Are rich people and entrepreneurs really innovative or do most just buy assets and give good service? HELP?
PLEASE READ I AM DOING A STUDY ON THIS :]
You know I have always read in magazines and on TV that rich people and entrepreneurs like Bill Gates were always industrious and innovative etc. etc. In my own life however most the rich people that I know like Millionaires didn’t really do or create any genius product, rather they saved and bought assets that produce automatic income in a smart like (like stocks) and they started businesses that were very common but used simple philosophies to running them. As an example they buy hotels. There is absolutely nothing really genius about owning a hotel but it still makes one of the people I know over 100,000 thousand a year on top of the other businesses he owns. Sure he gives good service and the the place is clean. So what is the secret to success ? Does it lean more toward thinking of brilliant new product ideas: or simply investing buy assets and making business work because you provide service etc. using the Hotel example?
http://blogs.jobdig.com/diggings/2008/08/28/there-are-few-secrets-to-business-success/
If being in business was easy we would all be doing it. It is not that they are necessarily smarter or work harder but they have taken the leap, the risk to fail. A good idea helps. So does being good dealing with people. Having a thick skin, common sense, and tons of perserverence is essential. It is so much easier to work for those people and whine about things. They have no one to whine to.
Conrad Hilton was one of the first people to come up with the idea of hotels, as we know them. There are hardly any barriers to entry in the hotel/motel business except cost. Many other people saw that was a good idea and did the same thing, Others copy it. Competition enters the market. The market becomes saturated; hotels get overbuilt. Profits decline. Then you need new ideas to keep that business going, or an idea for a new business. It all starts with an idea and innovation, and new ideas and innovation keep it going. Its hard to keep making money, for very long, in a business if you just carbon copy somebody else
Some people are actually innovators (Bill Gates, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford), but many of the most famous people today are simply cutthroat businessmen. Look at Robert Kiyosaki, his only product is basically selling generic success formulae in both book and seminar form. Before that he did real estate and velcro wallets, big deal. Donald Trump has many properties, most of them are bankrupt, he basically wheels and deals his way around the finer points of the law to amass an financial empire. Not much innovation involved, just being louder and more confident than the rest.
There is a huge difference between becoming a millionaire and becoming a multi-billionaire like Bill Gates. Having a million dollars net worth only puts you in upper-middle class. Many people can reach this level of wealth through normal careers and reasonable investments. To reach a billion dollars of net worth is considerably rarer and more difficult. Most of the people who have reached that level have done so through entrepreneurial risk-taking and have succeed through inventiveness, hard work, and luck.