Summary
➡ To achieve your business goals, it’s important to identify and track key performance indicators (KPIs) regularly. This helps you understand your business’s health and guides you on where to focus your efforts. Additionally, conducting a time audit can help you identify tasks that can be delegated, freeing up your time for more creative tasks. Lastly, instead of focusing solely on monetary wealth, consider investing back into your business to buy back your time, leading to true wealth: time and location freedom.
➡ The article emphasizes the importance of investing in ‘trophy assets’ like real estate and Bitcoin to beat inflation. These assets are scarce and hard to replace, making them valuable. The author suggests that investing should be seen as saving, a passive activity where money is parked for long periods. He also highlights the importance of tax efficiency and using different types of assets in the right sequence to maximize wealth.
Transcript
So let’s go. So we’re going to talk about building wealth in 2025. But before we jump into that, we should just establish what is the definition of the word wealthy. Now, I believe that the definition of that word maybe changes as you’re in that pursuit in your as you’re in that growth period. And so when I ask most people and I’ve asked hundreds of people, maybe thousands of people, what has been truly wealthy mean to you? Most times they say time freedom. If I was wealthy, if I had enough money, then I would have the freedom to do whatever I wanted.
And so that’s ultimately the end goal. That’s what I like to think about. However, in the beginning, being wealthy might be more about like financial independence. Do I make enough money to at least live like I want to live? Eventually, it becomes do I have enough money coming in maybe passively through my business where I don’t have to work as much. And then ultimately, the goal is to have that time freedom. And that’s true wealth for me. And that’s the goal that I want for you. So when we talk about building wealth in 2025, we’re really what we’re talking about is having enough money, where I don’t have to worry about it.
So I can have the time freedom and the problem that I’ve seen, as I’ve been on my career, building multiple businesses and selling multiple businesses is most times people think that in my business, I’ll create the wealth, the money that I want. And then I’ll have the time, the wealth as well, I like to think of time freedom, and more importantly, not just time freedom, but time and location freedom as being the keys, the hallmarks of true wealth. But most people have started this business. And instead of creating a business, what they’ve really done is created a new job for themselves.
Instead of having this free entrepreneurial life that they dreamed about, they probably work for a worse boss themselves than they had before. And so really, the key is how do I create that business that can generate the revenue that I need to get me to the point of true wealth, which is not just having the money, but also having the time and location freedom to live that truly wealthy life. Let me tell you a story so you can understand what I’m talking about. My first company that I sold off was a high tech medical equipment company.
And the company was great. I had it for about seven years, I had about a dozen people working there and it threw off lots of free cash flow. The problem was is that it was a physical location. And I had to show up every day and I had to manage the people that were there. I had to keep the morale high. I had to make sure that they were still working and the wheels were still turning. And of course, the income was coming in. Now, I love the income that was coming in, but I didn’t want to be chained down to that physical location on a regular basis.
And, you know, I was reading too many books and watching too many videos about the dream of having this passive income. And so I thought, shoot, well, I’m stuck in this business. My one of my core values is freedom. It was going against that was causing massive stress in my life. That’s a whole other topic. And so I thought, well, if I really want the passive income, I need to sell this business, get multiple seven figures. I could use that money then to go generate what I thought this was a stream of passive income.
I wanted to be free of the business and have the life that I wanted, the time and location freedom. And so I did, I put the business up for sale and I managed to sell it to the largest company, a fortune 400 company, the largest company in the medical device space. Now, what was interesting about that is I thought I was freeing myself from that business, but the deal hinged on me working for that company for two years. Now, at first, that was a deal breaker for me. No way am I going to work for somebody.
I’m an entrepreneur, I work for myself. And ultimately, the whole point was to sell the business to become free from that business, not work for it for two more years and for a boss. But here’s the thing, I realized that there was a gap in my thinking, a gap in my knowledge, a gap in my training. And so rather than saying no and losing the deal, I said yes, and I approached it as a learning opportunity. And what I realized is as soon as the sell went through, I got to stay in my own building, manage my own team, but they put somebody that sort of was my liaison to the company and they helped me figure out how I could install a set of systems in the business to instantly remove myself.
And within about less than 90 days, using the systems that they taught me, I didn’t really have a job in the business anymore. I was still there as the figurehead. And I was still responsible to look at the numbers, report the numbers and guide the team and the vision. But all of a sudden, I was free from the business in less than 90 days. And then it hit me. I didn’t need to sell my business to be free from the business. All I had to do was follow a proven set of systems like Fortune 500 companies use.
And I could have had the freedom all along. So if you really want to build wealth, number one, you need to solve problems. You need to have a business. But most importantly, if you have that business and you’re feeling like you’re just not getting to that true wealth position that you want, true wealth being time and location freedom, then you don’t have to sell the business. You don’t have to start another business. And what I tell most entrepreneurs that I coach is that within about 90 days, you can have the freedom that you want with just a few simple steps.
All right. So let me give you an idea of exactly what we did here. Now, I can’t give you two years of education in a very short video. I could make another video on it, but let me show you the very first thing they had me do. Now, warning, when they told me this, I thought it was ridiculous. And as a matter of fact, I pushed back on it and said, I didn’t want to do it. It was ridiculous. It was stupid. It was a waste of my time. But I can tell you right now it transformed everything about that business.
It transformed everything, the way that I look at businesses and it’s still something I use to this day in every business that I own or operate or advise into. Okay. So let me break it down. The very first thing they had me do was come up with a spreadsheet, a Google sheet. Back then, it was an Excel sheet and we broke down the business into what are the key things that have to happen inside of the business to make sure that we have success. So what are the daily things that have to happen and how do we measure them? It’s sort of like if you went to the hospital and they took you up on a machine to check your pulse all the time.
Now, these are known as key, key performance indicators or KPIs. Now each business is going to have these, these differently and each department could also have these differently. But for the business, it would be, for example, in this medical device company, it’d be like, how many calls did we get? How many orders did we get? How many packages did we receive? How many repairs did we get done? How many packages did we ship? How much revenue do we collect? Now we entered this into a sheet and every single day at 4 p.m.
I had to enter these numbers and I thought this was ridiculous. I mean the data is in the computer. You could just get it right. Why do I need to pull this and put it into a spreadsheet? But every day I did. I put it into the spreadsheet and what would happen is that spreadsheet would then go to my person above me and they would compile that with their data and the person above them, compile, person above them, compile and it would get all the way to the CEO’s desk every single day.
So we could see through the entire business, the pulse of the business. Now one thing about data is at first, if you haven’t been looking at data on a regular basis, it might not make sense to you. But when you look at data on a regular basis, on a consistent basis over a long period of time, the data starts speaking to you. What I’ve learned is that we need to identify what are the core things you have to do in order to achieve the goal that you want. And so this is the way that life works.
If I wanted to put on 15 pounds of muscle, then I would have to create a system to do that. So how many calories would I have to eat? What types of calories would they be? How many times would I work out? What exercises would I do? How much weight would I lift? And then I would track that. Here’s how many calories ready today. Here’s my workouts for today. And over a period of time, I would ensure that I was able to gain that weight. And it’s no different with your business.
How much revenue do I want to make? How much time do I want to get off? Whatever those goals are you have in your business, you have to identify what are the successful steps I have to do. And you have to track them every single day, key performance indicators KPIs. Now, I’ve modified this sense KPIs are sort of lagging indicators, they tell us what happened. Now what I like to do is take the KPIs and match them to a forward looking goal. So I know if I’m tracking properly or not. But that’s a whole another subject.
If you want me to break this down in more detail, leave me a comment down below and we can dive into this. But that’s the very first thing they had me do, which again, I thought was ridiculous. You might say, Oh, yeah, I’ve heard this before. I know this, but I’m guessing you’re not doing that in your own business. So start with that. All right, let’s put this into action. So you can walk away from this video with something tangible that you can use right now. When it comes to making these KPIs, you want to have about five or six, no more than that.
And you want to understand what are the key performance indicators for this role. And it just depends. So for example, if I’m a salesperson, let’s say that I do high ticket sales on the phone, it might be how many hours did I work. And these are waterfall metrics, meaning each one qualifies the next. So for example, how many hours did I work? How do I know if those hours were any good? Well, how many phone calls did I make? How do I know if those phone calls were any good? How many minutes did I talk? How do I know if those minutes were any good? How many quotes did I get out? How do I know if I put good quotes out? How many quotes did I get returned back? And how do I know if those were any good? Well, how many sales did I close? And how are those really good? How much revenue did I collect? So each one qualifies into the next one.
That would be for like a sales based business. Okay, so now that we’ve done that exercise, we know what the key things are in our business, and we start to track the data, the numbers. Now what this shows us is which of these areas we need to do more work in. So now we have focus as to where we need to go to improve our business. Now the next part is how do we start getting some time back right away? Well, what we want to do is the first thing is do a time audit or a time study.
This is something I do usually about twice a year, sometimes more often, depending on how I feel about how clear I am and what I’m working on the business. Now, you can do this low tech or high tech. Low tech is just get like an Excel spreadsheet and print it out and literally use a piece of paper and a pen. And I set my iPhone up with a timer. And every 15 minutes, the timer goes off. And when that goes off, I write down on the piece of paper, what am I doing? What am I working on? And I do that typically for two weeks, then at the end of two weeks, I look at that sheet of all the things that I’ve been doing, and I categorize them, and I break them down into creative tasks, management tasks, ideation tasks, research tasks, or whatever those categories might be for your business.
Then once I’ve been able to categorize what I’m spending my time on, I can start to think, okay, of these tasks, which ones can I get rid of? Alright, now, typically, what we want to do as an entrepreneur is start to move more towards the creative tasks, that’s our zone of genius, and away from the technical tasks, technical tasks would be defined as something that’s done more than one time. If it’s done more than one time, I can create a system for that I can just record my screen while I’m doing it or record a camera of me doing it.
And I can then give that to somebody else to do, I want to continue to move more and more to the creative time. So I can spend that on the higher value tests again, my zone of genius. So the only way to really do this is to do this through a time audit. So you can understand where you need to attack sort of like the KPIs, it’s all about getting the data. So you can learn how to optimize on what you have. Those two things right there would typically save most entrepreneurs about 10 hours a week if you can dial those in.
Alright, so now you’re well on your way to getting true wealth, again, time freedom. So you have a business that’s now being able to run sort of without you or with less of you, it’s hopefully throwing off good revenue, we can talk about that later. But now, are you able to get that time freedom? Now, let me tell you about a trap that you have to watch out for. Now, most people, again, think that wealth is just money. So I need my money, my business to make as much money as I can, because that’s true wealth.
But the problem is that, again, the new rates think about time and location freedom. And so rather than looking at my business like a bank account, like a piggy bank, and how can I extract as much wealth out of that, if you put your investor hat on is how can I put money back into my business to allow it to grow, but more importantly, to buy back my time. You see, if you’re only focused on the amount of money that you’re making, then you’re going to work 80 hours a week, because you’re going to want to do every task yourself, you’re never going to want to hire anybody else to do that.
However, if you’re focusing on time and location freedom, then you’ll realize that it’s okay to give up some of that money to allow people to do other tasks they can do for you to get that time back. Now, that’s part of becoming true wealth is having that time and location freedom, the true pro realizes that by doing that, and if I reinvest some of that time that I get back into the business, then I’ll grow even faster in the wealth pursuit. Alright, so we are on our quest to getting real wealth, time and location freedom, we have a business now, that’s running on a system, we have a system in place, we’re growing, we know exactly where we need to focus on that business, we’ve reclaimed some of our time by doing our time audits.
But now what do we do? Well, what we want to do is we want to use that business to get our time back first, but then we use that business to generate wealth or money that we then put into other assets. Now, the key is what type of assets are you buying? Now, the problem is that traditional education, mainstream narratives, Wall Street and the Dave Ramsey of the world are misleading you down a very dangerous path. So forget the nine to five save 40 years and put it into the S&P 500 index or 401k or mutual fund.
Those assets are all fake. When I say fake, what I mean is their returns are fake, because they’re being measured against CPI or consumer price inflation, which is a fake metric CPI or CPI. What we want to do is we want to be buying trophy assets. Now trophy assets are assets that are unique, they’re rare, they’re scarce, and they’re a lot different than most general assets. The S&P 500 is doing seven, eight, nine percent over whatever 50, 50, 60 year period you want to measure it, maybe 12% the last couple years.
But the real rate of inflation is the rate of debasement or the supply money supply increasing, which is about 10% per year since 2019. That’s the real rate you have to beat. And that’s why you look at your S&P 500 index mutual fund, and it’s going up in value, it looks like you’re getting rich. But the reality is, you’re feeling more and more poor. And that’s because they’re not keeping up with the rate of inflation. So we want trophy assets, scarce assets, rare assets, and consider this like beachfront property, consider it like lakefront property, think of it like a unique painting, a unique car, think of it like Bitcoin, something that’s scarce, that’s hard to get.
Now let me give you an example of why this matters. Since 2019, or let’s say the last four or five years, real estate in the United States, the median, the average real estate across the United States has gone up by about 40%. Well, that’s about the rate of the money supply increase in the United States as well. Austin, Texas was the fastest growing city in America for about the last 20 years. And its real estate went up a little bit faster went up about 45%, because there was a little bit more demand for that.
But in Austin, there’s a lake, it’s called Lake Travis. And there’s only so many homes that lakefront on the lake, those homes went up about 150 to 200%. Because they’re scarce, because their trophies because they’re hard to replace. So that’s where the rich people want to take their wealth, they want to park it. And I like to think of it as savings instead of more investing, I invest into my business, so I create more money. And then I take that money, whatever I don’t spend, and I save it and I save it in real estate.
And I save it in Bitcoin, and I save it in other rare assets. And the reason why I use the word saving as opposed to investing is it changes my mental mindset around it. You see, when I think of it as investing, that means that’s like active, it’s something I have to be actively doing. And I want to be active in my business. But saving in real estate and saving in Bitcoin and other scarce assets make me think of it being passive, meaning I’m parking my money there. And maybe I’m leaving it there for five years, 10 years, or maybe for future generations.
And so we’re making the wealth creating the wealth in the business, and we’re saving it or investing into scarce assets. Now, if you’re still not quite understanding, let me give you a couple examples of trophy assets that I own today. So for example, when the world was sort of melting down during the pandemic, people were starting to buy a freezer for the garage and put meat inside their steaks inside there. I bought a ranch. And so I bought a property outside of Austin, Texas, a beautiful ranch property. I have cows, I have goats, I have animals on there.
I have a place for my family to go refuge. And this is a very unique property because it’s close to Austin, but it’s still far enough away. And so this is a very unique property. And the reason why it’s a trophy property is it’s one of those properties that if you sold it, you may never get it back. That’s what makes it scarce. Another example is currently right now, I have a house that I’m building down in Mexico. Again, I like to have options. I don’t know how the world’s going to unfold.
So I bought a property in another country, and it’s on the beach. It’s a beautiful beach property. You might have seen me posting about it on my social media accounts. And again, this is on the beach beachfront property. And it’s again, one of those properties where if I were to sell it, I may never be able to get that property back again. Now you might say, Mark, that’s great for you. You’re so rich, whatever. Well, number one, there’s ways that we get those assets to pay for themselves. They don’t cost us money.
That’s a whole other video. If you want me to break that down, let me know. But there’s ways that we can all do this, even if you have $5. So I mentioned Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a scarce asset, and it’s giving private property rights to people all over the world with as little as $1 or $5. And I can tell you that Bitcoin is going up at a much faster rate than those trophy real estate properties that I have with a little bit of money right now. And you need to get some trophy assets.
Bitcoin is a good option. But what you realize is as you start to get more money and more wealth, you don’t need every single dollar to return the highest amount to you. Because you see, at the end of the day, money is not what we want. What we want is goods and services. Money is just a medium of exchange is the means for us to get those assets. So I want money. I want my assets to go up in value in Bitcoin. So one day I can get the beach house. Okay, so I got the beach house.
But there’s ways that each one of us can get those trophy assets right now. Alright, now I need to give you one more reason why you need to consider the types of trophy assets that you buy. Now in the Bitcoin community, which of course, I’m a big member of, we see this raging debate nonstop about what’s better Bitcoin or real estate, Bitcoin or real estate. And I think it’s the wrong question. The right question is, how do I use different types of assets in the right sequence to end up with more of both? Now, how do we end up with more of both? Well, there’s two ways that we do that.
One, it’s a concept I call velocity of money, which is how do I invest $1, three times, five times, 10 times. But more importantly, for this, I want to talk about tax efficiency, you see, whether you like it or not, the government’s your partner. And the government wants to take about half of your income, depending on where your what state you’re in and your tax income bracket. But let’s just say they want to take a big chunk of your income. And my goal is to reduce that amount as best as possible.
And the government gives us lots of ways to do that. And so when I use real estate properties, I get massive tax efficiency. Tax efficiency became a big problem for me when I sold my first business, because now all of a sudden, we’re getting a multi seven figure liquidity event, and you realize, oh, shoot, I got to pay over seven figures to the government. And so we started having to figure this out. And so when we use trophy assets like real estate, using different tax incentives that are there, such as short term rentals, accelerated depreciation, cost segregation, then that gives us a way to then reduce our taxable income.
So I have more after tax income to continue to invest into these trophy assets. All right, now I know we’ve gone over a lot of information and maybe a little bit of overload, but hopefully it starts to give you a vision of something that you can drive towards. But let’s make it a little bit more practical. If you wanted to start today, what are the first few actions that you would take? Well, if you’re a business owner, first thing that I would recommend is to get those KPIs in place and start tracking those today, not tomorrow today.
Number two, I would do the time tracking study to understand where you can save time. If you want a time tracking study, you can download, I’ll put a link down to the description down below. And if you’re not a business owner, then you might want to watch this detailed blueprint I’ve given out in this video of how to go from zero to 1 million in 12 months, as I break it down into monthly milestones, you can follow along and you can watch this video right here. I’ll see you over there to your success.
I’m out. [tr:trw].
See more of Mark Moss on their Public Channel and the MPN Mark Moss channel.
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