How To Make Your First Million Dollars

How To Make Your First Million Dollars


Making your first million dollars is no longer impossible to attain. With the help of those who have been there and succeeded in their line of business, making a million dollars may now be easier to achieve than in the past years or generations.

For some, sheer luck is one of the factors that can make it happen. But for the great majority of successful businesses, they attribute success in making their first million dollars to hard work, dedication and commitment. Every business has its own start-up story. Some take advice from other successful entrepreneurs. But you should caution yourself about what can apply to your business and what won’t work because your business is unique from the others.

Some of the successful businessmen who started their business small and progressed into being big names in the industry share helpful tips to help you make your first million dollars.

Tom Ball: Analyze Failure Before Starting Again

Tom Ball used to operate a successful agency as his first business. But the horrific 9/11 wiped everything due to cancelled projects. A week before his wedding day, his business collapsed and he thought he couldn’t recover and get up again. He looked back and analyzed why his business failed and realized that he spent too much on flashy office space. That led him to creating NearDesk at a time when he wasn’t sure how people would receive his new business. Lucky for him, he discovered that people respectful of people who try their hardest yet failed the first time and for NearDesk Tom Ball got over 500 investors or $1.6M through crowdsourcing.

Tony Pierce: Build Scalable Business

Tony Pierce is an entrepreneur who recognizes that running a start-up is never easy. It will make you work 18 hours or more per day, sacrifice weekends, give your blood, sweat and tears. As an entrepreneur, Tony Pierce advises that the best way to approach the prospect of running a business is to make sure that you find the gap, fill that gap and stand out from the rest. You can’t do what others have already done or been doing. That’s a losing proposition. Whatever business line you want to get into, you have to be sure you enjoy it. If you are able to withstand all the stresses and pressures that go with running a business, then you know you’re headed to the right path of making your first million dollars. By building a successful and scalable business, you know that you have prepared a safe exit.  

Sarah Wood: Don’t be Afraid to make Decisions

She co-founded Unruly – a marketing technology company but before that she sought advice from her co-founder Scott Button and was told that “advice is overrated”. She thought about it and realized that she should not be afraid to take the big decisions and not rely on others to make the decisions for her. According to Sarah Wood, it’s good to hear from other entrepreneurs’ experiences that led to their success or failure but should understand that those experiences are unique to their businesses – their value systems, their circumstances, their priorities – not yours. In the end, you will have to decide what applies to your business and circumstances.  

Or Arbel: Do What You Believe In

He founded the instant messaging app “Yo” and recently raised seed funding amounting to $1M. His piece of advice? Go for your idea if you believe in it. The idea may give you good or bad results. The important thing is to recognize that if your idea failed, you should take steps to rectify it. Some people succeed with small ideas because they took the courage to go ahead and execute that small idea.

Leah Busque: Find Out What Other People Think About Your Ideas

She founded an outsourcing company “TaskRabbit”. She advices you should make your ideas known to others because that is how you can get a feel of how other people think about your ideas. Unfortunately, many people are not likely to broadcast their business ideas for fear of others stealing the ideas. So their ideas never got to be discussed – if viable, or doable, or cost-effective or realistic. If you decide to execute your ideas without getting other people’s opinion and you failed, you may have prevented failure if you heard from another entrepreneur who had ventured in the same business idea. Also critical to achieving success for your business is loving what you do. This is enough drive and motivation to succeed.  

Robert Jacobi: Seize Opportunity That Presents Itself

He is the managing director of Metcalf’s Food Company and he said that you should not miss out on any opportunity that comes your way. You should follow your instinct and give it a go if you believe that a product is good. You shouldn’t be embarrassed to seek advice from others. It may or may not help you. But with the advice you receive you are presented with another point of view which you might have failed to consider because you are thinking alone.

Duncan Jennings: Offer What’s Better Than Others

Duncan Jennings is VoucherCodes.co.uk CEO. His advice? In business you should be prepared for competition because it’s part of having a business. In order to survive competition, you should make sure that your business is offering products or services which are top rate and better than others. You should also make your company different from the others by creating an amazing company culture where employees work hard to achieve goals and in return are taken care of well by the company. Once the industry knows about this, your company stock value is sure to hit a spike.

So are you ready to make your first million dollars?

Photo credit to: Newslok


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