$1,000,000

My aim is to gain a net worth of at least $1,000,000 by my birthday in 2011.

This figure is something that many people will only ever dream of… But I want it to be my personal net worth by the my birthday on March 5th 2011.

So how am I going to do it? What am I going to do to make $1m by next year?

Here’s my plan…

Step 1 – Focus On Assets

Not many people will tell you this but assets are the key to wealth and fortune. This is something that has taken me a long time to pick up and has cost me dearly in 2008 and 2009… but I now know that asset building is the key to success financially.

An ‘asset’ is something that you own or have control over which is worth something to someone else. No matter how small or how large that thing is, if it’s worth something to someone, it’s an asset that you can cash in for at a later day. Assets are the ’secret sauce’ behind most billionaire’s fortunes and is where most newbies (including me) slip up.

I am going to focus entirely on building and developing assets this year, and instead of deciding to “sell” a site or business, I am going to devote myself to growing it as much as I can to earn the most from it. There’s  a saying I have which is “Momentum makes money”, meaning that the more momentum you have with a business, the more profit it’s going to make you. In terms of my plan, this means that instead of building 100 shitty review sites and then getting cold feet and selling them, I’m going to focus on building 10 good sites in a market and then leveraging them to build a more substantial business from.

That way, I will have a series of assets that could be sold if I need to, and also have a ay to progress my business in that market. It’s a win-win situation which requires discipline, motivation and focus. I’ve already got a series of nice assets in several markets so this is coming along well.

Step 2 – Always Look To Scale

There’s a book I was reading called the “Secrets Of The Millionaire Mind” in which T. Harv Eker explains how the most successful people didn’t get there by chance. They knew that they wanted to grow a big business and so that’s what they did. I always remember a quote of his:

When I was starting my fitness retail stores, my nearest competitor started 6 months after me. She did well and made a good living with her one store. I eventually opened 100 stores and got rich ~ T.Harv Eker

This shows me that you should be always looking to scale, and is what I plan to do for my goal this year. Instead of building one small site and earning $30 a day from it, my goal is to build more of those sites and eventually leverage them to make an even more profitable business out of it.

Step 3- Only Focus On The Bigger Picture

I’m a big sucker for this – getting so tied up in the day-to-day runnings of your company that you forget about the bigger picture.

It’s easy to get disheartened or down-beat if you don’t do well one day, or you have a streak of poor performances… but the trick is to not think about it like that. A big mistake I was making up to just a couple of months ago was that I used to only focus on the daily profits of my sites. I remember I owned several FX sites that were doing a bout 3 sales a week each. Now, saying it now that they earned 3 sales a week is good… but from my perspective at the time, I only saw them bringing in a relatively small number of daily sales, which made me think they were dead in the water.

I got so frustrated with those sites and decided to try and sell them whilst there was still life in them. Looking at it now, this was a crazy position to take, but it’s one that I made and I cannot change it now. As it happens, I was able to sell those sites for a nice sum, but I learnt that you need to focus on the bigger picture in order to keep yourself sane and motivated. A good way that I’m going to be doing this is to focus mainly on the monthly profits of my sites. That way, I’ll know if they are doing well and what kinds of trends they are giving me.

Step 4- Keep A Healthy & Positive Mindset

I’ve been reading all about mindset in these past few months, and have discovered that the power of the mind is just as important as the skills you posses in business. If you think to yourself that you are able and willing to create a $1million business, then you’ll eventually find a way to do that. However if you are constant residing to thinking that you’re not worth anything more than $100 then you’ll take the actions that will lead to that.

I have learnt that business is mostly about keeping a positive mindset and that in order to keep your company moving forward, you need to focus on both sides of the story and keep yourself from getting bogged down with emotion. Here’s a quite I like to use:

There are always two sides to the story

This means that even if you lose all your money, assets and wind up living on your parents’ couch, you’ve still learnt lessons and got vital knowlege. There’s NEVER a story that does not have two sides, and it’s your job as an entrepreneur to find and relate to only the side that’s going to help you. A good example is the recession… many people were brainwashed into thinking that it’s going to mean the end of America and everything… but in actual fact many businesses turned massive profits because they looked at the other side of the story.

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So that’s the general outline of my plan. What I’ll do in terms of business-building, I’ll detail in some posts this week.