Identifying High-Income Skills for Future Wealth Creation
How possible is it you are wasting your time learning skills that will have no value in the future? Extremely. The CEO of a $250 million business in the US is hiring people with high school diplomas to make six figures and firing people with fancy degrees whose skills have nothing to do with how the world is moving. So, here are the five high-income skills anyone can learn to build wealth. Thinking about high income skills is all about sales. One of the richest people on the planet is a guy named Steve Balmer, who was the CEO of Microsoft many years following Bill Gates.
Learning Sales from Success Stories and Local Businesses
The ironic thing is Steve Balmer did not come from the technical aspect of the company. He was a sales guy. One of the best places to build your sales skills is in a local business. So, think about teeth whitening businesses. They’ve been popping up everywhere. Ultimately, this comes down to sales. People may be interested in getting their teeth whitened, but they may be a little concerned or they may not know exactly what to expect or how this is going to make their life better. And ultimately, it’s the job of the salesperson of that local business to articulate the value that they can bring in a way that customers are likely to resonate and ultimately choose to do business with them rather than the competition. Think about niche consulting services. Learn More
Maximizing Earnings through Strategic Sales Approaches
Launching AI Marketing Services for Modern Companies
One of the business models that is absolutely great for young entrepreneurs is to go out, learn a skill, and then sell that skill to companies or people that need that skill. Right now, AI is all the rage. Every company is looking for ways to be able to implement AI into their business. So, one idea might be to go out and learn how to do marketing with AI tools and then start to sell those services to companies that need those marketing services. So, let’s say you’re earning commission. Would you rather earn commission every time you close a $100 sale, or would you rather earn commission every time you close a $10,000 sale? Which one is likely to make you more money? Often times, you’re going to find it takes just as much time, ironically, to close low ticket items as it does high ticket sales.
Focusing Energy on High Ticket Sales for Better Margins
High ticket sales oftentimes come with higher margin which means more money as a salesperson. For a young person looking to get started, maybe wanting to become an entrepreneur but needing to build skills first, the move is to go out and figure out a local business where you can cut your teeth learning to do sales for high ticket items. This could be an HVAC business. This could be a teeth whitening business. It could be a consulting business. Any of these could be great places to learn sales skills while somebody else is paying you to do it.
Mastering Search Engine Optimization in the Modern Era
The Lucreative Potential of Search Engine Optimization
SEO used to be a fringe industry. It oftentimes gets a bad rap, but SEO can be extremely lucrative. People have made millions of dollars doing SEO, both the white hat way and the black hat way, over the years. But there’s a problem. The elephant in the room that everyone in the SEO community is talking about is how to do SEO in the age of generative AI. AI search engines are going to be the key for SEO in the future. If you’re looking for where SEO is going, the focus needs to be on AI search engines and how they’re going to evolve. So, here’s a checklist for the elements to think about when doing SEO in the AI search engine era. First, you’ve got to be writing for the human that’s behind the query.
Essential Strategies for Future Proofing SEO Content
But at the same time, you’ve got to be anticipating how the AI is going to interpret, summarize, and repackage your content. Step number two is thinking about structured data, things like FAQs and clear headings so that search engines and generative AI can easily scrape your writing. Next, you need to be embracing topical depth. AI is going to reward layered original thinking. So, you’ve got to answer the question that’s being asked, but then you also have to prove that you have the depth that’s backing up the reason that you answered in that way. Last, you need to be updating your content ruthlessly. What worked last month might be obsolete tomorrow. Gone are the days where you can just write an article and forget about it and expect it to give you web traffic for the rest of your life.
Maintaining Topical Depth and Updating Content Ruthlessly
You’ve really got to own your industry. You’ve got to really own your expertise. And you’ve got to go deep more than wide. You want to make sure that you’re constantly updating, refreshing your content, making sure that you remain the most up to date source for whatever topic it is that you’re writing about. Fun fact, the most common college major in the US is business. The average person graduating in business earns about $60,000 a year, but the average amount of debt someone takes out to get that degree is $29,000. Is that really a good value? Just to put it into perspective, if you were to take one of the free courses from Meta, TikTok, or Google on ad strategy, you could scale an agency that brings in $50 to $100,000 a year in no time.
Alternative Education and Digital Marketing Opportunities
Building a Digital Ad Agency with Free Education
The reality is it costs nothing to educate yourself in this area. Because Meta, TikTok, and Google are all incentivized for people to spend more money on ads on their platform, they are going to give you all the information that you need for free to learn how to use that platform effectively. The task is to go out, study it, learn how to do it, then take that skill set, find businesses that need that skill set, and help them grow their business. That’s the trade. A college degree is not required to do that. It can literally be done for free. The key is going to be in the creativity. The creativity is the differentiating factor in being able to build something that people actually want versus not.
Using Creativity as a Differentiator in Business
You no longer have to have the hard skills of being able to do the programming yourself or being able to do the math or the science yourself. You just have to have the creativity for the idea and then use AI as your workforce or as your thought partner to figure out the details of how to make it happen. The next generation of millionaires are going to be people who go out into the real world and get their hands dirty. The average plumber in the US makes about $60,000 a year. A college degree is not required to become a plumber. So, why don’t we talk about this work more? Why don’t we encourage more people to go into the trades?
Building Wealth through Service Businesses and Skilled Trades
Finding Multi-Million Dollar Opportunities in Skilled Trades
There are lots of trades like this. HVAC technician, welder, dock worker, so many trades that ultimately can provide very stable incomes without going into debt and without a college degree. But what if $60,000 isn’t enough? Well, there are strategies to build a plumbing business into a multi-million dollar opportunity. When thinking about building skills in the trades, there are three main things to consider. First, is this work future-proofed in the age of AI? The last thing you want to do is spend a few years really building a skill that ultimately is just going to become obsolete. Being very honest about what is likely to remain and what is likely to be needed is extremely important. Building people skills, the ability to sell.
Importance of People Skills and Sustainable Business Systems
The ability to relate to people, the ability to manage people is ultimately going to be a huge differentiator in the ability to be a successful trades person. Do not underestimate the importance of those soft skills. Make sure to focus on them, work with them, build on them. Third, where does real wealth come from in the service business? Ultimately, real wealth in any business comes around building sustainable systems. At the end of the day, a business is just a set of systems that when done repeatedly will get you a consistent result every time. Two years ago, Filterby decided to get into the HVAC service business, called Filterby HVAC Solutions, partnering with someone with experience at Goldman who was willing to go all in on understanding the HVAC trade.
Scaling Successful Operations in the HVAC Service Industry
He decided he was willing to go all in on understanding the HVAC trade, getting his hands dirty to understand really what it takes to be successful in the HVAC business. The beauty of the HVAC service business is it’s not super capital intensive and has high gross margins, which means that you can scale without having a lot of cash. And that’s one thing that needs to be considered when going into any business what are going to be the cash flow dynamics as it scales. For anyone wanting to start and be successful in the HVAC business, the advice would be to go out and work in the industry first. Get trained and work in an existing business, observe it, and then ultimately figure out how to move forward in that industry, how to build a version of that business.
A Comprehensive Playbook for Becoming a Modern Millionaire
Developing Industry Expertise and Outlining the Business
how to make it more successful. First, you have to know the industry that you’re going after. It started with the air filter industry. Doesn’t have to be super sexy, but ultimately understanding the industry that you want to go after is extremely important. Going out and becoming an expert in that as quickly as possible is essential. If you want to become a multi millionaire or more, then here is what needs to happen. Step number one is creating a process. Think through every aspect of the business. What products and services are you going to offer? How much are you going to charge?
Creating Processes and Outlining Your Business Plan
How are you going to collect that money? What are your expenses going to be? Outline the business from start to finish. Then create a go-forward plan for how to execute on that. Step number two is hiring a team you trust. Once the process is outlined, the next step is figuring out how to fill in the pieces of that process, and ultimately that’s going to come with hiring people you trust. For a small startup just getting started, if someone who’s worked in a thousand-person HVAC company comes along, it’s worth being a little careful. They may be very good, come with a lot of recommendations, a lot of experience, but they’re used to working in a business that has a lot of resources.
Prioritizing Culture Fit and Finding Complementary Skill Sets
Has a lot of money, has a lot of people already that exist. They may not be the best fit in a startup company even if they have a ton of experience. Culture fit is extremely important. Hiring for the culture you want to build and for people that are comfortable working in whatever type of environment you’re looking to foster is key. The second piece is skill set. Finding somebody that’s really good at the nitty gritty, at the financials and the details that you do not necessarily possess, is important. Make sure to look for people that bring skills that fit with your culture, but also bring skills to the table that you do not have. Last, thinking about sales and marketing is critical. While you can hire for this.
Combining Traditional Trades with High Value Digital Marketing
Ultimately you’re going to need to hire for it, the entrepreneur needs to be the number one salesperson, but marketing is letting people know that you exist in the first place. And this is where high value skills like SEO and social media marketing come in. This is why the intersection of skills matters so much. Being great at HVAC and also great at social media marketing the combination of that is super potent, super powerful. That’s why building these high value skills is so important. But if they can be combined with a trade, that’s where the magic really can happen. Read More
