Are Tourism Industry geared up for matching skill and educated car/bus driver?

Calling Entrepreneurs - Why is it so hard to make real money?

• Preface - The ideal person I'm looking to answer this question is aged 18-40. They've made some good coin without a very specialized skill (law, computer science, banking, medicine, etc), moreover they're self made and didn't have family help. I'm a well educated person.  I'm 29 years old and I'm having issues here.  My main issue is trying to make some real money.  I'm not talking about a 100-150k per year salary with a pay increase that barely keeps up with inflation.  I'm also not interested in hearing someone talk about dividend paying bluechip stocks and compound interest.   Full disclosure - there is no family money and no family business, we're discussing first generation wealth creation here. There are really two camps of people, employees and employers.  I'm a lousy employee.  The notion of working for a company making small advances, always having a boss, and being restricted in terms of geography, finances etc just does not appeal to me. Also I really don't have any employable skills.  Let me clarify. I don't have the specialized skill-set that would put me in a very high paying profession IE law, medical, engineering, etc.  And if I did, the likely-hood is that would also put me back into the shoes of an employee (outside of setting up your own practice for that specialized skill-set). Now lets put the idea of a high paying profession behind us for this topic.  So you're an entrepreneur.  You're hard working and resourceful.  The only thing that matters to you in your life right now is staking your claim and making money. What do you do?  We live in a world where there is perfect information. A world where we have the large majority of first world inhabitants with little to no wealth and a world where that lovely 1% has seen dramatic increases in their holdings (and good for them, I love capitalism). So step one is to amass enough funds to make a play.  Lets call it $25-50k.  Ok this step is reasonable, savings, family etc.  Makes sense.  So now what's next?Where can you make a play into business that isn't hugely capital intensive these days? This is sort of where there doesn't seem to be a good answer, but it's the best I can come up with. My guess would be that next you look for some pre-established cash-flow businesses.  Find the boomers who've owned these for 5-15 years with solid financials and see if you can get into them for 1-1.5x net, for a variety of reasons I think you can find motivated sellers and find some great deals.  Then in all likely-hood you can optimize their business, hopefully drive more revenue and raise that profit margin (my buddy bought his first liquor store and they were using an excel bookkeeping / inventory and accounting system.  He implemented a POS and Freshbooks and found an extra 40k per year in a million dollar (revenue) business).  So perhaps the play is to source out these businesses for sale with strong financials that you can pick up a discount, optimize and automate.  Find preferably non owner operated businesses so you can maybe buy one a year for 5-10 years.  Not a bad idea.  In 5-10 years time hopefully you're generating 500k-1m per year in cash-flow.  Life is good right?  Sure, it probably is and listen, if you're not an entrepreneur this is probably where you disconnect with me as much as I disconnect with you.  That isn't good enough for me, I would not go to bed at night and feel satisfied with my achievement in life.  It's fine for a lot of people, but I want more. Buy a Franchise?  Yes, that can be lucrative.  Many immigrants have supported their family and set their future generations up with a foot head by investing their life savings into essentially buying themselves a job for the next 25 years.  Not putting it down, but it's not the path for me.  (Buying a territory and having the capital to put up 10 at a time is a different topic - again, very capital intensive). The Grand Slam - I call this the grand slam because it involves a lot of luck and a lot of risk.  I think this is where you put the "apps", "start ups", etc into this category.  High failure rates and heavy competition saturate this market - not saying they don't in others, just stating a fact. Now I have a massive giant sweet spot for e-commerce.  Reasonably low barriers to entry, and I think there's lots of opportunity if you know what you're doing.  However, this too is of course a mature industry with big players.  You're not going up against Amazon.  You're not about to start selling items with a barcode.  I think the idea of creating your online only brand and using the toolbox of different marketing techniques can offer some scalable and good opportunities. A consumer product where you control the whole vertical.  That's what I'm working on in the background now.  Consumable, reasonably priced products that are geared towards women ages 18-45.  A sweet spot of active media consumers/engagers and impulse shoppers who are comfortable (more and more each day) with making online purchases.  Create a brand around a high margin good so you have enough wiggle room to advertise and work on driving that CPA to the floor.  Optimize and automate every thing, wash rinse and repeat.  So what am I missing here?  Why is it so hard to make some real money?  I live in one of the richest cities in Canada, I have a well educated peer group.  As far as I see I have zero self made friends.  I have a couple acquaintances that are hungry and are trying to set up their own program, but we're talking lifestyle / passion businesses at best.  I have friends that make great salaries, many of them coupled with a nice amount of family money that will continue to be invested in various projects and will lead them to a very comfortable lifestyle as they grow old. Back to my preface.  I just think this a question that few can answer.  I look to these parents of my friends and that generation is just kind of clueless today. They enjoyed an age of imperfect information where they could capitalize on that. They enjoyed a great 10% year over year return on their property investment and well you don't have to look much further than a DJIA 30 year chart to see how their stock portfolio did.  Business was done over 3 martini lunches and Mr Bluth probably did build his fortune off that first Banana Stand.  That sort of day just isn't the day we live in. I understand that with small incremental plays, can lead to open doors, meeting people, being part of bigger and bigger deals. Money is drawn to more money thus is the nature of the capitalistic machine. And don't get me wrong, I love that machine, I just want to have enough wealth built up to play in that game before I'm 50.  Being old and rich is great, but being young and rich is just amazing.  I know you can't take it with you, and money doesn't satisfy everyone.  One of the best pieces of advice that older, successful people have given is to become rich with experiences.  I agree.  I have a massive bucket list of experiences I'd like to tackle in my lifetime.  However a good deal of them require money, health and time.  Hence why this post is about money. So self made 18-40 year olds, what have you done, outside of being Mark Zuckerberg's roommate, to set yourselves up in this day and age?

• Answer:

  Read my answer to this question: Conclusion: if you are this ambitious with a focus on making money, you're probably not in the right place. As others have said: get to it, anyway. If I read your comments, the first thing that comes to my mind is: "Geez, this guy needs a LOT of words to make his point." Do you have a tendency to overanalyze? To paraphrase myself: You cannot analyze an idea into execution. You come across as being all over the place with this piece. No harshness intended. Thank for these three questions: What are you deeply passionate about? What can you be the best in the world at? What's your true economic engine? That's where the pot of gold is, and only if you get all three right. Note that two of the key variables are not financially driven. With "economic engine" he means" that thing - in the undercurrent - that really drives your business, expressed in a number or formula that people can get. For example: I used to shoot for a certain amount of fee level per day in my business. When I rethought it along the lines of this formula, I came to the conclusion that my economic engine is occupation rate x  daily rate = average daily rate Result: flexibility in price setting, different business models, higher revenues, higher profitability, better work life/balance.* Money is not an object. You don't need $ 25,000 to get started. You need an idea, the will to execute and the resourcefulness to carry it through. If you blow $ 600 in India or Columbia or Romania, you have an app. Or, if you are willing to put in $ 5000, you can source it locally if you give up some equity to the developers. Or for Heaven's sake, don't build an app, actually. Everybody else is trying that. If you see a bandwagon, it's time to start walking. In the opposite direction. The only way that makes sense is of you build one that helps you cross and up-sell in a business or it can be come a complimentary revenue stream for you in an already flourishing business. There is no magic button. You may build one over time. I spent the last 12 years stumbling, failing, winning, losing. Now, I am just ahead of my next ramp up. Will I succeed? I don't know. Do I care? No. This is what I do and love doing. It requires grit to build a business. Facebook, Google and their likes, as I have said often before, are absolute outliers that perpetuate a myth and fuel a spectacularly underperforming category of asset managers. *) Read an excerpt of the book here: http://www.slideshare.net/Martijn_S/good-to-great-excerpt-2-presentation In the mean time, if you are up for a challenge, check this out: https://martijn.quora.com