intelligence’, ready to access them when the right
occasion arises.
These people are sharp, on the ball and don’t usually
miss anything. They ask good questions and don’t miss a
single opportunity to find out about what others are up
to. If you have the occasion to meet one of these people,
you will know exactly what I am talking about, as they
are skilled at asking informed questions and always seem
more interested in what you are doing than you are in
finding out what they are doing.
There is an old saying that goes, ‘He who ask the
questions controls the conversation’. Successful people
already know what they know, so spending time telling
you their ‘stuff’ adds nothing to their lives. Yet, by
spending their time learning from you, they have
generally walked away with more than they have arrived
116 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

with. I have named this the Sherlock Holmes Technique.

Interesting perspective, don’t you think?

19. LEADERSHIP BY
SMOKING AROUND
There is no doubt, the best businesses have great leaders, and
great leaders know it’s their power that constantly supports
and lifts others around them. Great leaders inspire others to
become more — especially when times are tough.
It’s in tough times that leadership really shows — and
at such times, as a leader you have more reason than
anyone else to be stressed and on a short fuse. It is
especially important at times like these that you show
courage, share your power and inspire your people.
Remember to have a laugh and make it clear that no
matter what happens, you are steady and in charge.
I observed great leadership on one occasion that Pd
like to share with you. It will stay with me forever as a
great example of this discipline. It clearly demonstrated
how important it is as a leader to earn respect rather than
demand it, by showing respect at all times for your people.
I was on a courtesy tour of amanufacturing premises
owned by a colleague, Kerry Lee. He owns a medium to
large organisation with about 300 employees that produces
chemicals and petrochemical products for industrial use. As
we walked through the large premises, I was impressed at
the mutual respect the workers had for Kerry and that he
had for them in return. In particular he addressed everyone
by name without missing a beat as if they were all family.
The tour took about 40 minutes and, as we were
heading back to his office, Kerry noticed three of his
 FORTY-TWO HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 117
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employees on a smoke break in a hazardous area, right

underneath a sign that said ‘Danger — No Smoking,
Flammable Material’. Clearly they were being complacent
and were smoking in an area deemed to be dangerous.
I was intrigued to see how he was going to handle
this and watched intently. He excused himself and
headed toward these workers.As he approached them he
asked them for a cigarette and a light, and began chatting
with them. The workers simultaneously broke into
laughter — obviously he had shared a joke with them.
He put out his cigarette, and as he walked off he
pointed to the sign and casually said, “Next time, fellas,
have a smoke a little further away from the sign, OK?’
Kerry is a non-smoker.

20. THE RICH BUMPER STICKER —

‘BIGGER SH*T HAPPENS’
No doubt you’ve seen the bumper sticker that says ‘Sh*t
happens’. Everyone can relate to this, as no matter what
you are doing things will go wrong.
The bigger your business and the faster it grows, the
more Chance there is that this will happen more
frequently. I guarantee that if you are looking for fast
growth, there will be not one single day that goes by
where everything goes according to plan and you won't
encounter obstacles.
Some people don’t handle problems too well.
Successful people do. They mentally prepare themselves
for this and realise problems are all in a day’s work — it
pays very well to be a problem solver and stay cool
through the whole process.
118 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

This is an admirable quality, and very rare. Luckily it is

not something you have to be born with. You can learn this
great habit through prior mental preparation. To do this
requires you to make a decision in advance and to realise
problems come with the territory. Then when they do
arrive you will not be surprised or caught unexpectedly.
Clearly this does not mean you should not try to plan
ahead to avoid such problems occurring. However, no
matter how good your planning, things can and will go
wrong and you should be ready for this.

21. HOW TO CREATE MAGIC!

Even the smartest, most sophisticated individuals like to
hear words of praise and be recognised for a job well done.
And if they don’t hear it from you, they may go job-hunting
to find a boss who will appreciate what they have to offer.
So a couple of times a day get out of your chair, leave
your office, and go and talk with your staff casually.
Encourage them to show you what they’ve
accomplished so far, to tell you about any challenges
theyre facing and to let you know if they need
additional help. It sounds obvious, but nine out ten
employees will tell you this simply does not happen.
Above all, make a point of letting your team know
that what they do is important to the company as a
whole, and to you personally. Publicly recognise them at
every Opportunity.
If you create an environment where people are
appreciated and empowered to do what you have
employed them to do, you will see things happen in your
business like magic.
 FORTY-TWO HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 119
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The most successful people make praise and

recognition a daily habit. It is a great example to follow
and is a habit you should develop in your business. Most
importantly, it will allow you to achieve maximum
output through the high performance of others.

22. MAKE YOURSELF RICH BY

MAKING YOURSELF SCARCE
One of the fundamental principles of making money out
of thin air, which I bring up again and again, is to
develop systems in your business. And the main
cornerstone of concept is to ‘work on your business not
in it’, by employing people to operate your systems and
develop these even further.
Therefore when you employ people to do a job,
once you have trained them and satisfied yourself that
they are capable and responsible and you have made a
good choice, it’s time to get out of the way.
This means letting them get on with the job, allowing
them to make mistakes and to come to you for guidance
and advice when they feel they need it. In short, it means
getting out of the way of your employees.
If you are not prepared to do this why, employ them
in the first place? You may as well run a one-person
show and do it all yourself. This, of course, will not help
you in the wealth-creation stakes.
The most successful people intuitively know this and
always try to employ the best people. Then they are
smart enough to get out of their way.
120 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

23. THE RICH EMPLOY

ONLY ‘GIANTS’
By employing the best people and getting out of their way,
you engender a great culture in your organisation.AsDavid
Ogilvy puts it, you must create a company of ‘giants’.
Employ people smaller than you and you will create a
company of dwarves. Employ people bigger than you and
you will create a company of giants.
By giving people respect and responsibility you
release a very powerful, unstoppable force. Many
businesses do not see people as an asset. One of the habits
of successful people is that they have a real awareness of
the roles the people they employ play, the contribution
they make towards the overall success of the company,
and they know how to get the best out of their people
by fully utilising their potential contribution and
creativity.
Ask anyone who has worked for David Shein,
founder of Comtech, and you will see what I mean. He
takes on a godlike status when you ask his employees
about the experience of working with him. It is no
surprise that he built one of the most successful IT
companies in record time.
People like David, and thousands of other successful
people around the world, not only fully utilise their
human assets but also maximise every resource they have
at their disposal. They constantly look for ways to
maximise the use of human capital, equipment and other
assets the company may have, bringing down costs and
increasing productivity.
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24. THE RICH UNLEASH

PEOPLE POWER

Observe the likes of David Shein, and you will find

underneath a person who is exceptionally skilled at
inspiring people to be the best they can. They do this
through earning (not demanding) the respect of their
people. They do this by setting an exceptional example
of leadership, by asking people only to do what they
would be prepared to do themselves, if need be.
They don’t yell and scream for more or lose their
composure when things go wrong. They rally the troops
and get people to take responsibility — and don’t punish
them when mistakes occur. They create an environment
of pride, not fear.
When things are not on track they ask their people
to dig a bit deeper, which is more than offset by giving
back a little extra when things go well.
heyy understand) that. everyone © in. .their
organisation is essential to the smooth functioning of
the business, like cogs in a wheel, small or large — if one
breaks the whole machine stops, or at the very least
will not run as smoothly.
A business colleague summed this up at his weekly
staff meeting: ‘The person answering the phone is equally
as valuable as the CEO. If the phone is not answered
promptly and efficiently, the CEO could not do his job, as
he would indeed need to answer the phone’.
I thought this was a simple yet great example of
creating a terrific work environment and _ inspiring
people: his receptionist then came to work every day
knowing she did not just answer phones but was part of
something bigger. By playing her part in it she allowed
the whole team to work efficiently.
122 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

No wonder when you ring his company you get

such great service and a happy voice as your first
point of contact.

25. FAILURE IS NOTA

FOUR-LETTER WORD
Failure! We are indoctrinated from the day we are born
to believe that to succeed is to be admired — and to fail
is something to be ashamed of and avoided.
We spend so much of our lives trying to succeed by
avoiding failure that we never get anywhere close to
achieving the level of success we might if we were taught
and allowed to fail.
Success and failure are not opposite ends of the scale.
They are one and the same. You cannot succeed without
risking failure, yet 1f we are punished socially, financially
and emotionally for failing, then how can we ever hope
to succeed? The short answer is we cannot, or we can
only reach a moderate level of success at best, by trying
to achieve this without risking failure.
Society is to blame. We get punished for failure —
the feeling 1s that ‘we should know better’. As children
we are discouraged to fail yet still get given some
leeway for a while. As we get older this ‘behaviour’ is
definitely not tolerated.
This makes us a nation of risk evaders.
I have sat in hundreds of meetings where I have
found myself analysing what is going on and why no
progress is being made. Entire discussions become a
charade of making progress yet the only thing that is
going on 1s ‘butt covering’ and risk evasion. It’s a wonder
 FORTY-TWO HABITSOF THE WORLD’S MOST 123
SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS PEOPLE

anything gets done with this going on.

Think about it! If someone works in middle or
senior management and is presented with an
opportunity, here is how the scenario is played out ...
If they agree to take on an opportunity, and it fails,
they risk losing their job and the security of aweekly pay
cheque. If it succeeds they won't generally earn any more
than before or won't get any direct recognition.
So ask yourself: why would anyone in this position
take a risk or do anything that could possibly fail when
they don’t have to? No one will be the wiser if they just
let this opportunity slip by. If they take it on, at best they
don’t get rewarded, at worst they risk losing their job.
Sitting in these meetings, I can see the answer
coming before the meeting is over — and the answer is
usually NO!
I train my staff when to expect the answer to be ‘no’
before walking into a meeting with another company. I
warn them that this will occur and tell them it is the
wrong answer and not what I want to hear. I teach them
to keep going until they get the right answer, which I
want to be ‘yes’ eventually.
What’s the lesson here?
If you want to become successful in life you must
expect failure and learn to live with it, regardless of how
you are chastised by those around you. And I can assure
you when you fail, as in the story of Julius Caesar and
Brutus, it will be your biggest supporters who will punish
you for the failure — as ‘failure’ is not tolerated, especially
when they have had ‘faith’ that you would succeed. It is
unlikely you will be given a second chance by your
124 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

former supporters, who will be after some blood.

Successful people know this will occur, yet have the
courage to believe that this failure — no matter how big or
small — is just temporary, and they will live to fight another
day. When this day comes you will have learned from
failure, and thus will be able to achieve even greater success.
No matter how good you think you are, you will
fail sometimes, and if you can’t take the heat when
this happens it might be your first and last chance at
an opportunity.
Failure is not fatal or something to be ashamed of.
You have only truly failed when you give up trying —
and if you do, you will have failed permanently.

26. BE RICH - BE A DREAM SELLER

People who have made a great success of themselves
spend most of the time selling their dream to others who
can help it to come alive.
This habit is all about recruitment of people and
getting them voluntarily to buy into you, to then buy
into your dream and, most of all, want to be part of it. If
you cannot conscript people to buy into your dream,
you will never achieve the results you desire.
‘Dream selling’ needs to be done to employees, to
customers and to joint venture partners. Sell your dream
at every opportunity. It is a major step towards creating
something out of nothing and hence making money out
of thin air. Indeed, it is a great place to start once you
have crystallised your dream.
 FORTY-TWO HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 125
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27. BE SMART - BEA

DREAM BELIEVER
Dr Robert H. Schuller defines belief as ‘leaping across
the gap between the known and the unknown, the
proven and the unproven, the actual and the possible.’
Make no mistake, building a business, especially from
scratch, requires a mountain of confidence and belief.
People who succeed have much of this in reserve and
they usually need it.
Making money out of thin air is not easy — if it was
everybody would wake up in the morning and do it. It
requires courage, skill and, above all, an undying belief in
yourself, especially when things go wrong or don’t go
according to plan.
It is easy to be bold and feel strong when things are
going well. However, there are no reference points when
you are starting something new and therefore you don’t
know if you are doing well or not, as much of the work
you do only pays off years down the road.
This can allow doubt and loss of confidence to creep
in and, worst of all, cause a loss of self-belief. If this is
allowed to occur it is the death knell of the venture and
will send the project or business into a tailspin. Successful
people never allow this to happen and still believe in
themselves when all others have lost their belief.
There is not much you can do when things are going
wrong except to stop, step back and take another look, get
a new perspective and push on. If it was a good idea in the
first place it is still a good idea now. Successful people
know this, push on and still believe in their dream.
126 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

Others quickly give up and soon fail. Be a Dream

Believer.

28. HAVE COURAGE - DO IT

ANYWAY!
‘Be willing to trust your instincts, especially if you
cannot find answers elsewhere.’
Brian Koslow
Trusting your instincts takes courage. For many people
their instincts have been squashed for so long that they
have lost touch with their inner selves and have
stopped listening to their instincts long, long ago. It
takes courage to start believing 1n yourself again.
Believing in yourself when all others have given up
is not natural.We are taught to conform and to go with
the consensus. And when nine out of ten people say it’s
wrong, we feel enormous pressure to agree.
This 1s called social proof.
It is a very powerful law of society in which we
live. We believe what others say en masse, even if it is
totally incorrect. This is how gossip and fables continue
tOVEXISt:
It takes enormous courage to go against the grain,
to disagree and to continue with behaviour that has
lost support — or even has none. Successful people have
courage, if nothing else, and continue to believe in
themselves. They know that if you don’t believe in
yourself, nobody will.
It takes courage to continue to do this and
distinguishes those that succeed from the crowd.
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29. THE TRULY GREAT REMEMBER

TO REMEMBER OTHERS
‘I believe the first test ofa truly great man is humility.’
John Ruskin
Pat Rafter, one of Australia’s most successful and respected
tennis champions, once received an award not for his
tennis game but for his humility in his loss to Goran
Ivanisevic at the Wimbledon tennis final. Rafter
acknowledged his opponent and congratulated him for
being the better player on the day and a deserved winner.
True champions realise they have talent in life —
developed even further by hard work — yet never forget
they too are just people, no more important than those
who don't have as much talent. They never forget those
who have supported them or worked tirelessly behind the
scenes, directly or indirectly, to help them in some way.
They never forget those less fortunate than themselves.
Being humble does not mean these champions don’t
aggressively go after what they want, have a great
competitive spirit or hate losing. These qualities,
however, can co-exist with humility and are important in
sustaining their level at the top. To be a great champion
in life, sport and business you can win and be proud, yet
be humble about what you have achieved.
There is nothing that will bring a person down faster
than being arrogant and not being able to deliver. If you
can deliver you will get away with some arrogance until
the day comes when you slip up or stumble. Then knives
will come out so fast you won't even have time to recover.
_ 1 don’t think there were too many people either in
128 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

Australia or anywhere in the world that felt sorry for

Anthony Mundine in his recent boxing bout when he
ended up unconscious, flat on his back, after he made
negative comments about the September 11 terrorist
attack. This was simply arrogant and uncalled for and
Mundine showed no humility. He thus cost himself a
fortune and will find it impossible to recover from this
mistake.
The first time I met John McGrath of McGrath
Partners was in 1994. Today he is one of the best rags-to-
riches success stories in estate agency. He was a guest
speaker at small function at the Gazebo Hotel and I was
one of about 200 people invited to hear John’s story. He
spoke for about fifty minutes, most of which I don't
remember. But what has stayed with me, and 1s indelibly
engraved in my mind, is what he did right at the end of
the speech.
John was talking about success. In the last two
minutes of his speech, he asked the audience if they
would like to learn one of the great secrets about money.
Predictably the answer was a combined ‘yes’. John then
asked everyone to stand up, reach into their pockets and
purses, pull out currency between £1 and £5, and hold
this in their right hand. He then asked the audience to
throw the money high in the air and let it simply fall to
the ground. By simply doing this, he said, they would get
back ten times more.
Like most in the room I was intrigued and thought
somehow my £2 contribution would allow me to return
£,12 from this exercise. In fact, it returned me a lot more.
When all the money had finished flying through the air
 FORTY-TWO HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 129
SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS PEOPLE

and had hit the ground, John asked everybody to sit

down and leave the money on the floor. He then
explained that when he arrived to do his presentation he
came into the room to check the sound level before
starting. The previous function had finished late and the
hotel staff had been frantically trying to get the room
ready and in pristine condition for our group.
It was a hot day and they had been sweating and
working overtime to ensure everything was just right.
John felt that these people were often forgotten and that
the money on the ground — my estimate was about
£280 — would be a nice surprise bonus for them when
they came back in at 10p.m, to clean the room after this
function when everyone went home.
I was very impressed and touched by this. It gave me a
new viewpoint about being humble and remembering
those who don’t seem to matter. Had John not done this,
no one would have been the wiser or less impressed with
what he had to say, and would still have been grateful for
having had the chance to listen to him. This action,
however, spoke volumes about John, and really told me he
was one of those people that had something special to offer.

30. THE RICH SPEAK SWEETLY

Genuine praise makes people feel very special, but genuine
praise in public will get people to move mountains.
Criticism, on the other hand, simply upsets people
and has the opposite effect.
Of course, it is sometimes necessary to criticise as
part of your job so that someone can learn, but criticising
in public is nothing but destructive and unwittingly
130 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

destroys both people involved — the victim’s self-esteem

and the offender’s stature.
You will never see a person with great people skills
doing this. They know both the incredibly empowering
and destructive nature of these two tools, praise and
criticism, and utilise them to their advantage by using
criticism selectively and strategically.
If you get it wrong you will do nothing more than
destroy morale and will achieve absolutely nothing
positive. Successful salespeople never criticise their
competitors in front of their customers (no matter what
they think in private), successful sports managers never
criticise a team member in public, successful parents
never discipline their kids in front of their friends,
successful partners/marriages never air their dirty linen
in public — no matter how angry they are or how
tempting it may be.
It takes years to build up self-esteem and seconds to
kill it. Make sure you are a builder in life. Make this a
habit.

31. THE RICH — MAKE THEM A STAR

‘Good treatment of workers results in similar treatment
of customers.’
Todd Englander
Your employees are on the front line of customer relations.
Just as it is in your interest to keep your customers happy,
make sure your employees are happy, too.
Certainly incentives and tokens of appreciation will
boost your employees’ morale. But there is another way to
almost guarantee that they will become loyal, motivated
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and outstanding employees: recognise them in public — in

front of friends, colleagues, customers and other staff.
Also, you must demonstrate you trust them with the
authority to exercise their best judgement about most
decisions. Initially you will want to make sure this is not
abused and that they have the training to make good
decisions. However, if you have recruited the best people,
you will find this really works to get things done without
your input and focus.
Your trust will make your employees feel respected
and they in turn will do what they can to make your
customers happy and business fly.
ihe most successful “people “also: instil \high
standards and values into their staff, and in turn expect
them to continually lift their own standards on a daily
basis. They lead people with coaching and
compassion, not compliance.
Employees who have exceeded expectations or their
sales quota, turned in projects early or shown initiative,
deserve to be well recognised. Many companies offer
cash bonuses or gift certificates to their high achievers.
You may want to be more creative, as cash bonuses don’t
have the same effect as something more tangible;
something that perhaps they might not buy for
themselves and would regard as being a nice indulgence
—a massage, a weekend away, a helicopter flight, a private
butler for the week, etc.
Gash bonuses can be! forgotten and seen as
compensation, yet an unexpected indulgence (a treat)
will be seen as an incentive for a job well done. There 1s
a big difference in the effect and the impact.
132 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

Treat the employee and his or her family to dinner at

a fine restaurant. Send the employee shopping at a
prestigious clothing store and pick up the bill. Give your
winning employee a name-brand DVD player, video
camera or CD player. Throw a party for them and
everyone in their department.
If you are going to make this a habit — which I
strongly recommend — then it needs to be consistent and
systemised like all other aspects of your business, and not
just run for a week or two and forgotten.
Many times rewards-and-recognition programs are
launched by the ‘boss’ with a big bang, and are sustained
for a few weeks, then quietly fade away and get forgotten
about — because they are not built into the company
culture. This is a big mistake and a great opportunity
gone to waste.
So, the question is: how do you build a sustainable,
systemised rewards-and-recognition program? This is the
challenge I found myself facing in 1994 when
experiencing hyper-growth in my publishing company.
After much introspection I came up with a simple yet
powerful low-cost program that could be systemised. I
introduced what I named the ‘Vision Star Awards’.
I remembered the rewards-and-recognition system
our teachers used at school every time we did well — our
teachers gave us a gold star on our test or term paper. I
took this simple idea and announced to my staff that
each week at our 45-minute general staff meeting,
anyone could award a ‘star’ to any other staff member for
a great job, act or achievement that had taken place that
week — for catching somebody doing something right.
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It could have been for hitting a sales target or

something less tangible, such as finishing a project on
time or staying back to get an order out, processing a
record number of orders or coming up with a new
layout or design. It could be for just about anything that
showed talent, initiative or extra effort.
When a nomination was made at the staff meeting,
the person nominated would be asked to come forward,
would be awarded a star and cheered on by the entire
staff. The stars were not just small gold stars but were the
size of an A4 page. I announced that these stars had to be
displayed on or around workstations or desks.We then
gave the staffaTreat List, which allowed them to cash in
their stars for treats of their choice (similar to a frequent-
flyer program):
3 stars = Swedish massage
4 stars = Sony Walkman
5 stars = dinner out for two
10 stars = a night in a five-star hotel
And so on.
We made the Star Award a regular agenda item in our
meetings. At first I had to encourage people to speak up
and award recipients were a little shy — there were some
comments about not being schoolchildren. But with a bit
of persistence on my part, this turned into a great rewards-
and-recognition program, with the award winners loving
the public recognition they received in front of their peers.
Each week we had more and more people being
recognised for a job well done, and every week we were
giving away ten, 20, sometimes 30 stars per week. We had
people running around doing outstanding things, everyone
was looking to do what they could to improve our business
134 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

and working just that little bit smarter and harder.We built an
amazing business and work culture as a result — people just
loved coming to work and loved working in our company.
This may sound as if it became an expensive exercise,
with all those stars being handed out and having to pay for
all those treats. And, yes, we did have to pay for some treats,
but not too many.
Why not? You see, the stars and their public display
became more important than the treat. To get a treat
someone had to take down their stars and hand them in, and
they were reluctant to do it as the stars and the public
recognition were more important to them than the treat —
even though the treats were worth hundreds of pounds and
the stars worth just a few cents.
Almost unbelievable, I know, but this is the power of
this habit.
You don’t have to go this far to get great performance
from your people. The point is to do something to
demonstrate your appreciation and make them feel special.

32.*GET OUT’ BEFORE YOU STOP

As we have been discussing throughout this book, there
is no point in thinking you are maximising your money-
making potential simply because you have a business that
is producing an income.
Business Sleuths know before they go into a business
that one day they will want to get out. For some people
this is the whole purpose ofstarting a business. Successful
people have an exit strategy and know when it’s time to
exit. This requires some forethought and planning, as it is
not always easy to pick the right time to do it.
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About 14 years ago I was involved in negotiations for

the purchase of a watch-manufacturing business. The
owner at the time was a man in his late sixties and was
interested in selling. We did the numbers and estimated
it was worth less than the asking price. After many weeks
of negotiations, the owner would not budge from his
price and so we did not proceed with the purchase.
Eight years on I heard the owner was still interested
in selling his business for £400 000 and, due to his age
and loss of focus on the business, he did not have any
interested buyers. Clearly this gentleman had cost himself
a fortune. He felt his business was worth more than it
was, and as the years slipped by so did the tradeable asset
value. Even if he did achieve his price of £1 million
eventually, which was unlikely, it clearly would have been
far less than the £800 000 offer we had made to him
eight years earlier.
ligsis seasy 610. aiiake (this mistake if cyou! are too
emotionally attached to your business. I sold my business
one year later than I should have. This one-year delay
cost me about £900 000.
The best time to sell is when you have made a success
of your business and everyone is in awe of your
achievement and praising how smart you are. It’s nice to
feel-good about this, but living off feel-good praise will
cost you money. This is a clue: it is the perfect time to sell
and sit back and feel good about your money in the bank.
Knowing when to exit, as well as having an exit
strategy, is essential in knowing how to maximise your
ability to make money out of thin air, and the best time to
get out financially is while your business is running hot.
136 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

33. THE RICH HIRE WHEN THEY

DON’T NEED TO
By pure definition, it is extremely rare that you will find
the best people available for hire when you need them.
These people are the best because they are valuable and
busily working solidly elsewhere.
So, to become a Business Sleuth you must recognise
this and always be on the lookout for the best people.
When you come across them, then be prepared to hire
them immediately, even before you have a job for them.
There have been many occasions where I have had
the opportunity to do this, and so will you. I will meet
someone during the day — perhaps it’s a friendly
receptionist in a hotel or great salesperson dealing with
us — and if I recognise something special about these
people, I spend most of the time we are interacting sizing
them up and secretly conducting an informal interview
by asking a few extra questions about them and their
work.
Once I have satisfied myself of my interest — I never
offend them or their current employer — I simply pay them
a compliment and comment that if ever they decide to
look for a new job I would be delighted if they would
consider calling me.
Sometimes they indicate this desire immediately,
while other times I never hear from them again.
However, I have discovered this is the best way to find
some of the most outstanding people for my business.
If, however, you have not identified someone this
way and need to find people, I wouldn’t recommend
using a recruitment agency as I find this process too slow,
 FORTY-TWO HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 1S?
SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS PEOPLE

too expensive and generally I don’t find what I want. I

simply run an advert in the metropolitan newspaper.
I will explain the best method to do this later on.

34. ARE YOU IN PRISON?

‘The minute you think you are invincible, is the minute
you start your demise.’
Brian Sher
Unsuccessful, insecure people try to hide their weaknesses
by being brash, arrogant, dishonest, deceitful and not
admitting to any weakness at all — cognitive denial.
It is easy to see these people. You can spot them a mile
away. They believe their bravado 1s fooling everyone when
actually they only fool themselves. I am certain you know
someone like this. They stand out like a sore thumb.
It is sad and unnecessary. If someone feels they are
disadvantaged in some way, instead of growing a
complex they can acknowledge it, make fun ofit, turn it
into strength. A blind person may justifiably feel limited
in a world of seeing people, yet can decided not to
become a ‘victim’ and look at making the most of what
they do have.
A few years ago I attended a breakfast where
W. Mitchell was the guest speaker. For those of you who
do not know his remarkable story,W. Mitchell met with
two unfortunate accidents a few years apart that left him a
paraplegic, and he suffered burns to 65 per cent of his body.
In fact, he was so badly injured that the fire completely
burned off all his fingers. Doctors had to do massive skin
grafts to his face and amputated two toes to reattach them
to his hands so he could use them as thumbs.
138 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

Prior to his accidents he was a successful businessman

and happily married, but his accident, convalescence,
time in recovery and disfigurement caused him to lose
both his business and his wife.
His is truly an amazing story of mental strength.
Despite all his horrific injuries, disabilities and handicap,
he subsequently recovered enough to go on and start a
new business and made a huge success of it again.
Imagine being young, healthy and having everything
to live for, and within a matter of days finding yourself in
a body you don’t recognise with a future that suddenly
looks incredibly bleak. Imagine the fear and negative
thoughts you would have to deal with — in circumstances
you are powerless to change. Life has changed for you
forever — there is no going back.
Listening to him speak, I remember my first reaction
was typical of most — a mixture of amazement and
disbelief. He wheeled his way past my seat to the front of
the room and [ll never forget his opening remarks. He
said. ‘Some people are in prison and others locked up
behind bars ... We all have our disabilities — what’s yours?
Before my accident, I used to be able to do 10 000 things
and did only a few, now I can only do 9900 but try to
do many more.’
So the question to ponder is: what is holding you
back? Are these weaknesses or fears? What can you
indeed do that you think you can’t — not because you
can’t physically achieve it, but because mentally you have
put yourself in prison and have thrown away the key?
There is nothing wrong with having a weakness or
being afraid, but if you want to get somewhere in life
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you need to overcome your fear and learn to turn your

weaknesses into strengths, or you will find only
frustration and you will fall short of your desired goals.

35. RUN FASTER —- JUMP HIGHER

There is no doubt that the one thing that sets successful
people apart from the rest is the standards they set for
themselves. They expect more of themselves and have
higher self-imposed standards than others.
Many people have been taught to achieve standards
that have been set by others — bosses, teachers, parents or
company policies. Near enough is good enough, and
they get away with the minimum they can.
Successful people make a habit of looking at world’s
best practice. They make it their mission to know what the
best in the world are doing and then strive to go beyond
even this.
It is no different to the world’s best sportsmen and
women, who measure themselves daily against the best
team in the world or against the current world records,
taking these as their benchmark for achievement. And as
world records are broken, they shift their goal upward
accordingly. Successful people set their standards higher
than all others and then challenge themselves to better
them everyday. It is no coincidence this is noticeable in
all areas of their life.
If you’ve ever met a champion sportsperson, the chances
are you've found they are a great person, too. They don’t
keep raising their standards because it is easy, but because it
provides them with the satisfaction of achievement, and
they know it pays handsomely in the long term.
140 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

This takes drive, energy and daily commitment to be

better than you can be — a discipline sorely lacking in
everyday people.

36. SOMETHING MORE VALUABLE

THAN GOLD
With everything that has been written about self-
improvement, so much of it being in the public domain,
published thousands of times over and accessible for free,
why is it that so many people try to improve their lives
yet still never seem to get anywhere?
I can assure you this has nothing to do with
education, effort, positive thinking, willpower or self-
discipline.
So what goes wrong for people who genuinely try
so hard yet don’t seem to achieve? Dr Maxwell Maltz,
in his book Psycho-Cybernetics, reached an interesting
conclusion: people who tend to fail do so due to a lack
of self-esteem or self-image. He said that whenever the
resolution is incongruent with self-image, the
resolution will fail.
This makes so much sense and is something you
should self-examine.
It explains why sincere dieters cannot stick to a
weight-loss regime, why New Year’s resolutions are not
kept, and why people procrastinate so much. Self-
esteem is the governing and self-limiting factor that
ultimately determines why people can and cannot
achieve. For example, if someone sees themselves as
impaired or disabled in some way physically or
mentally (whether this is real or simply believed), they
 FORTY-TWO HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 141
SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS PEOPLE

will never succeed, no matter how much aid they are

given. Their skewed image of‘self’ or value of‘self’ sets
an upper limit to their achievement and capabilities, no
matter what the reality is or how much talent they
actually have.
Wake Sthe, child, whe is. “shchtly “clumisy,
uncoordinated and is led to believe he is athletically
impaired, through years of negative comments. This
‘truth’ has been proven to him as he is the last child to
be picked to play a game. He can take lessons, watch
videos, use gadgets and learning aids to help him to
improve his skill, but he will never be good at the game.
On the other hand, take the blind man who runs
marathons, goes trekking and mountain climbing, who
has not bought into the belief that blind people can’t do
these things, can’t enjoy these pursuits.
Consciously held thoughts will have little or no
impact on your life if they are not congruent with the
embedded images and beliefs held in your
subconscious. Plainly stated, if you honestly believe you
cannot do something, you cannot — no matter what!
For this reason you will find that successful people
protect their self-esteem like gold, and take time to feed
and nurture it every day. They avoid any people and
practices that threaten their self-esteem in any way.
There is nothing more destructive to an individual’s
success than to have their self-esteem damaged or
slowly whittled away.
142 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

37. DO YOU HAVE FLEAS?

‘If you lie with dogs you get fleas. It’s that simple.
The world is full of people who have been damaged
through _life’s. disappointments and negative
programming, who wake up every morning and hate
what they are doing, hate the traffic, hate the crowds,
hate the increase in prices, hate, hate, hate.
Life has made them fearful and scared, and they spend
their days looking at the dark side of life, avoiding all
risk, ridicule or anything that might change the status
quo. These people complain quickly about everything
and everyone, they gossip and generally feel better about
other people’s misfortune. They seek to create problems
rather than look for solutions.
These people drain your energy. They are literally
dangerous to your success. You must realise you have a
limited amount of energy 1n a day, and these people — be
they family, spouse, friend, work colleagues, boss or
whoever — will drain this from you, sucking you dry.
I am sure you have experienced something similar,
waking up in the morning feeling bright, full of energy
and positive, and you get someone moaning and
complaining about something that is unnecessary or
trivial. In minutes you feel drained and tired and are
ready to crawl back into bed. Yes, we have all
experienced this and these people must be avoided at all
costs, if you wish to achieve your goals.
Success is a team effort and few people are truly self
made. Successful people make a habit of avoiding
negative people and a negative environment, and
 FORTY-TWO HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 143
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surround themselves with people who can help and

nurture their thoughts and spirit.
But never choose your friends because they are rich.
Money doesn’t equate with success. Success is made up
of many things: optimism, a positive attitude, a
determination to get things done, a thirst for knowledge
and a willingness to take risks. If your friends are
successful you will also think more positively, find
yourself seeing more opportunities and get ahead
yourself.
Beware in whom you entrust the stewardship of your
self-esteem, as this has far-reaching consequences when
it comes to the level of success and happiness you will
enjoy. Take note of warning signs around you, and make
the decision that anyone that engages in the practice of
self-esteem mismanagement — including parents, friends
and colleagues — should not be beyond reproach and
should be surgically removed from your life, if all else
fails.
Sometimes this is very difficult and painful, especially
if the doubter happens to be a parent. It’s not so easy to
just find another one, but this is one of the more difficult
life decisions you may have to make if you wish to heal
yourself, like finding out you need to go under the
surgeon's knife to remove a tumour.
I have what I consider to be a successful friend and
on one occasion I asked her why she left her homeland
at the age of 16, travelling to settle in Australia on her
own. I asked how she managed to achieve this while
seemingly not missing her past. I have always admired
her for her courage to leave, then survive when so young
144 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

to plant her roots so far away from home. She never

complains or compares her life now to what it was, as so
many immigrants seem to do.
Her response was honest and true. She explained that
she still loved her family but left to get away from them.
She went on to explain that her parents constantly
fought and embarrassed her in front of her friends. Even
at the age of 12, she knew this was not a positive
environment to grow up in.
It then occurred to me: did she need courage to leave
or courage to stay?

38. TAKE RESPONSIBILITY -

IT’S THE ROAD TO GREATNESS
‘If matters go badly now, they will not always be so.’
Horace
It often amazes me the number of times in business I come
across people who spend their whole day figuring out ways
not to get things done and avoiding responsibility.Yes, this
happens, whether you believe it or not.
Such people fear failure so badly and don’t want to
face the consequences of something going wrong.
Most work environments provide no incentive for
their employees to try new things and make things
happen, and will punish or fire them if they make a
mistake. These ‘unwritten rules’ quickly make employees
figure out that if they say ‘no’ to a proposal or new
Opportunity (and simply maintain the status quo —
keeping their heads low), they will have a greater
longevity in their job and may even get promoted when
their boss retires or moves on.
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If, however, they make a decision and take a risk, and

it does not turn out to be successful, they will be at best
reprimanded or at worst fired. So where is the incentive
to take responsibility — when all taking responsibility
does is create stress? There is none.
Successful people are different and know that taking
responsibility is part of the initiation you need to
undergo to attain greatness, at whatever level you desire
— especially when things go wrong.
It is amusing to see how many people run for cover,
duck and dive, point the finger or lay blame when things
go wrong. They will not even accept responsibility for their
own failure — financially, socially or in relationships — as it
is always the other person’s fault. And the sad thing is that
such people go through their whole lives blaming others
for their own failure — their parents, their partner, their
lover, the government. It is always someone else fault.
Successful people are different. They make it a habit
to square up to things, facing any problem and going
about fixing and learning from it, no matter how painful,
embarrassing or expensive it might be.

39. LIFE IS NOT A TEST DRIVE

How many Pete Samprases are out there, whose names
we will never know as great tennis players? How many
Bill Gates are out there, who will never be known as the
world’s richest man?
How many times have you heard people say when they
see a new product hit the market,‘Icame up with same idea
two years ago, but never did anything about it’? How often
have you heard people marvelling at another’s success,
146 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

saying things like, ‘What a great idea, it is so obvious and

simple’, yet they did not come up with it themselves?
Conversations like these happen all the time, in every
city in the modern world. Tens of thousands of new
products are launched each week, yet hundreds of
thousands or indeed millions of people never do a thing
differently to what they have done before. This lets so
much potential go unnoticed or get wasted.
Why this occurs is simply a matter of attitude, and
has nothing to do with ability or inherent skill.
Successful people do not have more talent or luck
than average, but they do one thing others don’t and that
is maximise their potential. In other words, they become
the best they can be, and will stand for nothing less.
This is what sets them apart and is what gives them the
edge. It gives them an aura of respect and stature. Thomas
Edison once said, ‘If we did all the things we were capable
of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.
Edison himself has 1093 inventions to his credit —
including the electric light bulb and the phonograph.
The greatest inventor of all time, he was granted at least
one patent each year for 65 consecutive years, and
developed the modern research laboratory.
He was 67 years old in 1914 when his beloved
laboratory burned to the ground. Lesser men would have
been devastated, but Edison said, ‘I am not too old to
make a fresh start’ He rebuilt the lab and kept working
for another 17 years.
Edison is mentioned over and over again in self-
development circles as a great example of someone living
to their full potential.
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40. EFFORTLESS RICHES —- CAN

IT REALLY BE EFFORTLESS?
Business Sleuths know the value of their time and
knowledge. Many people and companies are simply out
there working for less than they deserve. The
consequences of this means depriving yourself and your
company of valuable profits.
Note I said profits, not income. When you increase
your price, all of this increase ends up as profit.
The result of this in terms of making money out of thin
air 1s enormous — if you undercharge for what you
produce you are depriving yourself of extra income and
massive profits from the tradeable value of your business.
This impacts on the value of your business enormously.
Every dollar you undercharge comes off your bottom
line. Every dollar less on the bottom line reduces the value
of your business by between four and 3080 times. (The
figure 3080 is an example from the extreme case of Metal
Storm Ltd. Metal Storm is a company that invented a gun
that electronically fired a huge number of rounds per
second. The publicity for this was immense, and their share
price soared so high, in fact, that Metal Storm’s p/e ratio
reached 3080 on 20 December 2001.)
Looked at another way, what this means is that for
every dollar you increase your price by that ends up on
your bottom line, you will increase your company’s
worth by between four and 3080 times. This is not
something to ignore.
148 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

The implication of this is massive for you and is one

very fast way of making money out of thin air. You are still
doing exactly what you were doing yesterday, yet by
simply raising your prices your business is worth much
more — at no cost or effort.
So, how do you know whether you are
undercharging?
There is a 90 per cent chance you are undervaluing
your time and knowledge. So, here is a simple way to
discover this for yourself: simply put your prices up and
see what happens!
I have advised many clients to do this and discovered
little or no customer resistance, yet its impact has made a
huge difference to the company’s profitability. I had a
client that ran a boutique organic food takeaway store.
They were very busy, so much so that they were run
ragged trying to keep up with demand, yet did not make
much profit after all costs, earning a modest living from
the business.
When I inquired about this they explained their costs
were higher than other food businesses — as they used
premium quality ingredients — yet were trying to deliver
their products at competitive prices.
After much resistance and concern they agreed to my
suggestion to increase their prices by 10 per cent across
the board and to put up signs around their business
educating their customers about the high-grade quality
and care that went into the making of their products.
The net result — not one lost sale or upset customer
(many, in fact, commented that they felt the new prices
were very reasonable). They added just over £100 000
 FORTY-TWO HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST 149
SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS PEOPLE

per annum directly to their bottom line, which

immediately increased the value of their business by
£400 000. They made £400 000 out of thin air — almost
overnight. They had to do no extra work to gain this
great value and monetary benefit.
Perhaps you should be thinking about your value
and prices?

41. HOW TO EMPLOY RICHARD

BRANSON
There’s a whole new industry spawned in the last few
years — business and life coaching.
People are setting themselves up in business to
‘coach’ others along toward their predetermined life
goals. (I don’t advise you to get into this business as such
coaches are breaking a fundamental rule of making
money out of thin air — they are selling their time.)
This industry has grown because people today
recognise they need help and guidance if they wish to
ever achieve their goals. Successful people have been
employing coaches for years, well before the appearance
of this industry. Needless to say it is a great way to help
keep you focused and motivated.
But it is important for you to recognise that focus
and motivation will only get you so far. You need much
more than that. Having a role model and mentor who
has already achieved what you want to achieve is one big
step up from life coaching.
What you need is to find a mentor with experience
and knowledge. But not just any experience and
knowledge. The more specific their experience and
150 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

knowledge the better. Find yourself‘aRichard Branson’

or someone even more appropriate. No two businesses
are the same and therefore you should be looking for
someone who has done what you wish to do — or
something close. This is where you need to be.
As a boy my dad gave me some great advice, which I
would like you to always remember. ‘Never get advice
from anyone more messed up than you are.’ Great advice!
How often do we get advice from someone because
it’s free (a friend, a family member, a colleague)? It is
likely this advice will be the most expensive advice you
will get, because it will usually be wrong, although given
with great intentions. It’s always amazed me that we get
advice about finances, health and relationships from
people who are poorer, less fit, and more confused than
we are. And, yes, this happens all the time without us
even realising it.
I seriously questioned whether I should be seeking
advice from my doctor shortly after he experienced a
heart attack and two bouts of cancer. Here I was
entrusting my life to a man who was unable to look after
his own although he was a doctor. As you can imagine, I
have changed doctors and asked a few more questions
about the new one I now see (very occasionally).
How many times when we have relationship issues
do we get advice from a friend or family member who
is single or in an unhappier relationship than we are? And
what about your financial and business advice — where
are you getting this from? Does your accountant make
more money than you do? What about your solicitor,
friend, life or business coach?
 FORTY-TWO HABITS OF THE WORLD’S MOST Aw
SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS PEOPLE

If the answer to that question is no, I think you know

what to do. And fast!

42. FEAR KEEPS YOU POOR

‘Fortune favours the brave.’
Virgil
Does this mean you need to be brave to succeed in life?
Not really!
Successful people feel fear like anyone else. They
simply react differently to others when dealing with it,
and face up to it for good or bad.
Many people become paralysed by fear and live their
whole lives using all their energy to avoid it to such an
extent that dominates their entire behaviour. These
people have no physical disabilities, yet it is their mental
disability stops them from achieving.
It is well recognised that 90 per cent of what we
worry about never happens, so we waste 90 per cent of
our mental energy on what 1s essentially trivia. Does this
mean we could eliminate worry altogether?
Worry plays a useful role in the planning process and
helps us to anticipate potential future problems. Successful
people use fear constructively. They analyse and risk-profile
the situation — and then make a decision about moving
forward based on understanding the worst possible
outcome. This allows them to put the fear behind them.
I call this the ‘What’s the worst thing that can
happen?’ technique. By looking at a situation and asking
yourself this question it allows you to know what your
worst-case scenario is and decide if you can live with it.
This makes decision-making simple and easy.
152 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

Such a decision-making process frees you up to take

action. You already know the likely outcome(s), having
weighed up your options. And whatever outcome
occurs, you are ready for it. When it comes it may not be
the outcome you are hoping for, but it will not come as
a surprise.
This process of eliminating surprises helps to remove
much of the fear in making a decision in the first place.
Because you have taken action you will be happy with
the result, even if it is not the one you initially hoped for,
as something good always come from this process of
taking action.
Facing fear and moving forward is not only for the
‘lucky few’. It is a learned process and can be practised
by anyone, given his or her desire to do so.
 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OFTHIN AIR 153

chapter 14
TWENTY-SIX SECRETS
TO MAKE MONEY OUT
OF THIN AIR
I’ve spent much of this book talking about why you need
to set your business up from the very start to ensure that
you maximise your ability to make money out of thin air —
so you are not simply working hard and creating nothing
of value for yourself. My focus has been on the habits of
the most successful businesses and the habits you will
need to develop yourself if you wish to follow the path
of the world’s most successful people.
The final section of the book brings these together a
step-by-step approach to help you achieve this for
yourself. It focuses on helping you to create maximum
value by making your business valuable, saleable and
tradeable.
I have identified a 26-step formula to make money
out of thin air, one that you must follow to ensure you get
off the ground and that you are indeed building
maximum value into your business from the start. To
follow this formula you can start at the beginning and
154 TWENTY-SIX SECRETS TO MAKE MONEY
OUT OF THIN AIR

work your way through each point, or you can pick it up

anywhere along the way, depending on where you are
along your journey. If you are already in a business or
looking at buying one, you can compare your current
situation against these steps to see how you are faring.
Let’s begin.

1. TURN ON YOUR RADAR

When starting the process of making money out of thin air,
many people are confused and unsure where to begin.
The first point is to realise that opportunities pass in
front of you every day.
You don’t have to look very far. Great opportunities
don’t just happen to rich people; instead rich people just
know how to find opportunities. I have people
approaching me all the time with great opportunities. I
can assure you there is no shortage — and rich people do
not have a franchise on money-making ideas. They
simply tune into this channel and see things others don't.
It may take you a while to get used to doing this, but
it’s a matter of tuning in. Opportunity is everywhere,
every day. You just need to open your mind and
possibilities will begin to flow in.
Read books, newspapers and a wide variety of
magazines you may not ordinarily read. Listen to people
on buses, trains, at parties, hear what their major
concerns are, and listen not only to what they are saying
but read between the lines. Follow the careers and
movements of successful people and look at what they
are up to. Listen to talkback radio. Look for different
angles. Go to shopping centres and look around to see
 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OFTHIN AIR 155

what people are buying, which stores are busy, which are
quiet. Break your normal routine.
This stage is all about simply sucking in information
and getting a feel for the pulse of the people. I enjoy
going to new places and cities. This is the time when you
can get out of your normal routine, explore, open your
mind and take in the mood and buzz of what’s going on
around you.
If you do this I guarantee you will begin to tune in
and to see opportunities almost daily.
This is a most exciting time, and you should be all
fired up about the possibilities of creating something
really special. The fire should be burning inside you.

2. IDENTIFY YOUR PASSION

‘Look at your choices, pick the best one, then go with it.’
Pat Riley, NBA basketball coach and author
of The Winner Within
Now you need to hone in a little as you begin to realise
the possibilities are simply endless, and there are more
opportunities than you could possibly take advantage of.
It is time to begin to identify your passion.
This can be as simple as asking yourself the following
questions:
¢ what do I love doing?
¢ what ideas and patterns suit me as a person and my
lifestyle?
It’s important that you discover what your passion 1s
and what you want, as ‘If you don’t know what you
want, you will have to take what you get’. A big part of
156 TWENTY-SIX SECRETS TO MAKE MONEY
OUT OF TRIS-AIR.

achieving success in life is knowing what you want.As I

have outlined earlier, most successful people know this
from an early age.
You don’t have to look anywhere for this. Your task
now is to switch from tuning in to tuning out. Switch off
from the outside world and look inside yourself, to
discover honestly what your passions are.
Everyone has passion. You have it somewhere. It may
not be obvious at first, as it may have been squashed or
beaten down. If you don’t have passion, as some people
believe, you are probably dead and don’t know it yet. I
can assure you that you do have passion, even though it
may be hard to find. You must rediscover it and fast.
Don’t worry, you will know when you have aroused
your passion: the mere thought of it will make you feel
light, happy, positive and excited about spending the rest
of your life working with passion.

If you work with your passion you will

never have to go to work again for the
rest of your life.
What a beautiful thought, and how lucky you will be
when you can achieve this.
Passion is the key — I cannot stress this enough. This
step is, if Ican be blunt, the most important in helping
you to make money out of thin air. Do not simply do
something because it will earn you money. Greer
Garson summed it up: ‘Starting out to make money is
the greatest mistake in life. Do what you feel you have a
flair for doing, and if you are good enough at it, the
money will come,’
 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OFTHIN AIR LS?

Listen to your inner voice. At first it may be a little

faint. But persist with this practice and always
acknowledge strongly your own feelings and emotions.
These are your signposts and inner directions to know
where your passions lie.
Do not be influenced by others, no matter who they
are, unless their passion is consistent with your passion.
Do not be fooled into buying into somebody else’s
passion foolishly thinking it is your own, or because you
think you are not worthy of having your own.

3. ONLY LOOK AT
GROWTH MARKETS
If you are going into business for yourself you should
want to build the business into the biggest asset you can.
If you are going to give yourself the best chance of this
occurring there is no point in addressing a market with
growth limitations. You must go after large and
expanding markets with unlimited upside — go where the
money 1s.
Why limit yourself? Why get on board the Titanic by
getting into markets that are mature, overcrowded or
shrinking?
Which markets are growing? At any time there will
be some markets growing and others shrinking. The
balance shifts over time and with differing economic
conditions. For example, during recessions more markets
contract than grow on a macro level. Yet at any time
(even during recessions) you can find growth markets,
regardless of what people say about the economy and
economic conditions.
158 TWENTY-SIX SECRETS TO MAKE MONEY
OUT OF THIN Ax.

In fact, I love recessions. I like to start new businesses

during a general downturn. This might sound odd to many.
However, I find that during boom periods it’s too hard.
Suppliers, landlords, employees are then too busy to deal
with your ‘little’ business and are making too much money
to be interested about your concern. There are no bargains
to be had and you need to pay top dollar for everything.
People don’t or won’t negotiate with you for better prices
because they don’t need your business, you will find it
harder to get staff and will have to pay higher wages.
We saw this during the tech boom. Companies were
paying ridiculous money to get average — or any —
workers, and everybody wanted the prestige of working
for a big company with big expense accounts and a
company car. In the United States there was a massive
skilled-labour shortage and graduates straight out of
college were being offered absurd sums of money, with
share options and other incredible perks — until the
bubble burst. I understand that today these same college
graduates are moving back in with their parents and will
be happy to find work for any sum.
During a recession you can lock into cheap, good-
quality rents, you can attract great staff at reasonable
costs, you can buy office furniture at discounts or fire-
sale prices, get cheap advertising rates ... the list goes on.
You can get going with a quarter of the funds you
might otherwise need. Another great bonus is that most
big companies won’t compete with you, as they are so
busy trying to stop their losses, they are totally risk
adverse in recessions. They won’t expand into your
market until the boom is on again, and then they will
 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR 1p9

want to get in quickly, which means for them simply

buying your business rather than starting from scratch —
helping you make money out of thin air.
Unlimited upside businesses also have other, not so
immediately obvious, benefits. They:
* attract more capital — as investors know growth
markets
* attract better people — as staff are attracted to fast-
growth markets and companies
* are valued higher by potential buyers as they promise
future growth and investors are prepared to pay a
premium for continued promise of growth.
Right now, amongst the fastest growing markets are
these five sectors:
* health
¢ wealth
* education
* the environment, and
* security-related products.
There are many reasons for this, but most of them are
due to the ageing of baby boomers and the realisation
that they will live longer than they once expected to.
They have in the past lived on too much credit, spending
frivolously and without concern for our non-renewable
resources (air, water, land). They also have come to realise
that the government has led us into a false sense of
security about being able to guarantee our health, safety
and an adequate pension for retirement.
These markets are worth literally billions of pounds
around the world and are only going to get bigger in the
foreseeable future.
160 TWENTY-SIX SECRETS TO MAKE MONEY
OUT OF THIN AIR

There are, of course, other growth markets aside from

these five. They just happen to be the ones I watch and like.
How passion intersects with growth markets
Some people ask what you should do if your passion
does not lie in a growth market.
The reality is that products that sell the best are those
that appeal to the most buyers. Therefore you will do
best if you try to match your passion with a growth
market, or you may be limiting your upside.
Even if you are not going into an identified growth
market, there must be enough of a market for you to
build a growing business. A product that only appeals to
very few people isn’t going to make you rich. So research
your market thoroughly, and then choose your business
possibility as the one that best reflects your passion and
yet has the possibility of strong growth.
Be wary of ideas that require any shift in the
market, as the trend you are expecting may never
happen. On the other hand, don’t jump on the
bandwagon of a trend that is in full swing: you may be
left with a warehouse full of yo-yos or scooters. Trends
come and go so fast today that you can’t rely on them
to last long enough to make money.
You don’t have to pitch your product or service at a
Rolls-Royce level, either. To be successful, you must
match your product to what the maximum number of
customers want.
Product selection is critical to your success
You may be convinced that the timing is right to
launch a new product or service into the market — but
remember the high cost of educating that market. It can
 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OFTHIN AIR 161

sometimes take years, and millions of pounds, to educate

the market about an entirely new product.
Everyday items that we now take for granted often
took years to gain market acceptance. Take, for example,
Nautral HRT (hormone replacement _ therapy).
Conventional HRT has been used by women for twenty
years, despite the increasing awareness of side effects such
as the greater risk of developing heart disease and some
types of cancers, or suffering strokes. Yet, until recently,
women have been resistant to adopting natural
alternatives, even though they do not have the side
effects of conventional HRT.
Keep in mind that a new or improved version of an
existing product requires far less customer education, and
thus will be less expensive to launch. Also note that it’s
usually not the inventors of a new product or service
who end up with the money. It’s almost always the
entrepreneur who picks up the concept when the timing
is right, and runs with it, who makes it successful.
Oporto Chicken, a fast growing Portuguese -style
chicken store in Sydney, Australia, began operations as a
single store in Bondi, Sydney’s famous beach suburb. It
was always busy with people lining up to by its peri-peri
chicken specialty. This was spotted by an entrepreneur
who turned Oporto into a successful franchise chain.
So am I saying that, if your timing’s right you don’t
have to worry about market education? Definitely not!
To be successful you need to educate your market
constantly.
However, educating your customers about your
unique qualities, and why they should buy a particular
162 TWENTY-SIX SECRETS TO MAKE MONEY
OUT OFTHIN Aik.

product or service from you, is going to cost you a lot less

than educating them about a whole new concept.
Your payback period won’t be quick, and you may
run out of resources to eventually cash in. However, if
you do make it through this treacherous period, you'll
stand a good chance of making large amounts of money
out of thin air.

4. FIND OUT WHO IS ALREADY

DOING IT (OR SOMETHING SIMILAR
ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD)
If you want to know a short cut to making money out
Of thin-ale this is10
People who do this successfully are masters at it. To
become a master at anything takes years of refining your
craft. Becoming an apprentice to the Master of a trade is
a time-honoured tradition of skilled craftsmen, going
back centuries. Such craftsmen worked for very little to
learn their chosen trade.
Today, people with no training or skill — or those that
have been to university to learn ‘theory’ — go out and
start a business. Starting, building, buying or running a
business, as opposed to working for someone else (selling
your time), are two completely different set of skills. And
just because you can work in a successful business does
not mean you can run one.
Please don’t get these two confused, or it will cost
you millions.
Look around (the world if you have to) and find out
who 1s already doing what you want to do, or is working
as close as possible to your field. Go and meet them,
 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR 163

work with them, get their advice, become their partner.

Work with them for free, if you have to.

5. STUDY INTENTLY WHAT THEY

HAVE DONE
Once you have identified this person or company, study
what and how they do things, what decisions they make
and why. Once you feel you understand this fully, only
then is it time to move on your own. It may take years
to do but it will be the most valuable education you will
ever get.
Chances are that if you do this right and work hard
and study well, the person or company you have studied
under may even offer to help fund you or become your
partner, assuming you have shown your commitment
and passion.
It is never too late to start. You are never too old to
learn from the best. You are never too old to ignite your
passion. It just takes a bigger sacrifice when you are
older, as you may have a family and financial
commitments that need to be considered. This 1s why the
earlier you start the better.

6. CREATE A POWERFUL VISION

Once you have decided what it is you want to do,
creating a powerful vision is essential. When you do this
you must ensure that your vision is worthy and is one
that captures people’s imagination. This is the time to
dream and THINK BIG.
People — staff, investors, customers — all want to be part
of something special, and at this stage if you are not able
164 TWENTY-SIX SECRETS TO MAKE MONEY
OUT OF THIN AUK.

to paint the big picture for them, to share your vision and
passion, you will never get another chance to. If you are
going to do something, try to follow the words of Henry
Marchant in 1789: ‘Be daring, be first and be different’.
And all of this should be reflected in your vision.
Your vision should be enticing and it should be sexy
— but, most importantly, it should be realistic and entirely
possible, or you will achieve nothing but turning people
off. Don’t forget, people are attracted to energy and
enthusiasm and that’s what this vision should contain. If
done correctly, it will attract all the right people who
will help you get off the ground.
At this stage some of you, never having done this
before, may not be sure what’ this means — to create a
powerful vision. It is simply a powerful, enthusiastic
statement of what you wish to do.
For example, John McGrath had just one goal and
focus (which also was a very powerful vision statement).
From the first day he began his business he wanted to
have the largest single real estate office in the world. Bold —
yes, daring — yes, different —yes.
And I believe he has achieved this over the past ten
years. A powerful, compelling vision needs be no more
complicated than his was. In fact, it must be powerful
and compelling and simple for people to understand and
buy into.
 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OFTHIN AIR 165

7./GERT EXCITED; SO EXCITED

YOU CAN’T SLEEP
Your next step in this process should be natural and easy.
If not, this is a bad sign and it is time to go back and re-
evaluate your decision.
If you are passionate about your business and you
believe in what you want to create, then being excited,
in fact so excited you can’t sleep, should come easily and
naturally. Your mind should be racing with the
possibilities and opportunities. You should be lying in
bed wide awake with a pen and paper at the ready to jot
down all the ideas you find yourself coming up with in
the middle of the night.
You should have a strong sense of doing something
great and special — for yourself and the lucky customers
you haven’t met yet.
Think about this. It should be common sense — if you
can’t get excited about your own business, how do you
expect anybody else to?
Excitement, enthusiasm, passion. All words you’ve
read about many, many times in books like this, but these
words should now come alive and be real and
meaningful to you.

8. HAVE A GOOD STORY!

Every great business has a good story about why or how
the person who started the business found himself or
herself being drawn into making their decision.
The masters of making money out of thin air know how
to tell and re-tell their story. They play on it, colour it
166 TWENTY-SIX SECRETS TO MAKE MONEY
OUT OF THIN AIR

and enhance it so that it becomes a good story, and over

time it becomes the folklore that others use to gain
motivation and inspiration.
How many times have we heard about Thomas Edison
and the invention of the light bulb? How many times have
we heard about Colonel Sanders of KFC’s persistence in
trying to get someone to take on his chicken recipe? How
many stories have we heard about entrepreneurs visiting a
thousand banks and getting rejection after rejection until
the last door they knocked on opened up to them?
All these stories are probably true to some degree, but
what is important is that they play a useful function in
any corporation’s life and history. They are there to
inspire and motivate others who face similar challenges,
yet where they begin 1s equally important and it 1s where
you need to begin.
Have a good story about why you found this
opportunity or what made you decide to create this
business or develop these products. Many companies
even use this as part of their branding, advertising and
packaging — for good reason.
Remember Victor Kiam? He liked the close shave he
got so much that he bought the company. Everybody
remembers Victor’s story.
Using a good story helps build excitement about the
project and will certainly aid in getting investors more
excited about backing you. Remember, you are in the
process of making money out of thin air and therefore that
is what you are selling at this point — air. There is nothing
wrong, illegal or immoral about this. This is the way
thousands, in fact millions, of great businesses around the
 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OFTHIN AIR 167

world had their humble beginnings.

Let me ask you a question. If you were an employee,
investor or customer, how excited would you be if
someone said they were opening up:
*- a coffee shop
°_ ea courier business
* a bookshop
* a delicatessen
and they were looking for you invest with them?
Let me help you out — probably not too excited.
Yet look at:
¢ Starbucks — the biggest coffee chain in the world.
That’s exciting.
¢ Federal Express — the biggest company in the world
in overnight delivery. That’s exciting.
¢ Amazon.com — the world biggest bookstore. That’s
exciting.
¢ Westfield — the world’s biggest shopping-centre
operators. Wow!
These companies have managed to attract millions of
pounds in investors’ funds, and still do today. Frank Lowy,
founder of Westfield Holdings, a company that now
owns shopping centres worth billions of pounds around
the world, began 35 years ago with a single delicatessen
and built this into a worldwide empire. Today he is
Australia’s second-richest man.
So, a great business needs a great story and it’s
important you have a story to tell — no matter how small
your beginnings.
168 TWENTY-SIX SECRETS TO MAKE MONEY
OUT OF THIN AIR

9. HAVE A BASIC BUSINESS PLAN

This does not have to be an extensive document that
dazzles the reader with facts and figures, but needs to be
a clear, concise outline of what your business is and how
you will build it.
Your business plan does not need to be a formal
document but an expression of how you intend to start
and expand your business. It should cover all the
elements of how your business will operate, who your
customers are, what products you will offer and how
many people your business needs, and should lay out all
aspects of your business and vision, so anyone can pick
up this document and understand how you will run your
business and where your revenues will come from.
It should also have a projected profit and loss and
cashflow, so you can demonstrate how the business will
work financially. Most importantly, if you are seeking
finance or capital from investors, your business plan
needs to show your exit strategy for investors, i.e. how
they will be able to get their capital out after three to five
years.
The more capital you are seeking the more
important this document becomes, and it may be
worthwhile having it professionally prepared if you are
seeking venture capital for your business.

10. GET PROPERLY CAPITALISED

You do need money to go into business, especially if you
are going to sell ‘boxes’ and not your time.
There are very few businesses that are worthwhile
getting involved in that don’t need at least some cash to
 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OFTHIN AIR 169

start with. Multi-level marketing or consulting businesses

are the exception to this rule, and I am not advocating
either of these types of businesses for one main reason:
you have nothing to sell and therefore have no ability to
make money out of thin air.
If you don’t have cash to fund your own business
there are always alternatives. Raising money is not an
easy or quick process and do not go into it expecting to
have someone write you a cheque in just a few weeks. It
could take months to raise some seed capital and it will
be a trying and challenging time.
The main reason is that people with money to invest
view start-up businesses as a very risky investment, one
that has a high chance of losing their money. And rightly
so, since 90 per cent of businesses fail.
There will be few people out there who are prepared
to back you, no matter how good your idea 1s. This is the
reason why you should follow the 26 Secrets To
Making Money Out Of Thin Air. Of course, there 1s
no guarantee my formula will get you the capital either
— however, it will certainly make it a lot easier.
How to get start-up cash
There are five ways for you to get the cash you need
to start your business:
borrow against assets
get a personal loan
angel finance
venture capital
eeventures.
ie joint
If you have sufficient assets, then No. 1 above is your
quickest and easiest option. Banks will lend you money
170 TWENTY-SIX SECRETS TO MAKE MONEY
OUT OF THIN AIK

against assets, as long as they cover their risk by using

your property as security.
Some banks will provide a personal loan. However,
this is unlikely to be a great amount and, unless you are
looking for a small sum, it usually will not be sufficient
to start a business.
The third option available is a relatively newer
avenue. There are a select number of high-net-worth
people — angels — who will back small and start-up
businesses. They will typically not only provide you with
capital but also with management expertise and ongoing
mentorship of your business — if they like the idea and if
they are impressed by you.
Thesevpeoplercany be hard ‘te tind) as*they donut
generally advertise. However, on occasions they do, so it
pays to keep an eye on the financial papers. A useful
website to begin searching for such people is
www.avcal.com.au
Your fourth option is to go after some venture
finance. The people and organisations that provide this
type of capital are generally very sophisticated investors
and their whole motive in investing in your business is
to make money out of thin air — this is the game they are
in. They know the principles in this book like the back
of their hand, they are masters at making money from
other people’s ideas and businesses. They understand
this game very well — it’s what they do professionally
and why they make so much money while apparently
doing nothing.
I have met many venture capitalists and I can tell you,
they will make you jump through hoops before they will
 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR sly(a

invest in your business and will scrutinise you carefully

on all 62 points in the self-audit questionnaire on pages
194-198.
You will find, however, that they usually don’t
invest in start-ups as they are risk adverse. Generally they
like to invest in companies that are already successful and
just need more cash to expand. It’s a safer bet for them,
so they can enjoy low risk and still share handsomely in
the fast growth and resulting capital gain, then get out
and do it again.
Venture capital, or VC money, as it is known, can also
be expensive and VCs will want more than their pound
of flesh, especially when the economy is slow. They have
many tricks to get you to give away more of your
company than you want to, and will leave you with just
enough to make sure you work hard to help make them
money out of thin air.
I know many gut-wrenching stories of VCs showing
great interest, then keeping the hopeful entrepreneur
waiting, sometimes for months, while they do their ‘due
diligence’ on him and his business’s potential. They may
even finalise negotiations, giving you a false sense of
security, and then at the last minute pull out after you
have made plans to move forward with them, leaving you
stranded and more desperate to do the deal. They let you
stew for a while, then offer you much less, or ask for
much more, than the original deal.
VCs are professionals and are out to make as much
money for themselves as they can. They will take as
much as they can get, because they know ‘cash is king’
and have the upper hand. Time is on their side, not yours.
172 TWENTY-SIX SECRETS TO MAKE MONEY
OUT OF THIN AIR

The last option on my list above is joint ventures

(JVs). This is the one I usually prefer as far as getting
cash and resources for a business is concerned. It
involves finding a company that could benefit greatly
by owning some of your company. It may be a larger
cashed-up company or another company that needs
what you are offering. In these situations the other
company might not necessarily be looking for a capital
gain directly from your business, but they see that your
business has the potential to add greatly to theirs, which
will create wealth in their own business.
The companies you should look for to JV with are
companies that would directly benefit from being
involved with you. It may be that your business offers
new customer acquisition opportunities for them. Or it
perhaps offers incremental profit opportunities, which
will add directly to their bottom line.
Public companies with high price/earnings ratios
have a great incentive to JV with a small profitable or
potentially profitable company, as this will add millions
to their share price — and make money out of thin air for
them quite quickly.
For example, say you had a product that could be sold
easily and at low cost to a larger public company’s
existing customer base and a JV deal could add perhaps
£900 O00 profit to that company’s bottom line. This
£,900 000 may be worth anywhere between £5 million
(if their share price is at a p/e of 10) and £50 million (at
a p/e of 100) or more to the public company’s value. If
you can demonstrate these sorts of benefits a joint-
venture partner has got a great deal to gain from
 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OFTHIN AIR 173

investing in your business. Why wouldn’t they invest £1

million in your business — if it is likely they will see
returns of £5—50 million in a year or two?
I know of one such company founded and owned by
two friends of mine that did exactly this. They sold 30
per cent of their small business to a large advertising
group because of the good product fit, as well as the
potential incremental revenues they could earn from the
group's existing customers that would add millions to
this group’s share value. They have also negotiated a buy
out (exit strategy) by this larger group, which ensures
they will be left with millions in a few years.
What they have done is a great example of every
principle I cover in this book — and confirms this is
available to everyone, as they started with no special
helping hand.

11. SELL OTHERS INTO YOUR

DREAM
Remember, making money out of thin air 1s all about
creating something from nothing.
Generally this starts with a dream. It means one day
waking up and deciding to follow your dream —
whatever it may be. For many people this is as far as
they will ever get, as they have so little confidence in
themselves that they dare not even believe this could
be possible.
Others might be a little bolder and will casually
mention their dream to friends or family and this is as far
as they will get, as the first negative comment they come
across will end their dream.
174 TWENTY-SIX SECRETS TO MAKE MONEY
OUT OF THIN AIR.

A few, however, will push on and work tirelessly to

making their dream come true.
Part of making your dream a reality is to make sure
you enrol others, recruiting people to help you, and this
requires you to sell your dream to others. Many of the
world’s most successful people are masters of this and do
little else but go around selling their dream.
If you believe in your dream strongly enough, this
should be easy, as Passion, Energy and Excitement will
come naturally and people will be drawn to it. Believing
enough in your dream is an absolute prerequisite to
getting people to follow it.
At first, selling the dream may feel a little strange but
it becomes easier when you have done it a few times.
This step is very important, as if you don’t do this well,
with great passion and a good plan, you may find
yourself getting nowhere, as every dream needs the
support of others to give it life.
This step is all about selling thin air.

12. LEASE OR RENT CREDIBILITY

Selling your dream is critically important, yet it will be
difficult to get people over the line unless you have
credibility. It’s the old story: how do you get credibility if
you don’t have some?
The answer lies in following a strategy I have used
successfully many times and which you can use easily, too
— and that is to go out there and don’t ask for anything, but
be prepared to give something away. In other words,
trade credibility for equity. Plainly speaking, find
someone who can give your business or idea credibility,
 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OFTHIN AIR 175

and offer them some part of your business or equity to

allow you to use their name.
This may be an individual or company and may even
take the form of a joint venture, which allows you to
leverage off another company’s name or brand. Do not
underestimate the enormous value this can bring to you —
but you must be prepared to give something away for this.
It is worth it. Credibility opens doors. Find the most
credible person you can, sell them your dream with
energy and passion — backed by a good plan — and offer
them equity to be associated with your business.
Be careful and don’t abuse this: you must respect the
name and credibility of your new partner or you will
face damaging both your name and theirs.
This strategy will also be enormously helpful for you
in raising funds for your business.

13. LEASE OR RENT EXPERTISE

Embarking on your journey to make money out of thin air
requires you to have a wide variety of skills, which very few
people have. In many cases you will need skills you are not
even aware you will require, until it’s too late. Please take my
word for it, you cannot be an expert on everything.
As I outlined in the chapter entitled ‘42 Habits of
the world’s most Successful Business People’,
successful people know their weaknesses and go about
factoring this into their business plan, budgeting for the
contingency of having to go out and find (rent or lease)
expertise, by hiring or employing people who do have
these skills. Furthermore, successful people not only rent
or lease expertise, but they get the best they can find.
176 TWENTY-SIX SECRETS TO MAKE MONEY
OUT OF THIN AIK.

So many times I have seen business owners

writing their own adverts or marketing material,
because they do not know where to find someone to
do this, or do not want to spend the money. This is
fool’s gold, as they end up paying far more in wasted
advertising and lost customer opportunities than they
would if they had employed an expert in marketing.
I often put this in perspective by asking such people
if they would go to court without a lawyer if they ran
into legal trouble. Mostly the answer is no — yet they try
to get away with not employing experts in other areas.
This step is critical in your path towards success and
making money out of thin air.
Again, you do not have to offer cash to the best
people if you don’t have it. You can offer equity — if
your business is exciting enough and contains the
principles I have been teaching in this book. Just last
week, my business partner did this in one of our newer
business ventures.We needed expertise, credibility and
to raise capital for our new start-up. So he approached
an accounting firm and sold this ‘dream’ to them. One
of the firm’s senior partners liked the idea so we
offered him some equity to introduce us to a large
company he had a personal relationship with. He
opened the door for us to this major company, so we
were able to negotiate a joint venture — for funding,
distribution and ongoing revenues — in exchange for
the major company being the exclusive beneficiary of
the leads and customer base we are capable of
generating. This is a great example of these principles
at work.
 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR a77

Naturally, the idea had to be a good one and really

fit well with all concerned, or the arrangement would
never even have got this far. This new start-up has got a
long way to go; however, I anticipate its potential worth
to be millions of pounds in just a few years from now,
and its value stems from using the principles in this
formula adeptly.

14. SET GOALS AND

IMPLEMENT FAST
A plan without specific, achievable goals is still just a
dream and will always remain just that.
There is nothing wrong with dreaming — it is very
important, as outlined above, but when the dreaming is
over, if you do not have the ability to set goals and
implement these well, you will not get beyond the
dreaming stage. After the dream and creating the vision
and business plan, this is the time for you to start
working on your business and putting it all into action,
in order and sequentially.
You should be building your systems, team and
products, and getting your business organised from day
one to be able to operate without you. You will have
many goals but this is your major goal — a business that
will eventually run without you. If your business cannot
work without you in the medium to long term, you are
either building it wrong or are in the wrong business.
If you do not design this into your business right now
— if you make the mistake of building your business
around you — you are making a fatal error that has cost
those before you millions of pounds.
178 TWENTY-SIX SECRETS TO MAKE MONEY
OUT OF THIN AIR.

15. BE DIFFERENT,
NO MATTER WHAT
It never ceases to amaze me how unimaginative many
business people are and how myopic they are in their
thinking.
Most business do no more than play tit-for-tat with
their competition. They look at their opposition and
simply follow each other’s small, incremental
improvements, never really achieving a net gain. One
business goes on sale, the other follows. One business
introduces frequent flyer or buyer points, another
follows. One discounts, another follows. This gets you
nowhere except possessing a dwindling market share,
with ever-lowering profits.
The world’s most dynamic business people almost
disregard their competitors, and continue to lead the
way. They are bold, take risks and benchmark themselves
not against their competition, but against the best
companies in the world, no matter what industry they
are in. They will look at the best businesses in all or any
industry, take ideas and concepts, and then translate these
into their own company.
You can and must be different to your competitors.
You must be unique in some way or another that clearly
defines you from your competitors. I covered this very
extensively in my previous book, What Rich People Know
and Desperately Want to Keep a Secret, so suffice to say that
you must be unique, you must be daring and you must
be different, not just for the sake of being different, but
in a way that is meaningful to your customers. The best
 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OFTHIN AIR 179

businesses will purposely not follow their competitors.

They look for ways to be unique and different by using
their imagination and some clever strategic thinking.
This is called having a USP (unique selling promise) and
unfortunately I still don’t see 99 per cent of businesses
doing this in any way.
Take the great example of two car rental chains,
Hertz and Avis. Both companies rent out the same cars
for about the same price. They’ve got a lot in common.
Yet these two companies have done a great job of
differentiating themselves.
Hertz came out with their USP of ‘We’re Number 1’
to differentiate them from their competitors. This USP
addresses the customers’ concern that they might be
dealing with a small unreliable company with unreliable
cars. Avis, on the other hand, offered “We Try Harder’.
This slogan was clever too, as it appealed to customers
who felt they wanted to deal with people who really
wanted their business.
I love this example, as it demonstrates no matter how
generic your product is there 1s always an opportunity to
be creative and customer focused.
This is a huge topic and if you wish to study it
further you should read What Rich People Know and
Desperately Want to Keep a Secret. Do not make the
mistake of skipping this step in your business, as this will
cost you millions in income and asset growth.

16. FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT

When you are starting out, you must do a lot with a
little. You must be a sleuth, ensuring you spend money on
180 TWENTY-SIX SECRETS TO MAKE MONEY
OUT OPTHIN AIK.

the right things yet skimp on others. And, most

importantly, know the difference between the two. I have
had to do this many times in order to achieve success. I
still do it today.
Sometimes you must spend money on things to
make you and your business look the part, even if you
cannot afford it. People expect you to be professional and
would be put off doing business with you otherwise. No
one likes a salesman in a cheap suit and worn-out shoes.
Such clothes do not project an air of confidence and
success, and if your customers don’t have confidence in
you, you can forget about them doing business with you.
Buy an expensive suit, dress well and look super-
successful — even if you haven’t got there yet. Meet in
expensive hotels if you can’t afford nice offices — they can
be a great way to create a good impression. Even if a cup
of coffee in these hotels costs £5 each, ordinarily this
may seem expensive, but work it out: that’s only £10 per
hour rent — a real bargain when you think about it.
If you are short of money but determined to succeed,
sleep in your car if you have to and use the money to
take your client out to a great restaurant. Pretty radical, I
know, but if you are building your business right, you
won't have to do this for long.
Some people might say this is a bit dishonest. I don’t
think so. It’s simply putting your best foot forward, so
you can keep following your dream, and demonstrates an
even greater commitment to success. It shows you are
worth backing. I have spent many nights on international
sales trips sleeping in my rental car and showering at a
health club, as I could not afford both a rental car and a
 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR 181

hotel room so I had to make a choice ofabed or walking

to appointments.
I am still very tight on my business overheads and
only spend money on things that will bring returns to us
directly. This is a skill you must adopt and keep constant
vigilant about, or you will find any profit you make
quickly gone.

17. WORK ONLY HALF DAYS

“Tomorrow is the only day in the year that appeals to a
lazy man.’
Jimmy Lyons
I warned you that making money out thin air was not a get-
rich-quick scheme. Like anything worthwhile in life, this
takes time, energy and effort, but not as much effort as
working for 50 years and retiring broke.
To succeed in business is challenging and requires
dedication and focus, especially the first 12-24 months.
It will require effort like nothing you have experienced
before. It will require you to work ‘half days’ — from 8
a.m. to 8 p.m. This is what it takes to gain momentum.
It does not mean you need to give up your life
completely, but becoming successful is all-consuming
and takes a massive effort and sacrifice to achieve. Yet
should you succeed it will bring your life a whole new
dimension and considerable joy.

18. BUILD YOUR BUSINESS FOR SALE

FROM DAY ONE
After reading most of the book the reason for doing this
should be obvious. Your business and all the effort you
182 TWENTY-SIX SECRETS TO MAKE MONEY
OUT OFTHIN AIK.

put in to build it will do nothing to help you make money

out of thin air if you are not able to sell it sometime in the
future. The faster you are able to build it for sale the faster
you will be on the road to riches.
So, from day one you need to have this firmly in mind
and build systems into your business for everything:
marketing systems, sales systems, production systems,
customer service systems, telephone answering systems,
hiring and firing systems, induction systems, administration
systems, reporting systems, reward and recognition systems,
systems for handling complaints and so on.
In addition, make sure you are 1n a business that only
makes your products once and leave it to the system to
make it over and over again.
Now, to a lot of people this may sound quite
extreme. However, when you start a business you should
start identifying and targeting companies likely to want
to buy you out a year from now. These may even be the
same companies who are possible strategic joint venture
partners, and you should also be targeting them for this
purpose. It is not even too early to be exploring the
possibility of a public listing on the stock exchange.
The reason for considering exit options at this early
stage is that if you know which direction you will be
taking with regard to your exit strategy, this will help you
tailor your business more closely to reach the outcome
you want.
There are five basic exit strategies:
* selling to a strategic buyer
* selling to a financial buyer
* going public
 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR 183

° selling to your employees

¢ liquidating your assets.
You will need to set your business up from the start
to cater for whichever exit option you decide will be the
most successful. There are big differences between going
public or being sold privately — for a start, the accounting
and compensation practices. To go public you must
usually have three years of audited financial accounts,
whereas no audits are required for a private sale. If you
intend to go public you can offer employees share
options, which are worthless if you remain private.
So, it’s never too early to start considering to whom
and how you will sell your business, and I suggest you do
this right from the start.

Loe EVIPEOY SUE BES fi

MARKETING YOU CAN
I covered this very extensively in What Rich People Know
And Desperately Want To Keep A Secret, and it 1s not the
purpose of this book to cover the topic in detail again,
other than to make you aware of its importance.
Marketing is one of the most neglected and poorly
performed functions in many businesses — and this fact
costs the business owner a fortune. I continue to be
amazed at how badly planned and poorly executed many
marketing campaigns are.
There are plenty of reasons for this. | have therefore
created the ‘Ten Commandments Of Marketing’, outlined
below, for you to follow, to ensure you are not making
these mistakes. Please copy these and put them on your
wall. Never break these rules, or it will cost you a fortune.
184 TWENTY-SIX SECRETS TO MAKE MONEY
OUT OF THIN AIR

The Ten Commandments of Marketing

If you are not skilled at marketing, employ someone
who is — fast!
~~) Never advertise your brand. Advertising sales people
will try to convince you to buy advertising to
increase the awareness of your brand with customers.
This is complete rubbish. If you can’t make
accountable sales from your advertising — don’t do it.
Always buy advertising at a discount, but never buy
discounted advertising. If you do decide to advertise
don’t do it because you get a call from an ad sales
person with a ‘bargain’. Instead decide where you
want to advertise and then negotiate the best deal
you can to get it discounted, especially if it is your
first time in that magazine or journal. Haggle.
Always know how much to spend on advertising.
Many people overspend or underspend. You should
only advertise where the cost of getting a new
customer is less than the value of that customer to
you on the first and subsequent purchases.
Always have a back-end sale (a sale in addition to the
product you initially sold the customer). If you are
going to spend money to attract a customer you must
have something else to sell them.
Always know the lifetime value of your customer. At
first this will be hard, but as time goes on you should
know what a new customer is worth to your business
over their expected period of buying from you.
Always know your cost of customer acquisition. If
you advertise to attract new customers you must
divide the cost of your advertising by the number of
 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR 185

resulting new customers to arrive at your cost of

acquisition per customer.
8. Always have a database. If you don’t keep your
customers details on a database, how do you know
who they are?
9. Always look for no-cost or low-cost promotions.
There are many opportunities to get advertising for
free or at low cost — look at these first before you
spend money on adverts.
10. ALWAYS, ALWAYS have a USP — a unique selling
promuse.

20. EMPLOY THE BEST PEOPLE

THROUGHOUT THE BUSINESS
Sounds obvious? Yet I can assure you this does not
happen.
Clearly if you hope to get maximum leverage by
systemising your business and getting the right expertise,
you must employ people. But not just any people. If you
want to have a business that makes money out of thin air,
you must employ the best people.
How? I know a trick to attract the best that no one
seems to do — just scan the job ads to see what I mean.
Write outstanding adverts that say nothing about the job.
That’s correct, say nothing about the job!
When doing this ask yourself a basic question that
very few people ask: what do employees want? And it’s not
too hard to figure out. It’s the same things you want. I
don’t think there is a single person looking for a job who
does not want fun, good conditions, fast growth,
opportunity for promotion, travel, variety and so on.
186 TWENTY-SIX SECRETS TO MAKE MONEY
OUT OF THIN ALR

This is where many employers go wrong and end up

with second-rate employees ... they try to skimp on the
advert cost by making it as small as possible, then word it
incorrectly. You must be prepared to spend more on your
advert than every other employer advertising a similar
job (including bigger companies) and your wording
needs to be fun, inspiring and never say anything about
the job.
Let me explain this clearly. If, say, you are looking to
hire a receptionist your headline says it all:
RECEPTIONIST. You do not have to explain in an
advert for a receptionist that you need someone to
answer the phone, have a good telephone manner, be
pleasant, organised and so on. Believe me, receptionists
looking for a receptionist job know that answering the
phone is part of the job, and if you have to state ‘being
pleasant’ as part of your job description, you are about to
hire the wrong person.
No matter what position is being advertised — even
middle and senior management — the advert needs to
talk about the company, the fun environment, the
exciting growth possibilities, the customers, and so on. In
other words, you need to sell the company, the working
conditions and the opportunity.
For example, if you are trying to hire a salesperson,
forget about saying things like Experienced salesperson
required, must have a track record of sales in the software
business, dedicated, hardworking ... This is boring, obvious
and a waste of time. How about writing something like
this: Top-gun salesperson required for fast-growing, dynamic
company. Fun, exciting working environment, opportunity for
HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OFTHIN AIR 187

promotion, earn up to £100K, no cold calling, prestigious

London offices, only the best need apply ...
I guarantee you that if you do this you will get ten
times as many people applying for your position, and you
will find the right one in the interview process. You will
be able to select from hundreds, instead of just a handful.
The interview also is a vital opportunity for you to sell
your ‘dream’ and recruit your new employees’ hearts and
minds — get them excited about working with you and
the great opportunity it is for them.
I have had clients complain to me that ‘There are no
good people out there, we have advertised and not found
a single good person. This was clearly wrong. We
changed their job adverts and shortly afterwards they
found a great person for the job. Yes, it 1s more work
interviewing a hundred as opposed to five, but you'll
quickly become skilled at whittling down resumés to
find your top eight or ten applicants to interview, and
you will end up with a great employee, no matter how
small your business.

21. GET SOME RUNS ON THE BOARD

Now it is time to step up to the plate.
It’s time to start generating some sales and to prove
your systems work. At the same time it will prove your
products and market demand for those products. This
will start to give you some immediate feedback and offer
you the opportunity to finetune and get the product
right, as invariably it will not be right the first time out.
You must keep track of all your key performance
indicators and keep score of how you are going. Then
188 TWENTY-SIX SECRETS TO MAKE MONEY
OUT OF THUN VALE.

work to improve every area of your business. Talk to your

customers, gauge their reactions and further tailor your
company to their needs. .
This process varies a lot in every business. If you don't
have expertise in your business, it will be the time you'll
suffer most, as this is when you will need good advice if
things are not progressing as well as you had hoped.
It is also the time you can play with your business and
begin working towards getting it right and getting some
real numbers (not just projections), so you have something
solid to work off and to show potential investors.

22. ALWAYS EDUCATE BEFORE YOU

SELL, THEN EDUCATE SOME MORE
Your customers are under attack. Full-scale attack.
Sounds dramatic? The truth is it’s not dramatic at all.
Every day your customers are being bombarded with
thousands of advertising messages. Why? Because every
business on earth is trying to get their attention.
Advertising expert Simon Reynolds claims that
customers are exposed to 1200-1400 advertising
messages per day. This is extraordinary, but entirely
possible if you stop and think about it. From the minute
we wake up in the morning until we go to bed at night
we are hit with messages everywhere — newspaper, TV,
radio, letterboxes, Internet, email, T-shirts, bus stops,
buses, taxis; litts, toilets, baseball caps, and so on.
Advertisers are continually looking for new ways to get
our attention.
The end result: complete customer overload by
advertising ‘noise’. Think of one person playing music,
HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR 189

then think of 10 000 people playing different, unco-

ordinated music — it’s no longer music, it’s just noise.
And when people become overstimulated and
confused by all the mixed messages being shoved in their
faces every day — advertising literally shouting at them —
the natural human reaction is to switch off and become
distrustful of all advertising.
How to make your customers feel safe
So how do you combat this? How do you succeed
amongst this competition and advertising frenzy? You
cannot stop the noise being created by all these ignorant
advertisers, who literally waste millions of pounds each
day, continuing with their insane practices.
Customers are not only more confused than they
used to be but they also perceive there is more risk than
ever before. Warranties and 100 per cent money-back
guarantees used to help customers feel secure about
dealing with you and give you a competitive edge. Today,
however, these have become standard. Just offering them
no longer works the way it used to.
If you want to get your customers’ attention and keep
it for a long time you need to employ a technique I call
edu-marketing. So what is it? Edu-marketing is a term I
have coined that means educating your customers
before, during and after you sell to them. How you do
this may vary, but if you do not do it you will have
nowhere near the success you deserve or could attain.
So, here’s the million-dollar tip: don’t sell — educate.
Start taking notice of some of the 1200 commercials
thrown at you each day. You’ll realise something they
virtually all have in common. They are all trying to sell,
190 TWENTY-SIX SECRETS TO MAKE MONEY
OUT OF THIN AIR

sell, sell. So what’s wrong with this? Advertising 1s

supposed to sell! This concept is fine in theory — if yours
is the only advert people see all day. But I can assure you
that it gets lost in the ever-increasing noise.
Remember that I said customers are confused. This
confusion leads them to perceive their lives have more
risk and they trust less. If you take my approach and
educate your customers before you sell, you won’t have to
sell. That’s right, you won't have to sell.
If you educate people correctly they will make the
obvious decision, and that is to buy from you, and thank
you for helping them to understand, because you will
make them feel secure about their purchases.
Edu-marketing is not only important today, it’s
essential to your success, and you must build this into
your sales process or your message will simply be lost in
the noise.

23. ROLL OUT STAGES 2 AND 3

Once you have completed the above step — which can
take a few months to get through — your next move is to
go back and get some more investment capital if you
need it to expand faster. If you don’t need more capital,
simply go out and expand your sales faster by focusing
on your sales and marketing methods and rolling these
out even bigger than before.
Clearly it is important before you do this that you
have your logistics and customer service up to speed and
able to keep up with your sales growth, or you could face
the worst sin of all, and that is: failure from becoming too
successful, too quickly.
 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR 191

Sounds like a good problem, but it will cause you to

fail as quickly and as surely as not having enough sales.

24. EXPAND YOUR DREAM

Once you are confident you can handle the growth you
have predicted and now feel it is achievable, it’s time to
think even bigger, and dream of taking your business
beyond what you might have done before. Your success
so far will have given you the confidence to know you
can go to the next level.
Now, not many people ever get to this stage. Instead
they are too busy trying to put out fires in their business
because they did not develop their systems properly or
have hired the wrong people, and in so doing have not
created a business but rather a headache for themselves.
If, however, you have followed the advice throughout
this book, you will have good people and great systems
(which, by the way, should have been developed by your
people). This frees you up to put new plans in place,
which will add even more blue sky to your business.
Remember, it is the blue sky that generates the
excitement and captures people’s imagination, making
them want to join you and invest money in your
business. It adds massive value to your business and helps
you make even more money out of thin air.
So expand your dream on every occasion, and when
you've reached this goal — expand it again.

25. DON’T GET STAGE FRIGHT

It will happen. I can almost guarantee you of this.
~ Once you get going there will be a stage (at least one,
192 TWENTY-SIX SECRETS TO MAKE MONEY
OUT OF THINTAIK

usually more) in the first 12-18 months when you will

suddenly stop, look at your business and feel like you
have bitten off more than you can chew. You may
experience feelings that your business is fragile — a house
of cards — that could simply collapse at any stage and the
customers you have attracted will all suddenly change
their minds and go elsewhere.
Although your business may still be new and a bit
fragile, | can assure you that your fears are not justified.
You must be calm. You must not lose belief in yourself.
When this happens it is a time to stay cool under
pressure, keep focused and don’t let short-term setbacks
get to you.
If you do find yourself in this frame of mind, refocus
on the big picture, go back to your vision and think
about the reasons you went into your business 1n the first
place. This is a dangerous time for you and you must
keep positive and keep moving forward regardless. One
day you will look back and laugh about these times,
about how much you worried, and you will wish you
had not wasted so much energy worrying.

26. WORK ON POUND-PRODUCTIVE

ACTIVITIES ONLY
The biggest mistake you can make once you are up
and running and your business is ticking over is to
work ‘in’ your business, as Michael Gerber, author of
The E-Myth Revisited, describes it. You should never
work ‘in’ your business but, as he so adequately puts it,
work ‘on’ your business.
HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OFTHIN AIR 193

What's the distinction between these two? The

person working in their business is doing things they
could be paying others to do, such as answering phones,
processing orders, arranging couriers or keeping the
books. All of these are important functions and a business
cannot run without them. However, these are tasks you
can pay others to do at a relatively low cost. Doing this
frees up your time to focus on two critical things for the
future and fast growth of your business:
* generating revenue
* creating and refining your systems.
Working on generating revenues and developing
your systems are the only two things you should ever be
working on. Why? Because this will maximise your time
leverage, and it is time leverage that creates value in your
business.
Why do work that will cost you £10-15 per hour
for others to perform, when you could be doing work
that pays your business £100, £200 or £1000 per hour?
£1000 an hour is what you will earn by selling boxes, as
opposed to time, and why it is so important that you sell
boxes and not time.
By spending your time selling boxes and letting your
employees sell their time to you, working your systems,
you will make money out of thin air in the medium to
short term. This is not what people typically do when
starting or running a business and it severely limits their
growth potential, and hence the tradeable value of their
business.
194 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR

chapter 15
THE ROAD TO RICHES
AUDIT
If you have got this far in reading this book, you have
already achieved more than most. Research has shown
that 90 per cent of people never get past the first chapter.
Many of the answers you still currently don’t have are
hidden inside you. The answers will come from within
through a process of self-discovery. Stay with me for a
little while longer as it is now time to look inside
yourself, to discover whether you have what it takes to
go out and make money out of thin air.
As you were progressing through the book, and
covering the 20 Habits of the World’s Most Valuable
Businesses and the 42 Habits of the World’s Most
Successful People, | am sure you felt that you
possessed many of these habits already. There would have
been others that perhaps you are still working on.
The Road to Riches self-assessment audit below
covers all the habits of successful people and businesses.
It’s time to get an accurate assessment of where you are
in your life, to take an honest look at yourself and your
prospects of making money out of thin air. Completing
this questionnaire will allow you to gain a true
 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR 195

perspective on whether the business you are in, or

contemplating going into, has the right chance of
making money out of thin air, or whether you need to
go back to the drawing board. This five-minute self-audit
will also identify for you whether you currently possess
the necessary habits for success and if you have what it
takes to succeed in the world today.
It may take some courage for you to complete the
audit, but I urge you not to skip it. Although it may not
give you the result you are hoping for, it will certainly
highlight — in a snapshot — where you are, and what
work you still need to do if you are to get where you
want to be.
So, let’s begin by completing the audit.

The Road to Riches Audit

Yes No Pts

1. Are you addressing worldwide markets?

2. Do you have unique, timely products?
3. Are your products highly leveraged?
4. Does your business have residual
income?
5 .Do you have systems in all areas?
6. Is your business dependent on one person?
7.Do you have great customer service?

8. Are you building a powerful brand?

9. Are you a market leader?
10. Are you attracting the best
_ and brightest people?
LEER
196 WILL YOU BECOME A MILLIONAIRE?

Yes No Pts

11. Do you reward well and base this

on performance not longevity/time?
12. Do you have high gross margins,
i.e. > 60%?
13. Do you have few competitors?
14. Do you keep innovating and reinventing?

15. Do you have investor entry

and exit strategies?
16. Do you have a large customer database?
17. Do you have great marketing?
18. Do you anticipate customers’ needs?
19. Do you always add value to your
customers’ experience?
20. Do you educate before you sell?
21. Do you have burning desire to succeed
from an early age?
22. Do you learn and study from the best?
23. Do you never stop learning?
24. Do you have a willingness to
change quickly?
25. Do you make decisions quickly?
26. Are you passionate, excited
and full of energy?
27. Have you learned to see
opportunity everywhere?
28. Do you see the world as your
laboratory and playground?
29. Do you have a great vision?
30. Do you dream big?

——————
HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR 197

Yes No Pts
31. Do you take calculated risks?
32. Have you rented/bought credibility?
33. Are you customer/market focused?
34. Are you supremely confident?
35. Are you creative, wanting to build
and make a difference?
36. Do you listen and look for
clues all the time?
37. Do others consider
you a great leader?
38. Are you cool under pressure?

39. Do you empower people around you?

40. Are you always on the look out
for the best people?
41. Do you know when to get
out of the way?
42. Do you fully utilise your human
and other assets?
43. Can you inspire people to
become the best they can?
44. Do you have courage?
45. Do you anticipate rough spots?
46. Do you keep selling your
dream at every opportunity?
47. Do you believe in yourself
when no one else does?
48. Do you remain humble?
49. Do you praise in public
and criticise inprivate?
50. Do you recognise others’ achievements?

ee ee ree
198 WILL YOU BECOME A MILLIONAIRE?

Yes No Pts

51. Do you know when it’s time to exit?

52.Do you know your weaknesses?
53. Do you expect more of yourself
or have higher standards than others?
54. Are you a great communicator?

55. Do you take responsibility when

things go wrong?
56. Do you work smart, play hard?
57. Do you earn respect rather than
demand it?
58. Do you value your time and knowledge?
59. Do you have role models and mentors?
60. Do you have an abundance mentality?
61. Do you feel fear yet do things anyway?
62. Are you single-minded and focused?
TOTAL
Award yourself 2 points for every ‘Yes’ answer,
and 0 for every ‘No’. YOUR SCORE SHOULD
EXCEED 90 POINTS IN TOTAL
How did you go? Ninety points or above should
indicate you are in a good position to go out and begin
making money out of thin air in your own venture.
If you got below ninety points you still have some work
to do and some learning to undertake. This should be
your focus for the near future, allowing you time to
bring your skills up to a higher level.
I hope the result you achieved, even if it did not
reach the level you may have wished for, will at least
highlight where you may need to focus more of your
attention, and help you move forwards from now on.
 HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR 199

THE BEGINNING
Congratulations! You’ve reached the beginning.
Your reading is just about over, but your learning is
only now about to begin. When you put this book down
it 1s time to start doing things differently.
You can forget everything you have read or learned,
unless you are prepared to go out and put something
new into practice. As I said right at the start, it’s the
practical application that makes you the money — not just
knowing about it. This message should have come
through loud and clear: it is what makes successful
people successful.
Wherever I go I meet people who tell me they have
read my books. And I am grateful for it. It is gratifying
and an honour to know that people appreciate the
thoughts you share with them. What really makes me
proud, however, is meeting people who have achieved
outstandingly successful businesses and who can
attribute the growth to something they learned
through my work.
I gain inspiration from these people. I admire them
and in turn want to learn everything I can from them, to
enhance my knowledge even further, to get an even
greater understanding on the practical applications of
these amazing principles.
200 THE BEGINNING

And so, thank you for spending the time to take this
journey with me.I wish you luck and the success you
wish yourself. I look forward to learning about your
success and perhaps one day having the opportunity to
write about you.
Success and happiness to you and all those around you.

SELECTED READING
Barry, Paul, Rich Kids: How the Murdochs and Packers lost
£950 million in OneTel, Random House Australia 2002
Engel, Peter H., What's Your Exit Strategy?: 7 ways to
maximise the value of the business you’ve built, Prima
Publishing/Random House CA, 1999
Godin, Seth, Permission Marketing: turning strangers into
friends and friends into customers, Simon and Schuster, New
York, 1999
Margo, Jill Frank Lowy: Pushing the limits, HarperCollins
Australia 2000
Ruiz, Don Miguel, The Four Agreements: a practical guide to
personal freedom, Amber-Allen Publishers, CA, 1997
Trout, Jack and Rivkin, Steve, Differentiate or Die, Wiley,
New York, 2000
Sher, Brian, What Rich People Know and Desperately Want
to Keep a Secret, Macmillan, Sydney, 1999
NOTES
NOTES
 aYol sal of-Yo)o)(-Mje-]aanidamarelcaliare M-lare male me]omWAhea)

the whole lot. How To Make Money Out Of Thin Air

is a brilliant expose of every strategy on how rich

people get that way and why others fail.’

‘If you're interested in learning these

secrets, this book is a must read.’

John McGrath
Chief Executive - McGrath Estate Agents

Halim lee) aa Mola dalr-Manliiitelame(e)it-|amimy col]

follow the advice it contains.’

Simon Reynolds
OR Kel -m-ie-are [are