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Wealth Building – Other People’s Money (OPM): What the Rich and Wealthy Have Known for Years

Getting rich isn’t all about hard work. In fact hard work has got little to do with getting rich. It’s not that I don’t advocate hard work, I do. I love working hard but I especially like to see myself and others working smart. I know that getting rich and achieving success is not exclusively the domain of blood, sweat and tears. I’ve seen friends, work colleagues and family work themselves to the bone for little or no reward.

The Cult of Hard Work, Self-Sacrifice and The Golden Goose

There is a cult of self-sacrifice evident in our culture that warrants you to be extra busy, working super hard, and putting in crazy hours. When it comes to personal wealth building and attaining success, you’re the golden goose. However, you can only push the golden goose so hard before he/she stops laying those golden eggs. Without exception every golden goose will eventually run out of energy, capacity or enthusiasm. Therefore, learning how to utilise Other Peoples Time, Money and Skills (i.e. leveraging) is a pre-requisite to becoming rich, building wealth and achieving success.

Other Peoples Money & Leverage

In general terms, getting access to Other People’s Money (OPM) is a form of leverage that enables you to go beyond the limits of your own resources and instead apply resourcefulness to everything you do. In business terms, leverage is the key that differentiates self-employed person who owns a job from the business owner who own a business. In financial/investment terms it means getting access to cash that’s not yours in order to buy assets that you control and that produce income.

What the Rich and Wealthy Have Know for Years

The richest and especially the wealthiest people in the world have known about leveraging Other People’s Money for years. Everyone from Jean Paul Getty, Aristotle Onassis and Donald Trump have excelled at this wealth building principle numero uno. Their use of OPM to buys assets is legendary. Onassis in particular is known for having secured contracts to transport ore and oil in ships and tankers he didn’t yet own and then going to the banks securing the loans to buy the ships and tankers using the contracts. A brazen and gifted deal-maker if there ever was one!

People go about building wealth or acquiring assets in different ways based on their background, past experiences and what they have been taught or know about money. For the most part people think of great riches and wealth as largely unattainable because of the model or mindset they have about money. What most people fail to understand is that you actually don’t need money to make money. Sure it helps but what you really need is access to Other People’s Money in order to make money.

The Benefits of Utilising Other People’s Money

OPM buys you time; it enables you do things before you would otherwise be able to do them. It allows you participate in deals your own resources don’t allow you to do. It enables you make choices you couldn’t otherwise make. It takes the average person many, many years to accumulate wealth or build a business entirely from their own resources. By utilising the power of Other People’s Money you can fast-track your personal wealth building or the growth of a business. Importantly, your personal wealth building is no longer limited to what you have been able to save and invest from your earned income.

Getting High on OPM – Real Estate

Most people’s typical first experience of using Other People’s Money is when they take on a mortgage to buy their home. Typically, their initial down-payment combined with their contract of employment that demonstrates their ability to produce future income is enough for them to secure a mortgage loan against home. Unfortunately your home is not an asset, well it is, but it’s the bank’s asset as they are making income from the loan advanced, not you. If you can get a bank to advance you a mortgage loan so as to purchase an investment rental property (an asset) whereby you get to retain what remains of the rental income after you pay the mortgage, then you have used Other People’s Money to buy and asset to produce income. In order to secure this loan you need to demonstrate to the bank that you are a safe bet. They will typically want to see that you have at least 20% of the purchase price as a down-payment and sufficient net income being generated by this asset and other sources to ride out any changes in interest rates, rental void periods etc.

Getting High on OPM – Business

In business, entrepreneurs and business owners get access to Other People’s Money when they write a business plan which they present to a business agent or venture capitalist i.e. investors. This process is known as raising capital. In return for the money (known as capital) received the investor who provided the capital typically receives equity (i.e. shareholding) in the business. Money can also be borrowed from a bank and the bank is repaid the principal and also receives interest on the loan. It’s the business owner’s job to put this capital to good use; to produce products or services that generate sales revenue to pay back the loan and, of course, all the other expenditures of the business.

Other People’s Money is always available and accessible to a greater or lesser extent depending on overall market conditions. Your first responsibility as an entrepreneur or investor seeking capital is to understand and inform yourself as to the multiple sources of OPM and numerous deal structures that utilize OPM.

Jumping Through the Window of Opportunity

Finally, the chief take-away from all this talk about Other People’s Money is that rather than saying to yourself “I can’t afford to start a business” or “I don’t have the money to invest in that deal” you now know there are no real excuses or limitations. Not that using Other People’s Money is without its pitfalls. Like every financial transaction there are inherent risks. Firstly, you are liable to repay the capital borrowed and generally provide an agreed additional return to the investor. However, that’s not up for discussion here. The key thing for now is to realize that you can always get access to Other People’s Money to enable you participate in deals and do things you previously thought weren’t possible. You can start jumping through the window of opportunity when it’s open…and as you begin implementing this principle of Other People’s Money into your business and personal wealth building endeavors you begin to realize its open all the time!

List Building, Lead Generation and Email Marketing

Email leads are definitely one of the cheapest ways in generating ROI (Return of Investment). It helps you gain from interested prospects through effective marketing strategies.

Email leads can help generate sales leads through email marketing. By building a list of people’s contact details, you can give them more information and updates about your products and services. So by the time they are ready to make that purchase, they would know how to reach your site again. This means, you need to send them email messages just so you can convince them to making a purchase.

Email marketing is without a doubt the most effect method used by business owners and Internet marketers. It offers an efficient way of sending niche messages as well as broadcast to possible clients.

There are a lot of advantages you can get from email marketing. First and foremost, sending email messages are a lot cheaper as compared to print media. All you need is a computer and a reliable Internet connection. Second, it offers a shorter time of delivery. As a matter of fact, you can send email messages in a matter of seconds. Third, it has a wide user base. These days, who still doesn’t have an email address?

Of course, if there are advantages, there are also disadvantages. One disadvantage would be the fact that there is a tendency to be regarded as SPAM. Don’t worry; there are now ways to resolve that issue. You can consider double opt-ins. With double opt-ins, after your visitor finishes filling up the opt-in form he or she will be asked to verify his email address through an automatic email you will send to him or her. If this is the case, you would need to set up an autoresponder too.

List building and email marketing are just the first two important steps to the buying cycle. To succeed in the two, you may need to consider an effective email leads campaign. To do this, you need to initially identify your target and the messages you will use in order to achieve ROI. Hence, even a single email for as long as it is dynamic and it can grab attention is enough to lead you to the right path.

You can also try buying leads. Just make sure you can buy qualified leads. Keep in mind that these leads can vary greatly when it comes to quality.

The third important step would be sending email messages to your subscribers. With a powerful email script, you can convert your subscribers into buying customers.

Building Your Brand Through Forums and Online Groups

Let’s talk about forums and online groups. People talk all the time about how difficult it is in forums and online groups. I don’t get it, I’ve gotten some of my best traffic in the world from Forums, and I’ve had clients that have done amazing well with Forums. Yes, it’s mindless work. Yes, it’s a matter of finding the right post to respond to. Yes, it’s a matter of becoming a trusted poster so that you can put a squeeze page in your signatures. No, that’s not easy. Yes, it takes 2 to 3 months to do. And if you’re not willing to invest 2, 3 months in building a source of great traffic, then Forums and Communities are not for you.

You’re posting great content with a few videos, and you’re posting in a forum or community. Now layer on interviews. Where do I get interviews? Here’s the thing, if you write enough articles, people will ask you to be interviewed. I get interview requests a lot. I turn most of them down, because I just don’t have the time anymore. In fact, I wish that I had found a way to do them all, I really do. But, if all I did was interviews, I couldn’t create trainings like this. I couldn’t do all the other things that I hope add value to the world. If when you’re starting out, you write a few hundred articles and put them on your website, and you write a few hundred more, and you get them posted here and there, and you start ranking in Lifehack, and you start ranking in the websites in your niche, and you start ranking in the forums… I can almost guarantee you’ll get interview requests.

You may say, how do I figure out if it’s a good interview or not? Do them all! Do them all until you’re overwhelmed! Then we’ll talk about when to cut back. And then you start noticing things, cut back. Here’s what you do, when somebody interviews you, you’re going to post that interview. The first thing you do when someone asks you to interview is, you ask, “can I have the right to record it as well, and use it in my marketing the same way you’re going to use it in yours?” They’ll almost always say yes, and if they say no, say no thank you. Unless it’s obviously somewhere you’re setting out to be interviewed by.

When they interview you, you record it as well, and you put it on your website as the interview by so and so. It creates instant credibility for you and you share it on Facebook, you share it on G+, and you get instant credibility. And when 50 different people over the next year interviewed you, and all of those are showing up on the front page of your website, and they’re starting to show up in Google, what’s going to happen? You’re going to have instant credibility.

Before we go any further, I’m going to touch on about three more things that I want to give you. Some of you are still asking, where’s the 1-2-3 formula? THERE ISN’T ONE!

Hopefully by now you’ve got this idea that you’ve got to know what your website is going to look like, you’ve got to know how you’re going to change the world, and you’ve got to start changing the world right there on your website, and then tell everybody that you know about it.

One thing I’ve talked about in the past is, you’ve got a list of 100 Facebook friends. And most of you probably have 100 Facebook friends. You should be able to post a post on your Facebook page that says, “hey, as you know I’ve been working on starting my own business, and I’ve started one. How to create a scrapbook is my new business, and I know you’re probably not interested in scrapbooks, but could you please tell everybody you know that might be interested in scrapbooks?” Here’s the thing, if anybody unfriends you, because you spammed them on Facebook, because you told your friends about your personal pet project. Do you REALLY want to be Facebook friends with that person?

If you’re scared to tell your friends about your business, maybe you need to create a business that your friends would like. Or maybe you need to reevaluate some of your friends. I’m serious! Your friends should be the #1 people that are supporting you. You say, “well, so and so doesn’t support me,” maybe you just need to unfriend them for 3 months. I don’t know what the answer is, I don’t know all the social etiquette rules, I don’t know if you unfriend somebody that your kid goes to school with and they won’t speak to you anymore, and your kids can’t play together. I don’t know how all that stuff works. You’re going to have to figure that out on your end, I’m not a relationship expert.

What I’m saying is, if somebody dislikes the business that you’re building so much that they want to unfriend you? I question their friendliness.

I believe you should be able to tell everybody. I believe that you should be able to go get a business card made up that all it has on it is your website name, and your logo.

And any time you meet people in the grocery store, and you’re talking, and you say “hey, what do you do,” and they tell you, and they ask you what you do, you pull out your card and you say, “I run this website.” Doesn’t make any difference if you started 3 days ago, you run that scrapbooking website, right? Great, “I run this website, and let me ask you this, do you know anybody that’s interested in scrapbooking? Here’s another card.” You may not want to be that aggressive, but I’m just trying to give you the point, you can do this offline as well. This should not be some secret project that you have online. Do you think that Dropbox was a secret project? Do you think that Taskrabbit was a secret project? Is Google a secret project? Is Facebook a secret project. Is Business Insider a secret project?

NO! They’re not secret projects, they’re social projects!

When you take your website and allow it to become a social project, you’ll find that amazing things are going to happen.