Wealth Creation Lessons From Successful Entrepreneurs

The term wealth creation can refer to many things. For most people, wealth creation means amassing a significant amount of material wealth either through business, career and/or various other income streams.

For others, true wealth is an all-encompassing term that includes financial independence, health, love and happiness.

What I’ve learnt about wealth creation on my journey towards financial freedom

Whichever way you look at it, wealth is almost always related to being financially independent in some shape or form.

In fact, achieving financial independence provides you with the precious time you need to focus on and pursue other aspects of wealth in your life.

The problems many of us have when it comes to setting goals and achieving big things is that we make our happiness conditional to external results.

We think that when we “make it”, we’ll find happiness and joy in our lives.

What I’ve learnt on my journey so far is that allowing an external event to control your inner emotional state is a recipe for disaster.

We can’t find happiness in objects, and if we do, it never lasts.

One thing I’ve learnt from many successful people over the years is that creating wealth in life is so much easier when we aren’t self-sabotaging through having a scarcity mindset.

Think about it like this:

Your mindset is the software that’s running you.

It determines how you feel, the actions you take, and the decisions you make.

If your software isn’t up to date then you’ll have no chance of competing at the level required for success in all aspects of life.

Some of us need an upgrade on the software that’s in our head before we can start pursuing things like wealth creation, although it’s something that is way easier said than done!

I know this because I was running that terrible software in my mind for so many years. I’ve failed a lot, made plenty of mistakes and I’m not afraid to admit them.

The bottom line is that you can’t thrive if you’re running on Windows 95 while your competition is on Windows 10!

How Successful Entrepreneurs Created Their Wealth

Bringing things back to wealth creation… I want to focus on the financial side of things as this is the first step to living a life of freedom and independence for a lot of people.

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When it comes to financial success, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

So many people assume that they need to come up with the next amazing idea that will change the world.

In reality, most successful businesses are based on things that have already been done before.

They just separate themselves from the competition by having a unique selling point.

Of course, there are also a whole bunch of other factors that go into creating a successful business, but we won’t go into that here.

I believe that the best way to learn how to create wealth is to look at what other successful people have done. There are many things about entrepreneurship that we’re just not taught in school, and I’m going to address those points throughout this article.

In this list, we’ll cover a whole range of successful entrepreneurs, young and old, who have created a significant amount of wealth for themselves.

Neil Patel

Neil Patel is the founder & co-founder of multiple internet companies such as Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics and Hello Bar.

These are online software as a service (SAAS) companies. He is also the founder and owner of Quicksprout and of course, Neilpatel.com.

His focus on those two sites is helping businesses drive more traffic and make more sales by leveraging the power of digital marketing.

Neil is the epitome of a successful internet entrepreneur.

• The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web.
• Forbes says he’s one of the top 10 online marketers.
• He’s been recognised by former US president, Barack Obama for being one of the top 100 entrepreneurs under 35.

How he amassed his wealth

Neil’s first successful venture was starting an SEO consulting firm with his business partner Hiten Shah.

This was Neil’s second business venture (his first failed because he was just doing it for the money!) and in the space of a few short months, he hit it big. Pulling in over $20,000 a month from his SEO consulting agency.

Neil quickly grew his SEO consulting agency to a business that grossed over 7 figures a year by focusing on acquiring big clients that would pay six figures a year for his services.

Neil’s next two business ventures involved creating SAAS products Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics, launching in 2006 and 2008 respectively.

Crazy Egg is a visual analytics tool that shows you where your site visitors are clicking and scrolling.

By 2013, Crazy Egg hit 100,000 users.

KISSmetrics is a powerful software tool that tracks and reveals detailed behavioural analytics on website visitors.

This allows businesses to understand how their audience is interacting with their website and enables them to optimise their site based on the data received from KISSmetrics.

Wealth Creation Takeaways:

• Work ethic – Neil Patel is a hustler, putting in 70-80 hours of work a week to this day, despite all the success he’s had so far.
• Invest and focus – His biggest piece of advice to his 21-year-old self would be “Invest in yourself and focus. One problem, one company and then grow from there.”
• You don’t need lots of capital – You don’t always need funding to start a company. You can bootstrap a business and give equity away to people who will help you solve the problems you need fixing.
• Consistency is king – Be consistent with whatever you do. Neil churns out 8 extensive blog posts a week. Figure out how you can streamline your productivity process and stick to your guns.

Eric Thomas

At 12 years old, Eric Thomas found out that his father wasn’t his real father. Things drastically changed for him after this discovery.

A few years ago, Eric was homeless. Sleeping in abandoned buildings, eating out of trash cans and stealing food from grocery stores just to survive.

He was at rock-bottom. Absolute zero.

Most of us are worried about not having enough money to start a business.. try not having a place to put your head down at night.

It was this crushing low point is his life that unleashed the insatiable hunger, determination and drive he now possesses.

He uses this energy to inspire people all over the world to go after whatever it is they want in their life.

The best way to learn about Eric is to see him do his thing:

How he amassed his wealth

Eric is an author, teacher and motivational speaker who regularly works with the NBA and NFL. He performs at speaking engagements for corporate companies and gets paid up to $100,000 per speech.

He also performs at schools in some of the most deprived areas, and even prisons. He often does this for free.

Eric has a real love for what he does and always puts 120% into his speeches.

Eric is involved in various partnerships with companies, he’s even recently released an album called “the resolution”.

Wealth Creation Takeaways:

• No excuses – There’s no excuse for you not to fulfil your potential. Your circumstances are irrelevant to achieving the things you want in your life.
• You gotta want it bad enough – You’ll succeed when you want to succeed as badly as you want to breathe.
• Hustle hustle hustle – Get up, grind, rinse and repeat. Harness the power of your will and have an incredible work ethic.
• Show up every single day – There will be days where you feel tired, you feel pain or you just don’t “feel like it”. You can’t allow your dreams to be put on hold by temporary feelings.

Steve Jobs

A list of lessons from entrepreneurs wouldn’t be complete without the late, Steve Jobs.

A man who’s had such a big impact on the world and created one of the most successful companies in existence.

Steve Jobs was someone that needed no introduction. His entrepreneurial spirit and obsession over perfection is well-known and celebrated around the world.

Apple Inc is the most profitable company in the world right now.

How he amassed his wealth

Most of you probably know the story of how Steve Jobs rose to riches with Apple Inc.

Steve Jobs had a vision for a “computer for the rest of us” and subsequently sparked the revolution that enabled all of us to own personal computers.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started the Apple company with just $1350 dollars! The first Apple computer was built in a garage and sold to many computer hobbyists but the first big breakthrough for Jobs was the Apple II.

Released in 1977, it was the first personal computer with colour graphics and a keyboard. This machine was a huge success.

First-year sales were around $3 million dollars. Two years later, sales exploded to over $200 million.

This was just the start of the Apple story. A few years later, Steve was actually kicked out of his own company and then brought back after a decade in desperation because the company was doing so badly.

In March 1997, Apple reported a loss of $708 million. This was just before they begged Steve Jobs to come back. It shows that even the most successful company in the world can go through extremely difficult times.

Wealth Creation Takeaways:

• Don’t live a limited life – Once you discover that everything around you was made up by people that are no smarter than you. You have the ability to change it, influence it and mould it.
• Be passionate about what you do – If you don’t really love what you do, you’ll give up when it gets hard. Having that love for what you do enables you to persevere against all odds.
• Follow your heart and trust yourself – You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. Believing that the dots will connect further down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path.

Sam Ovens

Sam Ovens started out working a 9-5 corporate job at Vodafone after he attended college. Sam’s role at Vodafone was an internship and it’s fair to say that it definitely wasn’t his thing.

Sam observed the people around him, especially the people that had been with the company for a while and quickly realised that it wasn’t something that he wanted.

So he decided to drop out of college, start a business and move back to his parent’s house.

Unfortunately for Sam, his parents downsized their house since he moved out so the only option for Sam was for him to set up shop in the garage.

This is what his living space looked like…

His workspace was made from a bunch of concrete blocks and some old doors.

Not exactly what you’d call lavish!

Sam started at absolute zero. No specialist knowledge, no formal qualifications.

How he amassed his wealth

In just four short years, Sam went from zero to making $350,000 dollars a month.

Oh and he no longer lives in his parent garage!

Sam achieved this through starting a consulting business. He performed Digital Marketing services for local businesses where he helped them get more clients through search engines like Google.

For these services, he would charge a monthly retainer fee for each client. These fees can range from $500 all the way up to $10,000 a month (depending on the client and type of service).

He now invests most of his time in helping other people start wildly profitable consulting businesses through his training programs.

Consulting is a powerful business model because it’s something you can start without having to invest thousands of dollars.

It’s something that can be done in any industry and the profit margins are unlike any other traditional company.

Wealth Creation Takeaways:

• Focus on problem-solving – Too many people try and think of the next big idea when it comes to business, which results in products that people don’t really need. Find out what the needs are in the marketplace and focus on solving those problems.
• Knowledge is power – Sam says that if he had to start from scratch, he would spend a tonne of his time reading books. He would read books on mindset, sales, marketing and business strategy.
• Money-producing activities – Sam grew his consulting business to six figures a month without even having a website. Don’t waste time on the little details and focus on the activities that will produce money for your business.

Chloe Spencer

Chloe is a millennial entrepreneur, author, blogger, speaker and professional digital marketer from Orange County in California.

She started doing Search Engine Marketing when she was just 14 years old. (Don’t worry, I was still picking my nose at 14 too).

Chloe’s entrepreneurial spirit was lit when her father (Who’s an SEO expert) would talk to her about his online businesses.

She started her first business neopetsfanatic.com when she was just 14 years old. This was a fan site for the popular Neopets game that pretty much everyone was obsessed with at one point.

How she amassed her wealth

Chloe started generating an income from her fan site from the age of 15. She managed to rank her website at the top of the first page of Google for various high-competition search terms.

This resulted in a flood of traffic to her website and she was able to monetize her site through displaying ads via the Google Adsense network.

By the time she was 16 years of age, she was generating thousands of dollars a month in passive income.

Ten years on, she now runs her own SEO and social media marketing business, helping clients all over the world get better results in their businesses by improving their search engine rankings and boosting brand awareness through social media.

Wealth Creation Takeaways:

• Use what you already know – Chloe leveraged the knowledge of her father to build a business at a very young age. There’s probably a way you can monetize your existing skill sets and turn that into a profitable business.
• Master one thing – Chloe has mastered SEO and used that knowledge to build successful websites and launch an agency. Becoming an expert in one thing and focusing on just that is a pre-requisite to running a wildly successful business.

Carl O Cab

Another young whipper snapper who started a successful business in his teens.

Carl is from Archipelago in the Philippines.

He started playing around with the internet at the ripe old age of 12. He spent most of his time (like most others his age) playing video games and mucking around.

It wasn’t until his father called out his obsession with online gaming and introduced him to the notion that he could make money blogging.

Naturally, Carl was blown away by this prospect and wanted to find out more about this weird little thing called blogging.

He launched his first proper website, carlocab.com at the age of 13 and managed to rank on the first page for a high competition search term “make money online”.

This is when Carl started attracting attention from some major news outlets.

Carl now runs his own internet marketing agency that provides SEO, web development and social media services.

Wealth Creation Takeaways:

• It’s never too early to start – There are plenty of super smart, switched on entrepreneurs out there that are very knowledgeable. This can make it feel intimidating for younger people to get started with their own businesses. Entrepreneurs like Carl prove that you don’t need to know everything to get started.
• Execution is everything – So many of us spend so much of our time planning and mapping things out. We aren’t taking action on the things we’ve learnt. These young entrepreneurs show us that you don’t need to be perfect to start. You just need to get stuck in. stay consistent and learn from your mistakes.

Tai Lopez

If you’re on social media, you’ve probably seen or heard of Tai Lopez.

Tai Lopez is an entrepreneur, speaker, investor and social media expert who became internet famous with his “here in my garage” Youtube video.

He runs his own entrepreneurship program called The 67 Steps. A program that teaches people all the things they really wish they learned in school.

The lessons revealed in this program have helped change people’s lives all over the world.

He’s also recently launched his own social media marketing program that shows people how to build consulting businesses by helping local businesses increase their presence online.

Tai has a highly respectable social media following that’s not to be sniffed at…

• 4 million likes on Facebook.
• 2 million Instagram followers.
• 1 million subscribers on Youtube.

Things weren’t always this way though, just a few years prior he was sleeping on a couch in a mobile home with only $47 dollars to his name.

Tai turned things around in his life when he discovered mentors that showed him the steps to success.

Tai is passionate about living the good life. So that’s not just about being financially successful.

It’s about health, wealth, love and happiness.

How he amassed his wealth

Tai has created most of his financial wealth through investing. He regularly speaks about how the biggest percentage of self-made billionaires in the world are investors.

Here are some of the companies Tai Lopez has been involved in:

GE Capital – He worked there within the wealth management sector as an employee in his younger years.

LLG Financial – Back in 2003, Tai started Legacy Life Group with a friend of his, John Dewar. A company that provides wealth management and financial planning advice.

Tai later went on to release ownership and became an investor instead. The company has since changed to Retirement Geeks and is still in business today.

Night clubs – Started, owned and invested in many nightclubs on the east coast of the United States. He talks about these nightclubs and many other investments on the podcast interview by Success Harbour.

Wealth creation takeaways:

• Arrested humility – Be so interested and curious about what you do that you’re willing to get arrested for it. To do whatever it takes. People are too damn proud for no good reason. Be willing to spend your money to learn from others.
• Humans learn by osmosis – Surround yourself with people that are where you want to be in your life. We learn best from other people. The people you surround yourself with have a big influence on your habits and behaviours.
• Don’t be cocky – Most people are what Tai Lopez calls “humble cocky”- they appear to be humble on the outside but their actions tell a different story. They’re never learning and they secretly think that one day they’ll wake up with a great idea that’ll make them super successful.
• Learn from other people’s mistakes – You can accelerate your learning process by decades by learning from other people. Learn from other people instead of making all the mistakes and having to learn from them yourself.

Donny Ouyang

Donny started out as an entrepreneur when he was just 12. That’s right, another super young entrepreneur!

He was named a “Top 10 Under 20” by Vancouver Magazine, “Ten Teen Entrepreneurs To Watch” by TechCrunch and won the 2010 EO global student entrepreneur of the year award.

Donny started playing around with websites when he as 12 years of age. His taste for digital entrepreneurship was sparked when he made his first $200 online.

After achieving this, he knew exactly what he wanted to do.

How he amassed his wealth

Donny founded his first company, Kinkarso Tech Ltd in 2006.

Kinkarso was essentially a network of service-based websites that Donny had created.

One of them is Battleforums.net. A super popular gaming forum for the Blizzard video games.

They also developed and helped monetise websites for external companies through their consulting services.

He was earning over $6500 dollars a month online by the time he was 16.

Donny now dedicates his time to his latest business venture, Rayku Corp.

A venture-funded education startup that helps people in North America improve their grades.

Rayku makes money by charging students a monthly fee for their learning packages.

Wealth Creation Takeaways:

• Be different – Donny is super motivated by his desire to be different from the crowd. He has no intention of living an ordinary life and is inspired by the possibility of achieving anything.
• Build on your success – Reinvest a significant portion of your profits into your next business ventures so you can achieve compound growth as an entrepreneur.
• Anyone can do it – There are no special skills involved in making money online. You just need to be willing to take risks and put 120% into the thing you’re doing.

Bringing it all together

You probably already know that there is no secret to success. It just takes a healthy dose of hard work, determination and perseverance.

There are plenty of ways to generate an income and create the wealth that you desire in your life. You just need to find something, learn the fundamentals and start taking action.

Entrepreneurship isn’t just about business. It’s a way of life because it requires the embodiment of so many powerful personality traits. We can learn to change our self-sabotaging behaviours/mindsets and empower ourselves with the skills and knowledge required for success.

Things like books and the internet provide us with all the knowledge we need to create a life of wealth and abundance. There are no excuses!

You might be wondering how a lot of these entrepreneurs got started in terms of the actual business models they used to start generating an income.

Here are some resources that will give you a detailed breakdown of various types of businesses that you can start online:

• Online Business Ideas: The Definitive List
• 10 Business Ideas With Low Startup Investment
• Learn Affiliate Marketing: The Ultimate Beginners Guide

I hope you enjoyed these little lessons on wealth creation from all types of entrepreneurs. Feel free to drop me a comment and let me know your thoughts!