Wealth Building 101: Your Own vs Someone Else’s

You could go about building wealth for yourself in several different ways: real estate, the stock market, investing in some other kind of lucrative money-making endeavour, inventing something, working diligently for decades while scrimping and saving your money.

These are all valid ways of making money, getting yourself set for retirement and establishing solid footing for your dreams and goals. However, real estate is expensive to get into and if you’re not adept at fixing houses up and flipping them or renting them out, it can be difficult to make money in.

Stocks are always a gamble and they are usually a rich person’s game. If you have mutual funds, those are good for long term investing, but you are hardly going to become wealthy from them. Even if you’re an inventor, coming up with something so revolutionary that it is capable of making a lot of money is difficult and other types of money-making ventures are hit and miss at best.

And then there is the scrimping and saving.

Many of you reading this are probably in a situation where you are working at a corporation making an hourly wage or an annual salary. You put a little away regularly, and that is good, but it’s not building wealth, at least not for yourself. It’s merely saving money.

When you work for someone else, the fact is that you are building wealth for them, not for you. If you work for a private company, you are helping to build wealth for the owner and a few key people at the top. If it’s a public company, it’s the investors and a handful of people at the top of the company.

If you want to truly build wealth for yourself, you have to have something that you can invest in that will turn the money you’ve invested into profit. And, as stated above, that could be real estate or stocks or something else, but we suggest you invest your money in a business.

Why a business?

Unlike an investing vehicle like stocks, a business is something that you have direct control over. You can’t control everything when it comes to a business, but you can control how much effort you put into it. If you put your utmost effort into running your business, you can have a direct impact on how well it does.

A business is also yours. You own it fully and completely. It’s not just a tiny piece of some bigger thing that you own along with thousands of other people like a stock. And, unlike a piece of real estate, you don’t have to turn it over to someone else (via renting or selling) in order for it to make money. You get to keep it while it makes money for you. If you choose, you can step away from the running of the business and have it be a passive income generator for you.

There is a great sense of pride when you are able to build a business and make it successful. You are building wealth for yourself.

But, starting a business does involve a hefty investment and it does come with inherent risk, and not a small amount of risk at that. Thousands of small businesses are started and shut down each year in Canada. Some are done in by poor cash flow management, some by inexperience of the owners, others because people just weren’t prepared for the amount of work they required and some due to markets drying up.

With that amount of inherent risk involved in starting and running a small business, it can be daunting to get started. And that’s where franchising comes in.

Why join a franchise?

When you join a franchise, your initial investment goes toward buying into an already established brand with an already proven business model, mitigating much of the risk of starting a small business.

You will get all the benefits of the experience and training the franchise offers and you’ll also get marketing materials, possibly some administrative assistance and business coaching that will help you succeed.

Once you buy in, get established and start turning a profit, you will be building wealth for yourself and giving other people opportunities to make a living by the jobs you create.

Now, the only question is, what are you going to do with the wealth you build for yourself?

FranNet can’t help you answer that question, but one question we can help you with is what franchise to join. Sign up for a free FranNet franchise search and consultation today and let us help you on your way to business ownership and wealth building.

Jun 7, 2018