6 Ways To Get Rich Without Taking Big Risks
Introduction
For every business magnate that changes the world, there are plenty of 40-year-old failed entrepreneurs with neckbeards in their mom’s basement.
Before it all went south for them, these were the dreamers.
The visionaries.
Those brave souls with world-changing ideas, with the balls to go against conventional wisdom.
But wait what this-
Conventional wisdom is usually conventional for a reason?!?!
No one really wants whatever it is they’re selling.
They don’t actually make any money.
No money becomes crippling debt.
Their wife leaves them for a guy with a boring ass job.
This song starts playing.
No one likes to think about this side of entrepreneurship. There are real risks involved. Sure there are your Elon Musks of the world, but most wanna-be founders get absolutely slaughtered.
What if you want to make a lot of money, but you aren’t geared towards taking huge risks?
Is only fans your only option?
Here are 6 ways to get rich without taking big risks.
Why you should still think about starting a business
4 out of the 6 ideas in this article are specifically for people who don’t want to start any kind of business.
But make no mistake – renting out your time by working in someone else’s company will only get you so far in building any real wealth.
“Equity is the new land.
Shareholder is the new landowner.”
Naval
A highly skilled worker can get paid well, but only to a certain point.
No doctor, without equity in a business, can make a million dollars per year.
Another downside of working in somebody else’s company is the connection between your input and output. Every dollar you earn, you sweat for.
Say you spend 10 years building someone else’s company as employee number 5.
The minute you stop working, you stop getting compensated.
You don’t ultimately own the fruits of your labor.
With a business, you can spend your time building a machine that creates value independent of you directly working.
You can then make money while you sleep.
Although no business has absolutely zero risk, there are certain kinds of businesses that you can start where the intrinsic risk is far lower.
What makes a business risky?
A risky business:
Requires a lot of upfront investment. If you want to open a restaurant, you will probably need to invest 6 figures before you can even open your doors to customers.
Has high fixed costs. If you need to pay full-time staff regardless of whether you make any money, there’s risk there.
Relies on skills that you do not have as a founder. If you don’t know how to code, and you want to build an app, straight away you’re at a disadvantage.
A less risky business:
Requires very little/zero upfront investment. You don’t want to get into debt just trying to get the thing moving.
Has low fixed costs. If there’s a period of time where sales are poor, you aren’t burning through cash, paying staff etc.
Requires skills that you have, or can easily learn. You aren’t at any disadvantage over other people in your industry.
Doesn’t require you to quit your day job, initially
Disclaimer- low risk does not mean low effort
Just because you won’t ruin your own life trying to start these businesses, doesn’t mean they won’t be really hard.
Anyone with any shot in business works like hell. No hobbies, no brunches, really none of the normal things that mentally stable people do.
If you aren’t willing to live that life, try some of the other ideas in this article. Or maybe OnlyFans isn’t such a bad idea after all!
There are 2 forms of business that I have come across, that fit the low risk criteria nicely. These would be ideal for anybody who wants to get rich but is uncomfortable with excessive risk.
Start a service-based business
In a service-based business, clients pay for your effort and skills.
We all have limited time and knowledge, and this fact means that service-based businesses have huge potential.
Literally the longer you think about this form of business, the more things you can find that people and businesses would happily pay for.
You could cut grass for rich people with big gardens.
You could edit videos for YouTubers who make a lot of content.
You could build websites for old companies that were slow to see the power of the internet.
Dog walking.
Social media management.
Translation.
Consulting.
Ghost writing.
What’s nice about a service business, as opposed to selling a product, is that you can basically start making money immediately. You need to figure out what service you can provide, find 1 person, and get them to pay you to do that work for them.
You are in business!
Here are a few things to think about with service businesses:
It’s your skills that will determine your success
If you are going to edit videos, for example, it’s worth spending time honing your skill to the point where your work speaks for itself. It might even be worth working for free until you are sure that you can edit videos that surpass most other people’s. Once you’ve developed the skills, your service becomes far more valuable.
Service businesses can be difficult to scale
You have to take the rough with the smooth. Product businesses are hard to get going, but service businesses are difficult to scale. Here are a couple of ideas, to grow a tiny service-based business into something more substantial.
Provide more services to your existing clients
This doesn’t work with all services, but it can be a great way to scale a simple business into something larger.
If you build websites, for example, you can do a great job building a website for a client and then pitch managing their social media.
If you cut grass for rich people, you could start to look at other things that they need help with. Like pool maintenance, or patio cleaning.
Move away from actually doing all the work yourself
If you don’t move towards hiring people, you will always be limited by how much work you can do in a day.
The whole point of starting a business was to remove those kinds of limitations from your earning potential.
If you can eventually pay other people to take care of actually providing the service, you can spend your time scaling by getting new clients and improving your offering.
Start a content business
The internet gave people like us another way to build wealth without taking huge amounts of risk.
Wherever you can build an audience online, there’s an opportunity to get paid. Instead of trading your time for money directly, you can spend your time creating content that continues to earn money while you sleep.
The kind of content that you make should be a personal decision. You want to talk about something you enjoy, and you want to communicate in a way that’s a good fit for your personality.
You can blog about cooking.
You can create Musical covers on TikTok.
You can start a podcast for young moms.
If you can inspire, educate or entertain people through the content that you make, Over time your audience will grow. And with more eyeballs, comes more opportunities to get paid.
Like everything, there are pros and cons. One pro is that you can build a business around something that you genuinely love. Another pro is that it’s not like you need to spend a lot of money to get started.
One drawback, against something like a service business, is the sheer amount of work that you are going to have to put in upfront.
Once you’ve built a huge audience, the money will flow. But initially, you’re most likely going to have to invest hundreds of hours into creating good content and building that viewership 1 person at a time.
This blog is my attempt at a content business around topics that I am passionate about. I have found that the first year is the hardest, and it’s brutal to keep grinding away at something that no one sees.
But if you keep hammering, improving your content as you go, eventually you will have your audience.
How to make money from an audience
Here are some ways that you can turn an audience into a real business:
- Ads. The easiest, most passive, most self-explanatory way to make money off of content.
- Affiliate marketing. Recommend relevant products and receive commissions.
- Digital products. Create a course, make music, write an ebook.
- Physical Products. Launch a line of apparel, write a book, hold a ticketed in-person event.
- mentorship/guidance. Establish authority, then charge for zoom consultation.
- Premium content. Charge for certain content, like a paid email list or paid discord community.
The best strategy for your content business is going to vary hugely depending on who your audience is, and the type of content that you create.
Those are my favorite business models for someone averse to risk.
Here are 4 things you can do, to make more money without trying to start a business of your own.
Move where the money is
Everybody knows this to be true intellectually, but very few people actually act on this information.
Whatever job you do now, chances are you could do that same job for twice what you are currently making.
Right now, I am a chef. My salary is pretty modest, as I am working in a small independent restaurant in a village. Margins are tight, and so they really couldn’t pay me much more even if they wanted to.
I know for a fact that if I walked into one of the great hotels in London, they would double my salary. They have an absolute monster of a business, and an experienced chef is simply worth more to them.
I could be a private chef for a rich family. Same thing.
Or a chef on a cruise ship. You get the idea.
If you are an air hostess, you could work on private jets.
If you are a babysitter, you could work for a wealthy businessman.
What’s nice about this is that you are already qualified and experienced. It’s pretty much guaranteed to work.
You’ll just have to be flexible with where you live and figure out how to put yourself in front of the right people.
Help your bosses make more money
Here’s something you can do if you’re happy where you are working right now.
Whatever salary you are on, it’s because of the value that you bring to a company.
If you can bring more value to a company, ie figure out how then can make more money, you will be compensated.
I’ll use the chef example again because it’s what I know.
If you think that your restaurant does a horrible job on social media, take responsibility for that. Solve that problem for them.
If you were right and your efforts lead to more revenue, you can ask for a pay rise and you will deserve one.
If you work in sales and you’re damn good at your job, negotiate a lower base and a higher commission. Again you should get it, as you will only make more money if your company makes more money.
I would imagine that this works a lot better with small companies, where the decision-makers can really see who’s doing what. If you are in a large firm, you might have to try something else.
Become a minimalist to unlock “hidden income”
I know you don’t wanna hear this option.
You want to ball out.
You want 20 Brazilian girls pouring champagne all over your Maserati.
I hear you.
The thing is, boring as this is, the sh*t works.
Ultimately, when you want to make a lot of money, it’s because you want to feel free. And that feeling of freedom comes when you’ve got a lot more than you need.
Getting a lot more is really hard and not without risk, but cutting down your expenses is far easier.
Everyone thinks that they don’t spend excessively, but when you start living simply you start to see things very differently.
I’ve got good friends, doing exactly the same job as me.
They cant be making much more than me, mathematically.
They’ve got a BMW on finance.
They go on all-inclusive holidays like twice per year.
They go out to eat all the time.
They feel like they can afford that life, no problem.
I feel like you could triple my income, and I still wouldn’t consider myself rich enough to pull sh*t like that.
If you live below your means, you start to save money on autopilot. If you are getting richer every month that you work, significantly, a lot of the stress and desperation that you once felt goes away.
Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it!
Pick a tried and true investment strategy
Now that you’re driving a Nissan Micra and saving all this money, you’re gonna have to think about investing!
People think that investing is super risky. And If you try and get slick, it can be.
If you’re trying to make above-average returns, then you are going to have to have some sort of advantage over every other investor.
Either you know an absolute f-ck tonne about the stock market, or you’re going to have to take risks betting on individual companies.
I’m not saying you can’t make any money, but I wouldn’t call it low risk.
If you’re ok making average market returns, on the other hand, you can throw your money in an index fund and forget about it.
As long as the economy doesn’t completely collapse, your money will grow on average 8-10% per year.
That’s a pretty solid return for something so passive.
