If you want to get rich, you have to start a business.
A job will never make you rich, and even the best jobs leave you well off, not rich. When you work a job, you’re working to make someone else rich, and they’re giving you a (very) small piece of the pie.
The only way a job can get some real money in your hands is if you get paid in equity/stock options (at that point, you’re a part business owner anyway).
Fortunately, it’s never been easier to start an internet based business than today, where everyone has internet, and all the tools you need are available, well developed, and most importantly: cheap.
Let’s look at some reasons you should consider starting an internet based business.
Reasons You Should Start an Online Business
1. High Scalability and Upside
The income potential of an internet-based business is virtually unlimited. If you have a good product to sell, you can make a lot of money. Especially if your product gives you recurring revenue.
Your income is not a function of your time, but a function of your quality. In other words, unlike a job where you get paid $x/hour, your internet business will pay according to the quality. (Although there are some freelancing gigs where you can charge by the hour, in most cases, it’s about output, not the amount of time.)
Your internet business is open 24/7/365, and you make money while you sleep. You don’t need to be there to make the sale; you just need a sales page – software will take care of everything for you.
2. Access to New Markets
When you do business online, you have access to customers in every region of the world.
Unlike your neighborhood grocery store, people can buy your goods and services from North America, Europe, Asia, South America, etc. – literally, anywhere there are people without you needing a physical presence in that location.
Not only does this allow you the benefits of scale, but it also protects you from regional economic fluctuations. If Japan’s economy were to fail, people running online businesses from Japan would not be affected because most of their customers would not be from Japan.
3. Location Independence
As mentioned earlier, you don’t need to be there physically to conduct business. Once your business is doing well and you’re making 1.5-2x your living expenses from your business, you are free to go and live wherever you want as long as you have your laptop with you to manage your business.
You understand what real freedom is like when you’re able to generate cash flow no matter where you are at a given point of time.
That said, I highly recommend having a home base.
4. You Own Your Time
You don’t have to wake up at 7 (if you don’t want to) and quickly get ready to get to work and you don’t have to take orders from a boss. If you own a business, you don’t have to take orders from anyone other than yourself – you are your own boss.
You don’t need to work at a particular time someone else sets for you. You can pick whatever times suit you best.
For example, you can go to the gym at 2 o’clock in the afternoon when it’s almost empty and have a much better workout because you have the entire gym to yourself and don’t have to wait for equipment.
Being the boss of your time is really efficient because you know what’s best for you and your business. Over the long run, not only do you make more money, but you also have more time to spend with your family and do things that you like.
5. It Saves You Time (No Commute)
Not only do you own your time, having an internet based business also saves you time (your most valuable resource).
You don’t need to commute to work during the rush-hour traffic like everyone else. You can just run your business from your home via your computer or just rent an office next to your house to work from.
Remember that the whole point of a business is to make money, not to maximize the number of hours worked (which many corporate managers appear to want to do).
You’ll cut out every bit of inefficiency your job forces upon you such as commutes, unnecessary business meetings, waiting for approvals from other departments, etc.
Multiply the bottom row in this chart by 1.5
because you only get to spend 16 hours a day awake, not 24.
6. You Have More Time to Do the Things You Like
Here’s a great definition of success I came across:
“Success is when you can spend 90 percent of your time doing the things you want to do and only 10 percent doing things you have to do. Most people’s lives are just the opposite.” – Scott Spangler
After a point, your business will make you more money than you can reasonably spend while spending a minimal amount of time running it. In other words, your business is a money making machine.
You’ll have more time to do the things that really matter to you – be it spending time with your family, pursuing your hobbies, traveling, creating more businesses. You work when you want to, not when you are made to.
Once you have your cash flows right, you can outsource the soul-sucking stuff either by hiring an employee or just hiring other freelancers over the internet.
(Note: This point applies after you’ve gotten your business off the ground and it’s making you a decent amount of money. Getting there can take you a year or two or more – and you’re going to be working like a dog until then – but it’s worth it.)
7. It’s Cheap. Start-Up Costs Are Really Low
The three reasons I recommend an internet based business over a brick and mortar business are:
- It’s less time consuming once you get the ball rolling
- Much higher potential for scale
- It needs very little capital
Starting an internet business is *really* cheap.
Starter web hosting costs less than $3 a month, and a domain name costs $10 a year. Social media accounts are free.
All in – you should be able to float your first year of business within $50-$100. There is no physical business that can be started for just a hundred bucks.
Cheap startup costs also mean that in case you fail, you don’t lose much. You can quickly start another internet business until something clicks. The cost of failure is really low.
Contrast this with brick and mortar businesses that need significant investments and are fraught with risk.
(By the way, I recommend using Namecheap for your domain – they have ultra cheap hosting as well. Even if you don’t intend on starting an internet-based business, you should always own your FirstnameLastname .com domain for future promotion and to prevent defamation. For example, I own harshstrongman.com even though I haven’t done anything with it yet.)
8. Lower Taxes
If you have a business, you can write off business expenses and save on your taxes. It’s no secret that companies pay 10-30% lower amounts in taxes than people earning the same amount of money via salary. Remember, compound interest makes a massive difference over time.
9. You Have All the Ownership
Employees make a salary; equity holders make profits. But there’s more to it than that.
Let me ask you what’s worth more:
- $100,000 earned as a salary
- $100,000 earned from a business
Assume that the tax rates and time spent to get there are the same.
The answer is the second. Why?
Because when you run a business, you own the equity. A business that makes $100,000 a year is worth a multiple of that when you *sell* the business.
You can never sell a job because you don’t own the underlying asset. You can sell a business.
It’s similar to real estate in that way, it’s not just about the rent you can make, it’s also about the capital appreciation for the land it’s on.
Take a look at this graph:
The richer they are, the more their net worth stems
from investments and business interests.
People who break the top 1% do so because the value of their business interests rises as their cash flows increase.
10. You Are More Motivated to Put in the Work (No More of that Soul-Sucking Stuff)
I’ve been there. You sit at your desk at your job and stare at the clock. You wait for it to go from 10 to 8 so that you can finally go home without making people think you’re not working enough.
You’ve already put in the minimum amount of work you need to put in to stay under the radar and you couldn’t be bothered to do more.
Well – things change once you start a business. You want to put in the work because you’re fairly rewarded for it – in fact, all the gains are yours to keep.
There are no office politics and no dealing with annoying managers who want you to work like a dog while rewarding you like a worm.
I can tell you one thing: almost everyone hates their job, but very few people hate their business. If they did, they’d just sell it and start another one.
11. You Live in a Third World Country
If you live in a third world country, you absolutely must start an internet based business. If you don’t have an internet based income stream, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.
Third world countries have really low costs of living, and likewise, they have ridiculously low wage rates.
You’re better off developing an internet business that earns in first world currency than spending time and energy working towards a career that pays in your home currency.
In most third world countries (especially India, South East Asia, and perhaps Africa), you can live really well for 3000 US dollars a month. And the number is even lower for second-tier cities. But how many jobs in the third world pay $3000 a month? Very few.
This is basically Geo-arbitrage, where you’re earning in USD or Pounds or Euros and spending it in a currency where it’s worth 3-7x as much.
12. You’re paying for it already
There are two ways to look at this.
The first is that you’re already spending time on the internet. Why not put it to creative use and make some money off of it?
The second is the opportunity cost:
“The company that needs a new machine tool, and hasn’t bought it, is already paying for it.”
In the current day and age, if you don’t have some kind of internet based source of cash flow, you’re already losing money. You’re throwing away the money you could have made into the gutter.
Each day you waste is adding up, and the compound interest on the money you lost by earning it is piling up. It’s criminal to waste so much potential!
Well, the most common excuse people have for never starting is “I don’t have an idea,” but the real reason is apathy and pure laziness. You don’t need an idea to start – you need a website and a domain and you need to market what you already do.
If you can’t think of anything, just create some social media accounts and start building an audience. Start building your brand up. The earlier you start, the quicker you’ll get there.
At the end of the day, I can tell you that 95-99% of those who read this article won’t take any action. I’m not being snide, it’s a fact that most people just don’t take action.
That’s okay though. There’s a reason why less than 5% of people do anything meaningful with their lives – they take action, while the rest watch “prank videos” and complain about being “too busy”.
If you’re one of the 5% of doers, I recommend taking up the Live Intentionally – 90 Day Self-Project as you build your first online stream of revenue. Just set your mission statement to “building my first internet-based revenue stream”. As a bonus, you’ll also become tougher, calmer, and more purposeful as you take the self project. Your purchase is completely risk-free; if you feel that the project isn’t helping you, just shoot me an email within 30 days and I’ll fully refund your purchase, no questions asked. If my work doesn’t help you, I don’t want your money.
Hope this helps.
Until next time,
Harsh Strongman
wpDiscuz
