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Smart people wanted: 10X income in 5 years, how would you do it?

Anything considered a "hustle" and not necessarily a CENTS-based Fastlane

Constantine$

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Hi Fastlaners,

How would you 10X your income within 5 years?

A little context, I live in The Netherlands and I'm fortunate enough to be earning double the national average salary, making €4,000 after tax monthly.

After my expenses, savings and ETF investments I have about €1,500 left each month.

Don't want to be a corporate slave forever though, so I've set the ambitious goal of making 10X my income within 5 years, anyway I can.

If this was you, how would you do it?

Additional context:
- Population/max market size in the Netherlands is just 17 million (1/20th of the US).
- Amazon is not populair here.
- Legal and tax difficulties with opening a US LLC.
- I have a 9-5 job and a newborn, so mornings, evenings and weekends only for now.
- Saving to buy a home, so business opportunities up to 10K max startup costs only.
- Masters degree in business. Work in sales.
- No specialized skills (yet) like coding, legal, medical, or home renovation.



Ps: I'm asking out of self interest of course, but I believe the wisdom of the crowd could help a lot of people here in similar situations.

Appreciate you all!
 
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jdm667

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Hi Fastlaners,

How would you 10X your income within 5 years?

A little context, I live in The Netherlands and I'm fortunate enough to be earning double the national average salary, making €4,000 after tax monthly.

After my expenses, savings and ETF investments I have about €1,500 left each month.

Don't want to be a corporate slave forever though, so I've set the ambitious goal of making 10X my income within 5 years, anyway I can.

If this was you, how would you do it?

Additional context:
- Population/max market size in the Netherlands is just 17 million (1/20th of the US).
- Amazon is not populair here.
- Legal and tax difficulties with opening a US LLC.
- I have a 9-5 job and a newborn, so mornings, evenings and weekends only for now.
- Saving to buy a home, so business opportunities up to 10K max startup costs only.
- Masters degree in business. Work in sales.
- No specialized skills (yet) like coding, legal, medical, or home renovation.



Ps: I'm asking out of self interest of course, but I believe the wisdom of the crowd could help a lot of people here in similar situations.

Appreciate you all!
A master's in business and you work in sales ... the first thing that comes to my mind is Salesforce consulting. Your business degree would be another selling point to corporations.

If you get Salesforce certified, you can make $150 per hour - maybe more if you find a good niche. You can also work remotely for U.S. companies, so you are not limited to the Netherlands market.

Start off by doing the work yourself on nights & weekends as you build up a bigger client base. Then, hire help when you get too busy to do it all alone.

You could probably hire people who use Salesforce at work during the day and already know it well (no need to train or pay for certification). You could hire them as 1099 contractors, so no need for benefits or payroll taxes on your part.

You need to make $40k per month to 10x your current income. If you bill out at $200 per hour and pay your guys $100 per hour, then you make $100 for every hour you bill.

$40k ÷ $100 per hour = 400 hours per month, or about 100 hours per week. So you would need to bill the work of 5 half-time consultants at 20 hours per week.

So you need to find 5 companies that want a half-time Salesforce consultant. Add just one client per year and hire one consultant per year, and you are there in 5 years.

It is beyond doable to build an agency like this if you like a consulting business model. If you are good at sales, you should be able to close one new client per year.

Also Merry Christmas
 

Constantine$

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Jul 1, 2017
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Netherlands
A master's in business and you work in sales ... the first thing that comes to my mind is Salesforce consulting. Your business degree would be another selling point to corporations.

If you get Salesforce certified, you can make $150 per hour - maybe more if you find a good niche. You can also work remotely for U.S. companies, so you are not limited to the Netherlands market.

Start off by doing the work yourself on nights & weekends as you build up a bigger client base. Then, hire help when you get too busy to do it all alone.

You could probably hire people who use Salesforce at work during the day and already know it well (no need to train or pay for certification). You could hire them as 1099 contractors, so no need for benefits or payroll taxes on your part.

You need to make $40k per month to 10x your current income. If you bill out at $200 per hour and pay your guys $100 per hour, then you make $100 for every hour you bill.

$40k ÷ $100 per hour = 400 hours per month, or about 100 hours per week. So you would need to bill the work of 5 half-time consultants at 20 hours per week.

So you need to find 5 companies that want a half-time Salesforce consultant. Add just one client per year and hire one consultant per year, and you are there in 5 years.

It is beyond doable to build an agency like this if you like a consulting business model. If you are good at sales, you should be able to close one new client per year.

Also Merry Christmas
Wow! @jdm667 A very, very good strategy indeed. Time wise, it's absolutely a doable to learn the skill and get certified on Salesforce certification tracks.

I even remember that my last employer hired a number of Salesforce consultants for a digital transformation project. They were expensive.

Always open to more ideas, but this a goodie.

Merry Christmas to you too!!
 

Andreas Thiel

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I'd say The Lean Startup theory is interesting here. Make sure you are not primarily money chasing, the original post raises some red flags.

Find a real pain, create a SaaS mass market product around it (in your case probably more like have it created) and don't look at vanity metrics - instead look for signs that you have a productocracy in place. Selling SaaS subscriptions internationally does not seem problematic, not sure why you would think you are limited to a local market.

In the beginning you'd look for signs of exponential growth. The numbers look somewhat disappointing at first. As an example, imagine you have 100 sales and they grow 10% per week. After 10 weeks you'd be at 260, after 100 weeks at 1.3 million. Would you get discouraged if you were "only" around 300 after 3 months?

Buying a house while doing all that sounds like too much of a constraint with the danger of spreading yourself too thin. I have colleagues who bought a house and that dragged on forever, still keeps them busy and really drained their energy.
Why not rent a better apartment or house until you can afford to buy something even better?
 
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Johnny boy

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10x over 5 years mean 60% growth each year for 5 years.

4k start
6.4k 1yr
10.2k 2yr
16.4k 3yr
26.2k 4yr
41.9k 5yr

This is not to tell you to find an asset class that will give you a compounding 60% return on your money each year. This is to set a realistic goal for a scalable business.

Find a local service many people are happy to pay for in your area that is hard to find someone to do. Keep a very open mind and don't be afraid of a lack of experience. If it's bathroom remodels, permanent light installations, HVAC repair, mold removal, etc. Find SOMETHING that lots of people need. You can whip up a fake company and put together a facebook ad campaign in a couple hours. Put up some fake photos and see how many leads you can get for $50-$100. Always be trying new things.

Then, get out there and try it out. If it's something you really can't do, hire someone with experience and pay them the full price of the job and you can just watch them or help them out and learn. It likely won't go smooth but it doesn't matter. They'll think "wtf is this clown doing?" and that's okay. Maybe pick something where there's less of a chance you'll get sued for destroying their kitchen or something lol.

But, get out there and offer a service. You need to be able to be sure you'll get a lot of customers for an affordable price with paid advertisements. Figure out your expected profit for a single day of work and run the numbers. If you have employees you should bring in 20x their hourly rate in a single day of work per employee. If you pay a guy $20/hr you need to be bringing in $400 a day for each employee you're paying $20 an hour for. If a single customer is worth $400, with a 50% margin you have $200 to play with, maybe shoot for under $50 in ad spend per customer acquired, not difficult to do.

With whatever you do, run the numbers and your income becomes a matter of "how many crews can we get out there?" instead of "I hope I get a raise".

One guy working at $20 an hour bringing in $400 a day in revenue, you can expect to make $200 a day after expenses per guy. $200 times 20 days of work a month is $4000 a month in profit. Let's see how this can play out over 5 years.

Year 1: one employee making you $4000 a month total
Year 2: two employees making you $8000 a month total
Year 3: four employees making you $16000 a month total
Year 4: seven employees making you $28000 a month total
Year 5: ten employees making you $40000 a month total

With our basic lawn care company we are on the end of year 3 (we technically started in 2018 but I don't count it) and got to around 25k a month revenue at around 50% profit margin. So taking home 13k profit a month isn't too bad, and we have 4 employees. Next year our goal is 4 crews, 8 employees, 50k revenue a month and 25k profit a month. And, my workload is about an hour or two a week.

Once you have a business that works in this way ($/mo with x crews working) then you will think about money much differently. A million dollars a year won't be a million dollars. It'll just be 1000 customers paying you $1000. Average yearly profit is like $1000 or so for each customer for us anyways, so we really only need a thousand customers or so to make big bucks. It's so much more attainable and makes you so much more optimistic.
 

WJK

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Like the others have said, having a successful business is a numbers game. Your challenge is to find and develop your prospects, make doable agreements/contracts, manage the jobs, hire and supervise the people, make your clients and employees happy, and create a rich personal life work. I know that you want to do it fast. I would suggest that you expand as you gain the skills for each of the challenges.
You must create the business contacts in order to secure the workflow. You must have a system in place in order to complete the jobs. Then, when you have too much work for yourself, you must hire people to help you. How are you going to make sure that they do the job right and make your clients happy? And while you are building your business, how are you going to keep your wife happy and be a good parent to your child?
All these activities will take effort and new skills. You'll have to put your shoulder into every one of them. You'll have good days and bad days. You'll have successes and failures. This will be a true test of your character, your intelligence, and your ingenuity. Additionally, you will need a big dose of diligence. You must be relentless in your quest to serve your clients while building a happy family.
Did you notice that I didn't talk about money? That can't be your focus if you are to succeed. It's simply an end result -- a derivative -- not a determinate in the process. If you have dollar signs in your eyes, focus on yourself, and your needs, people will run away from you. You will fail miserably -- rather than to become the leader you can be.
Best of luck with your plans.
 

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