Business tips from millionairesSo I’ve been writing here for a while about millionaires and making money online and I thought it might be nice to share some business tips I’ve gleaned for learning about various people who have made it. No, I didn’t interview any of these people. However, I did study them and found some really cool idea that they had to share:

There Is Always Risk Involved

Just as Steve Jobs about this. Or rather, ask his ghost or his autobiography. Jobs took massive risks in order to make money. When he introduced the iPod, he didn’t know if it would succeed at all. But he risked the entire company on the enterprise, buying up stocks of 1.8 inch hard drives for the next six months from all the suppliers.
This allowed him to get a jump on the competition, who had to wait for additional supplies to come online. It could have easily flopped though and Apple would have gone bankrupt if they were stuck with all those hard drives.

Sure You Can Start from Nothing. But You Don’t Have To

Ask Howard Shultz. He joined a little coffee shop in Seattle called Starbucks in 1982 and wanted to expand the business to include Italian coffee drinks like cappuccino. The original owners said no and so he tried to strike out on his own. A few years later, the original owners of Starbucks decided to sell out to Shultz and he took the brand nationwide. The rest as they say is history and a whole of latte grandes.

You Don’t Need to Show Off

My favorite example of this is Warren Buffet, the self made billionaire who runs Mutual of Omaha. He still lives in a very modest home that he purchased decades ago and doesn’t feel any need for a mansion. Samuel Rob Walton, heir to the Walmart fortune still drives around in an old pickup truck. In other words, just because you have money doesn’t mean you need to show it off.

On the Other Hand…

Then again, if you want to keep making more money, then you should treat yourself once in a while. That’s after all what one of America’s most famous billionaires, Donald Trump does. He is ostentatious to a fault…

Raising Funds is Tough

I’ll refer back to my childhood hero, Steve Jobs for this one – he tried to get funding for Apple Computer back in the early days and he kept striking out. Eventually, he and fellow Steve (Wozniak) decided to do it all on their own.
One of Job’s gutsiest moves was when the Apple II came out – the cases were hand made by the two Steves and they had just three of them ready for a trade show. Jobs took those three, put them on display and made it look like they were just off the shelf models. He then took in thousands of orders and then set about assembling the off the shelf stuff for the customers.  No funding necessary.

You Don’t Need to be First

Jobs again (hey, he was my childhood hero so I like to quote him, even if personally he was kind of a jerk). Steve Jobs didn’t invent a single thing. The personal computer and indeed graphical operating systems (Apple II and Macintosh) were both invented by Xerox. The MP3 player was originally from Rio. The tablet PC was a Microsoft concept. Smart phones – RIM and Nokia beat him to it.
But what Jobs did do and what you need to do if you want to be successful, is to improve on these things. He took moribund product categories and made them into things people wanted.