The day I became a multi-millionaire…
Thoughts on the journey and a letter to all entrepreneurs seeking to “make it” in 2017… (pardon the title, I just needed to get your attention)
Dear Aspiring Entrepreneur looking to ‘make it big,’
I remember when I found out.
It was just like any other day. I was working away in my home office, staring at my multiple monitor set up and got an email from my accountant saying we needed to do some tax planning.
He sent me some doc’s to review and for the first time I realized…
I am a multi-millionaire
Not a paper millionaire, but a CASH millionaire in every sense of the word.
I tell you this not to impress you or because I’m some business coach renting fancy cars and houses for photo/video shoots, showing you lifestyle photo’s by the beach trying to sell you on my product/program on how to “live the dream”.
The truth is, I don’t have ANYTHING to sell you.
(So you can let your guard down).
I tell you this because you might be an aspiring entrepreneur looking to ‘make it big’ (whatever that means), and I think many ‘guru’s’ out there are doing you a disservice trying to pitch you a dream with some clever copy, and sales propaganda offering a great “opportunity”.
- “Successful” entrepreneurs who have never built a real business but made all their money teaching others, how to make money.
- “Life coaches” who have barely experienced life.
- Business coaches who teach business coaches how to sell others on being business coaches…
And as a result, you may have bought into a false narrative about what it really takes to get there.
Looking back on everything I’ve personally accomplished, I realized that it was NOT because I:
- took some online course
- joined some coaching program
- read hundreds of books
- consumed tons of content
- “invested in myself”
- invested in the markets
- #hustled my brains out
- had a vision board
- set some S.M.A.R.T goals
- surrounded myself high achieving people
or any other commonly believed idea around ‘what it takes.’
I got here following some very simple (often counter intuative and unconventional) principles, and today I want to share them with you in hopes that
a) they will help you in some way get a little closer to where you want to in your entrepreneurial journey
b) you don’t waste another dime or minute this year on anecdotal ‘stuff’ that someone is trying to peddle you as another way to feed your greed glands by chasing shiny objects
So let’s dive in.
A) I didn’t have plan.
If you were to ask me this time last year what I would be doing, I would not have answered with what I am actually doing today.
I didn’t have some magical GOAL list or Vision board that was driving me forward.
In fact, many of the key things I am currently doing [my Intensives and Speaking] were not even on my radar.
For my Intensives, I was sitting in a workshop with my wife commenting on how bad it was and got this thought that I could do something better that would help more people.
4 weeks later, The Art Of Lead Generation was born and have has since helped over 126 business owners scale their businesses and this is now a major part of my business.
For my speaking, I was invited by my friend Chris Record to speak at his 3C conference in Vegas. As I was speaking something lit up inside of me and told me I had to do more of this.
Since then I have had the good fortune of sharing the stage with Gary Vaynerhuck, Sean Stephenson, Robin Sharma, Seth Godin, Daymond John, Brendon Burchard and others.
As Mike Tyson said,
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face”.
And although I have had many experiences of being ‘punched in the face’, I have learned to “step into the ring” we call life, with the intention to be in the moment and to be open to any and all opportunities that might come my way.
Plans have usually let me down OR have distracted me from the thing that was before me in that very moment.
When you can be present to that which is before you in the moment, magic can happen.
B) I didn’t follow my passion (or the trend of the season).
Truth be told, outside of a very small handful of things, I don’t have any “passions”.
I love my wife and spending time with her.
I love my new baby, Eden, and creating memories with her
And I love having/making experiences.
But there isn’t a ‘cause’ or a ‘why’ driving my existence.
I don’t wake up every morning “passionate” about my ‘job’ or my business although I do love working with the people I get to work with.
Point is, what got me to where I am today was not following my passions, but following my skillsets.
Dan Sullivan calls this your “Uniqueability” — the only thing you really should be doing.
I doubled down on my strengths and making those even better and through that found passion, excitement and joy, letting go of all the rest.
Words of wisdom from a book of antiquity state
“A man’s gift makes room for him and brings him before great men.”
Too many people are wasting away, either trying to FIND their passion or improve their weaknesses, doing things because someone else told them “that’s the better way”.
But if you were to just turn inside, and leverage your ‘gifts’ — the thing you can offer the world to make someone’s life just a little bit better in some way, you’ll be so far ahead of the game.
Which reminds me to remind you to stay true to yourself and stop chasing shiny objects.
Too many times I see people creating a course, or looking to be a ‘coach’ or master ‘webinars’ or whatever the current flavor of the month is, just because that is what the industry is telling them to do.
And as a result you build “Broken Bridges”.
Let me explain…
You are where you are, and looking to get to where you want to be but there is a gap in between, so you start building a bridge to get there.
Let’s call that bridge “webinars”.
So you take a course, go to an event, start building your webinars and then before you know it you saw an ad about Twitter Advertising.
So before you finish, you start building that other bridge.
And you do this over and over again, staying busy but never making any real progress.
You look at the gap and you see a bunch of ‘broken, incomplete’ bridges and you are nowhere closer to where you want to be then when you started out.
Opportunities are abundant but also distracting and could be your downfall.
Your NOT TO DO LIST is even more important than your to do list.
Get clear about your gift, choose the vehicle of choice and stay focused until you get there.
And only say yes to what Derek Sivers is a “F*CK YA!”.
C) I “netted up”.
There is a narrative in our circles that say there is only one direction you should be going — up and to the right.
In other words scale and grow.
Entire books, courses and programs have been written about it.
When you surround yourself with overachievers (or even look at the Facebook feeds of your entrepreneurial friends) it can make you feel like it’s never enough.
I remember years ago thinking if I can only make $100,000 a year I’d be set! That’s all I want!
Then when I hit it, I thought well if I can only do $500,000 a year, then I wouldn’t have to worry anymore.
Then when I achieved that, it was a million, then $10,000,000 until I had to take a step back and ask myself when enough was enough or to what end was I doing this?
It’s said that;
if you make $400,000, you are in the top 1% of income earners in the world.
You don’t need that much to be in the 1% club.
It was then that I made a decision I was going to “scale down”. That is until my friend Los Silva corrected me and said “you’re not scaling down, you’re netting up”.
I cut away the chaff, all the distractions, all the “extra” opportunities to ‘grow and scale’ and although the revenue went down, the profit went up — hence Netting Up.
Greg Savage says…
“Revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity. Cash is reality.”
Now as the owner of a small business, with close to 90% margins, I make more money (cash in pocket) than many CEO’s running $100,000,000 companies with far less headache.
That’s not to say you have to too but I do encourage you to ask “to what end?” or “when is my enough?” and then enjoy life.
So as you venture into the New Year, may you:
dispose of your plans,
focus on your gifts (not your passions)
and find your “enough”!
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Nicholas Kusmich |
Speaker ~ Author ~Lifestyle Entrepreneur
www.NICHOLASKUSMICH.com
A better way… to live… to do business.
