Historically, there haven't been that many ways of acquiring wealth.
There are other ways including manufacturing & industrials, food, automotive, bio-tech & healthcare, media & entertainment, but by-and-large investments (if you count real estate) make up 35-40%, tech makes up 15-20%, inheritance is roughly 30%, so the other ones make up the remaining 10-15% scraps.
However, recently, there has been another emerging category: self-funded non-tech entrepreneur from day 1. They may raise money based on experience, reputation & brand, not so much that they've worked in corporate for 20 years.
Let's focus on this path because I generally think this is accessible to most people. Maybe you can't get to $15-20BN with it, although there's no physics law that says you cannot. But, it certainly gives you the most autonomy for the least amount of work.
You have a new wave of entrepreneurs that are typically non-technical & non-financially savvy in a 20yr corporate DCF excel monkey kind of way. They also aren't real estate and property moguls. They typically started as technical people who weren't quants. Alternatively, they were business people that had some agency and didn't want to spend their whole life in a cubicle, being an associate till age 29.
There are many entrepreneurs emerging here: Nick Huber, Alex Hormozi, Sierra Kozinsky, Codie Sanchez, Andrew Wilkinson, Brent Beshore, Peter Kang, Jeremy Giffon, Jess Mah. There are probably others I'm forgetting, or don't know about.
Essentially, the playbook most of them used is to build either a) a personal brand based on past experience b) a boring service-based business or c) raise a small search fund and compound from there. You then can use excess cashflows to buy new businesses that compound profits at higher % YOY than investing back into the existing business. Here, you can get creative & if you have good investing track-record, you can raise money from LPs to invest from the fund back into new businesses. You can also maintain total control & just use consulting fees, excess profits.
In terms of leverage, they essentially use a combination of media, capital & labour rather than pure technology, capital or media. They typically attract deal-flow better than the average boutique PE/holding company because entrepreneurs place them in higher authority, meaning they're more likely to trust them with their business.
Huber → Self-storage units for 10 years & $5M-ish business → twitter brand with 400k followers → excess profits into other businesses & book
Hormozi → consultant → gyms → sold GymLaunch for $46.2m with coaching as well → built media brand with 10m followers across platforms → consulting fee of $50k to examine business & invests capital & ops advisory team for 20-70% equity
Sierra → tech-business → search-fund into hold-co of 30 companies
Codie Sanchez → banker → media brand → hold-co of boring businesses like dry cleaners → VC investor as well
Wilkinson → MetaLab printing $20M profits → investing in small SAAS businesses → IPO'd
Beshore → ads agency → buys recruitment firm with seller financing → raises $50M fund → raises $350M fund with 40 year time horizon not typical 8 year vesting cycle in PE
Kang → web-agency → buying other boutique agencies doing $1-3M EBITDA
Giffon → employee at startup → investor at Tiny → raised $60M for his own fund
Mah → tech-enabled accounting startup worth $70M → profits into other ventures (mainly startups) & acts as ideas person with cash
Different journeys. But, a common through-line of running somewhat of a boring business for generally long-periods of time. Then, having cash usually via previous ventures or a small fund to buy boring businesses & continue compounding cash-flow. These businesses on a long-enough time horizon become like Berkshire. Basically, all the money is made in the last 10-20 years of the business provided they have competent owners; the nature of how wealth compounds if you invest wisely. Past a certain point, it becomes difficult to beat the S&P. But, over 40 year time horizons (Hormozi being 75), it's unimaginable that his net worth would be any less than $10BN given his starting position today.
Ultimately, starting with your own services business is the ultimate mix of low-risk ratio, compounding capital, agency & autonomy over what you do everyday and ability to tone up/down the growth of the business against your lifestyle at your own discretion. Plus, generally the people competing in service-based businesses are lower-iq and less business-savvy meaning it is a less competitive market.
Most people see ownership of businesses akin to how Paddy & I see technology businesses. But that isn't the case. Tech businesses are founders of something net-new. The world is a pretty smart place, with a high-volume of ambitious people. Therefore, to create something net-new that has not been done before requires some luck in terms of timing, very capable & competent individuals and a unique thesis/insight about the world. Very few can do this & hence idea-risk businesses fail 95% of the time. Sub 1% of funded startups become unicorns.
Most normal people extend this risk to "normal" business owners. It's "risky" to run healthcare clinics, auto-shops, home-service businesses, marketing agencies, recruitment firms, accounting firms, IT-service firms. Other people are running successful variations of these exact business models. They usually offer a service that other people in the marketplace are already paying for & therefore, it is accessible to anybody who wants to find the model and continually optimise it over time.
Basically, you get good at some service, buy employees who are already good or pay for a small business who has these employees. Then, you tell people about your stuff through content, ads, outreach or affiliates. You deliver the service, try to make them keep paying you every month for as long as possible. That's literally 80% of businesses in the economy (service-based).
It's true that some are harder. Because IT-services mainly does custom development & cloud migration for enterprises, it is a harder business to scale quickly because the only people that will buy are enterprises who want trusted vendors. Compare this to a marketing agency that can cold-call 200 people and sell a $5k website off-rip to an SMB. Restaurants are low-margin. IT-service is fairly high margin.
But ultimately there is a $100M business like yours out there. One caveat being that market conditions change so just because KlientBoost can sell for $40M in 8 years doing Google Ads for Mid-Market doesn't mean you'll be able to because they started in the boom of google ads, cemented authority in a time of low supply in the market. Nevertheless, people still buy google ads today & will pay someone to manage them for them (Jamie — Umped).
Worst case scenario is you work on say a website design firm for 5 years, it ends up turning-over $3-5m revenue per year for 3 years, you live frugally and save $400-500k per year from owner earnings. If the website design market suddenly collapses, people stop using websites because ChatGPT becomes the sole interface, SMBs can also build quality websites using AI. Then, you have all these savings that you can invest into buying another business, say a small home-services/construction business and then scale that.
There's some part of me that thinks I'm stupid for pursuing tech. In 12 months, I found a formula to skip university, have a chance of pursuing generational wealth through compounding capital & foregoing that. Nevertheless, finding this cemented that i'd never pursue finance.
The historical PE model of working at an IB for 15 years or some PE firm for 10-15 years going through 1-2 vesting cycles, and then raising your own fund at 36-40 is not favourable anymore. The idea that you forego 20 waking years for the potential of raising a fund which is still permissioned leverage seems outdated. Even if it can generate better outsized returns for hedge-fund dudes & PE dudes than scaling your own capital, the trade-off is enormous.
Essentially, the tradeoff is illogical because:
The difference in wealth does not have any meaningful impact on your living standards. If you run service-based businesses well, diversify with real-estate or different businesses like healthcare clinics, auto-shops etc & are reasonably intelligent (110+ IQ), you can reach a net worth of $100M & do that comfortably by 45-50 years old. And, let's say your counterpart finance bro raises $500M fund and nets $1BN net worth at 60ish (given most finance bros get from $1BN to $10BN after 60). The difference is 10x in wealth. But, not 10x in living standards. At $100M net worth, you can raise as many kids as you want basically in a $20M home on the water. You can fly private. You can have $200k holidays every year.
The only difference is billionaires can buy $50m yachts, buy $50m planes when you may need to charter them/rent them. They can buy $50-100m houses & be extravagant with their purchases.
Is that worth 10-15 years of 100 hour work weeks at Goldman Sachs & having zero autonomy over your day? For most people, I would be very skeptical if they said yes.
It's not exactly status. Unless you build personal brand like Hormozi, you probably will not accrue as much "normie" status as an MD at Goldman or JP Morgan. But, if you're vying for that, you'll probably have a tough time being happy anyway.
In terms of the actual business model, service-based businesses rely on good talent. they require scaling with people. therefore,
My take is that people that can maximise full-funnels with quantifiable ROI — their content as a marketer performs 10x better than the average website design dude without proof
Through content — you want to command authority. Peter Kang commands authority to other agency owners because he has ran many successful agencies himself. to big numbers & he has LESS authority than others. Fazio makes $1.6mUSD per month revenue, probs $300k/profit per month — that commands authority. Hormozi has sold gymlaunch & prestige for $70M AUD in 5 yrs. and ALAN for $30-40M USD. my guess bc churn was high.
Therefore — the numbers you are showing are generally the difference between whether you can command authority or not.