Expert Professional Advice

Multi-million-dollar principle #1 – 6 (why waste time with the other obvious stuff?)
The superstar’s job is to meet with clients and close the sale. Everything else is delegated.

If you want to increase your income, see more people.

Stick with the system that works. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel.

If you wait to sell your business for maximum profit, move from being a star-based business to a team approach.

If you cannot become a team-based business, increase your profitability. Use your increased profits for retirement.

When you keep your clients happy… you keep your clients.
I wonder when the people were writing the book if they really thought it was great. Recommendation: avoid.

It is my belief that the economy in the U.S. hasn’t been well since 2000 so I took note of the following comment that expresses the author’s view of the economy (the book was published in 2005), pg 272, 273: “Unfortunately, after a few years of economic downturn and jobs shipping overseas, the market for potential new distributors is growing.” The author referred to avoiding multi-level marketing schemes.

Pg 217, Don’t do anything: (my favorite part – make your own bailout)
If you don’t anticipate having a steady income or owning anything for a while, bankruptcy is probably not necessary. Your creditors will simply write off your debt as a deductible business loss for income tax purposes. In several years, it will become legally uncollectible under state law, and in seven years, it will come off your credit report. If you have seven years to kill, and you don’t incur any new debt during that time, you can just forget about the whole thing. Of course, I would seriously question what you are doing reading this book if this sort of life is a viable option for you!

The need for reform and clarity is evident and urgent. (Paul A. Volcker, Foreword)

Who saw the banking crisis in advance? It was obvious to the authors that it was on the horizon:
Too big too fail is real, costly, and becoming more severe. The second part of the book provides policy makers with options to address it. TBTF is not unsolveable, and this is the right time to address the problem – waiting for the next bank crisis can hardly improve our lot. (pg xii, Preface)

Penalize policy makers: (pg 142) <President Obama are you listening?>
For example, policy makers who do not close banks while still solvent must forfeit their jobs.

Warning signs that a banking problem might have been underway: (pg 181)
CDOs went from roughly $8 billion at end of 1998 to $500 billion at the end of 2001.

Issuance of loans in the so-called asset backed securities market – securely backed by consumer loans or smaller business loans – had risen fourfold, from roughly $300 billion to $1.2 trillion between 1995 and 2001.
Now that TBTF has been proven false, government officials who didn’t act prudently must lose their jobs (in some cultures a lot worse would befall them), and where warranted, if their influence was bought, mandatory prison terms should be handed-out in order to restore public confidence. If executives and companies continue to improperly benefit from the “crisis” why should I believe in the system? It’s amazing that when the first proposal was issued for the bailout in September the government officials spoke of the urgency to act by claiming that within a week the economy would completely crumble, confidently pushing a crummy bailout package for the privileged, not the people, but where were those government officials when it came time to confidently act before the banking crisis? They didn’t see it coming and yet they were so quick to offer the solution! So, how could their “expertise” be relied on?

While these are helpful methods to employ in management, copying the Japanese may aid in building great companies, but logically there is no long-term best approach… where are all the five hundred year-old companies? Where are the one thousand year-old businesses? I will credit the Japanese with building great products, and although the Japanese economy continues to suffer for over twenty-five years I think Japanese companies will continue to survive in a sustained economic downturn. They do too many things right. So, the alchemy of a leader itself arises, not from management, but from huge markets… but the author of this book, published in 1994, was nearly oblivious to the rise of China as a superpower with leading economic development. And it happened with nothing but millions of people forging ahead to serve underserved markets, not practice educated MBA activities or follow Japanese management techniques. Now that the fog has cleared from 1994, there is a huge mountain of advancement and economic activity… and even skilled outsiders didn’t get the golden keys to the Middle Kingdom.

It should be common sense that finding wealthy people to work with is how you access private capital. I’m not sure why people worth between one and ten million in US dollars would choose to go into funding ventures at an early stage and tie up their capital without a clear plan of an IPO cash-out but the book claims those are the people who are angel investors. For those folks that think the downturn in the economy is new, I’ve felt it hasn’t been good for a longtime, since the tech bubble burst and here’s commentary from the book that discusses the economy (the book was released in 2005).

Page Xxiii: Such companies also possess the potential for jobs in our recessionary and recovering economy, both nationally and, particularly regionally. Large funds must make large investments in order to put their money to work.

Although the authors are experienced in the field and have created International Capital Resources (a funding exchange/matching platform), the book doesn’t seem to offer a lot to hold a reader’s attention. The enlightening part can be summed up in the introduction: It is a part of probability that many improbable things will happen. (Aristotle, poetics)
Companies never go broke if they always have enough cash. Since the only time companies go broke is when they run out of cash, really work on your cash projections, your cash flows. That’s the overwhelming concern to raising angel capital or accessing any investor capital.

Tax liens and deeds
Below-market real estate
Income trusts and master limited partnerships
High-yield stocks (Dividend capture)
Drips
Bonds
Options
Foreign exchange
Selling or brokering cash flow
Passive income strategies:
Vending machines, ATM, timeshares, payday loans store, Internet advertising

The book is nearly useless. None of the strategies are secret as the book references other books and websites for each topic. What you’ll get out of this book is a chance to waste time, there are detailed sources of information available online, all this book does is provide an introduction to the topic with none of the essential experience or detailed guided plans to executing a strategy, nor are any real-world investment returns presented.

The other flaw with the material is that the projected returns aren’t enough to fit the claim about becoming rich. The foreign exchange and options intro is extremely limited and not conducive to real-world application. Anyone at any time could make a fortune with enough leverage by gambling. Should I also consider the casino a model for quick riches if I bet US $1,000 to $5,000 on one number in roulette and win $36,000 to $175,000? This tactic alone would produce faster, higher-returns than the book delivers – except I’m dealing directly with the risk of total loss of capital per event.

The best idea of the book is missed by the author – he discusses a guy who created seatguru.com which was purchased by Tripadvisors for a significant sum of money. Building anything that anyone wants, especially drawing the kind of web traffic that seatguru did is the fundamental way to building wealth in the current marketplace. As long as there is business there is advertising and marketing. Some of the biggest payouts are advertising endorsements. A person now has an immediate distribution channel for a good idea and the marketing of that idea along with a quick way to assess if the market values that particular approach.