Big Money Ideas Anyone Can Start
Imagine a cashier at your local grocery store. How much do they earn for every hour they work? Maybe around $12? Maybe more, maybe less.
The exact number isn’t important. Now consider the manager at your bank. How much do they earn? Harder to say, but probably over $50 an hour.
Now, the cashier may work fewer hours than the bank manager, but that’s not the point here. The point is that for every hour the bank manager works, he earns more than four times as much as the cashier. Why? Well, quite simply because time doesn’t have a fixed ratio or a fixed relationship to production or income.
Consider as another example, Tara Blakely, the billionaire founder of Spanx. Now, Tara put in her hours pounding the pavement, peddling Spanx from store to store for years to build the brand, and to this day, she’s a hard-working lady. But if, today, Tara decided she wanted to take the week off, and she spent all 168 hours curled up in bed, eating bonbons, and binge-watching her favorite TV series, how much money do you think Tara would earn? Even without lifting a finger, Spanx would continue to fly off department store shelves, and dollars would continue to fly into her company’s bank account.
Tara would be growing richer by the hour without even putting a pair of Spanx on. The math seems weird. How can one person be clocking hours for $12 each while another earns $50 and still another is bringing in hundreds of thousands whilst just sitting on her assets? The math isn’t wrong though, and these situations also don’t defy math.
They just aren’t straight addition. Nope. This is more like one of those complicated algebraic word problems that you and I have long ago forgotten how to solve. Here’s the basic idea, though.
Time and effort can be spent now for immediate cash-out. You pass go, you collect $200 sort of thing. Or they can be invested, like when you buy a park, place, and boardwalk, and build a hotel on each. Chances are you’re only a few hundred dollars away from broke at that point, but everyone else at the table is quaking because they know you’re about to rake it in and they’re about to be screwed.
Said another way, you can start working at the grocery store today and start immediately earning 12 bucks an hour. Or you can invest $100,000, go to college for six-plus years and get your master’s in finance, and land that $ 50-an-hour bank manager position. Or you can be smart like Tara Blakely and invest that time, money, and energy into building a business of your own that a few years from now can be pulling in many thousands of dollars per week whether you show up for work or not. Different opportunities require different initial investments of time, money, and effort.
Many opportunities also require that you have some specialized skills or experience. Now in this story, I’m going to share with you several different opportunities that don’t require any sort of specialized skills don’t require college, or any advanced training. However, these are businesses that require work to start and time before they’ll start earning you any money. They’re completely the opposite of getting rich quickly, but they do have the ability to create wealth for someone who may be starting at the bottom.
Finally, a warning. If you try to cut corners and get rich quickly with one of these ideas that requires time and energy and effort, then most likely you’ll just wind up wasting your time and anything else you invest into the venture. The first high-paying opportunity that I want to share with you today is e-commerce and specifically drop shipping. Now drop shipping is basically when you sell physical products online but you don’t warehouse them yourself and generally, you don’t ship them to the customer yourself either.
Instead, you are selling products that another company, a manufacturer, produces and when someone purchases one of those products from your website, you then tell the manufacturer, typically with automated software, that that product has been ordered and the manufacturer ships it directly to the customer. Now, you can also build a different type of e-commerce business that sells physical products and you aren’t drop shipping, where you are warehousing the products yourself. However, most people would agree that it will be much easier and require a much smaller investment if you do go the dropshipping route because storing products and shipping them can be very expensive. If you do your market research and you find a product that there is good demand for, there is a huge opportunity for profit here.
There is an infinite opportunity for selling physical products online. This very general industry generates billions and billions of dollars every year. And you can find your spot in that market. However, keep in mind that this is a business like all of the ones we’re going to talk about today, which does require a fair amount of initial investment of time and energy because you have to work to find the right products that there is a good demand for, for your store.
And then after that, you’re going to have to put in a lot of effort to effectively market your store so that you can stand out from the crowd and get found by your customers. If you do go the dropshipping route though, it’s not going to require much of an initial investment. It won’t be free because you will have to initially buy some products to ensure the quality of these physical products that you’re selling, but you aren’t going to need to spend more than a few hundred or a couple of thousand dollars at most. Another type of physical product business that you could start has a different business model.
Instead of you selling the products on your site and having them shipped from the manufacturer, you’re selling websites on a third-party platform. Specifically, the common way that people do this is with Amazon. Amazon has a program called Amazon FBA, which means Fulfillment by Amazon. And basically what it means is that you send your products, which you’re going to sell to the Amazon warehouse.
And then whenever someone buys one of those products, Amazon sends it to the customer. They deal with all the transactions and they also deal with all of the customer service. This business model is similar to drop shipping, but it has some different pros and cons. Now, specifically, because you’re working with a very well-known company, Amazon, you can trust them more than maybe you could trust a manufacturer that you don’t have as much knowledge or experience working with.
So you know that Amazon is going to ship the product to the customers reliably. However, on the other side of things, there are some more unknowns because with Amazon FBA you do have to invest more money upfront. After all, you have to buy your products and then have them shipped to Amazon. This means you might invest several thousand dollars in your initial batch of products and you may not be sure whether or not these products will sell.
And that means that it’s even more important with this business model that you do plenty of upfront research to ensure that there is demand and it can also be very helpful, like you definitely should do this, to learn how the Amazon algorithms work to make sure that your products will rank well on Amazon so that you can ensure that you get the sales that you need to recoup your investment and earn profits. Now one of the reasons why doing Amazon FBA can be so incredibly profitable is because Amazon already has an enormous customer base and so it’s easier to generate sales with your products than if you were trying to sell the products on your website where you have to drive all the traffic, you have to get all the attention, all the exposure for your products. On Amazon, you’re going to get some of that built-in. So you are potentially able to do a much larger volume of sales, which means more profits.
Also, as you can see, this doesn’t require any specialized skills or previous experience. You need to learn how the FBA program works and you need to learn how to do market research, but beyond that, you’re selling a physical product. So you’re not having to provide any sort of service or anything like that to customers that you need to have the technical skills to be able to provide well. Within the next type of business that I want to share with you, there are many different options for specific versions of this business that you could start.
The type of business is an agency. You can start an agency, even if you don’t have much experience or the technical skills to do the work that the agency might provide to the clients yourself. An agency is a certain type of business model where you have multiple people working for you that are providing services to clients. There are lots of different types of agencies out there that you could potentially start.
These include digital marketing agencies, advertising agencies, creative agencies, social media management agencies, virtual assistant agencies, and online business management agencies, just to name a few. Now as I mentioned, you don’t necessarily need to have the technical skills yourself. You don’t need to be skilled or familiar with all of the intricacies of running an online marketing campaign, managing an online business, or doing all of the different tasks that a virtual assistant might do. However, to be successful with this business model, you’ll need to have a general understanding of how this field works and how the work needs to get done so that you can make sure that you hire service providers to work for you who are good at what they do.
Now, this type of business does require time and effort to build because you have to take the time to find the right people to work for you who are very skilled at what they do, and then you have to take time to market your business to attract the customers who will be paying your business to provide services for them. However, it’s again not going to require very much initial investment of money because you are providing a service. And typically you’ll only be paying the service providers when you have client work for them to do. Though it doesn’t require a big upfront investment, an agency-style business often has a significant monthly overhead, which just means that your fixed expenses every month can be fairly substantial.
Those are just a few things to keep in mind if you’re interested in starting an agency business.
But an agency business can be extremely profitable and especially can allow you to create a large amount of profit for yourself to earn a lot of money without necessarily having to put in a lot of hours of work every single week.
