Find a website where people buy and sell businesses.  They usually have a section called "looking for a business" where people post ads for businesses they would like to buy.  Most of the ads sound like this: I am looking for an online business that requires no employees, little or no work and makes over $50,000 a year.  Maybe something like a dating website or myspace type website.  I have $25,000 to pay for this business.

 

You know what?  SO DOES EVERYONE ELSE!  Everyone wants that business.  That's the American dream.  Make money and have to do nothing!  Lose weight and be in great shape and have to do nothing! 

 

Anyone who has a business for sale like the one mentioned above, email me. I'll buy 20 of them.  Here's the $500,000 and I'm going to go live on an island somewhere.  Just direct deposit the $1,000,000 a year to my PO box.

 

Most people who are successful in a business have a passion for what they're doing.  Colonel Sander's didn't become rich because he wanted to lay on a beach somewhere with a coconut drink in his hand.  He loved making great chicken and made everyone run their franchises the way he ran his business.  Donald Trump didn't get to where he was because his dream was to retire and vacation around the world.  He has a passion for buying real estate and making businesses successful.  It doesn't always work, but it does start with passion to try to be successful.  Not just to "make money the easy way."  If this wasn't true, Mr. Trump would have just taken the real estate his dad left, sold it all for $75 million and no one would have ever heard from him again.  But he didn't.  He went with his passion and continued with the business.  The rest is history. 

 

The reason I mention having passion for your business is because if you don't, you won't do what it takes to make it successful at any level.  The hope of making money some day won't do it for most.  Money isn't a good enough motivator, because if the money doesn’t come quick enough you’ll quit or you’ll fail from your lack of effort.  But if you love what you're doing to some extent, you'll stick with it long enough to be successful.  You'll work at it hard enough so that you'll be the best.  The exception would be if you bought a successful business from someone that you hate running, or after so many years you hate the business you created.  When this happens, the business will usually start going down from there. 

 

You have to decide what you want out of your business, and then take it from there.  How much money do you want to make?  How many hours do you want to put in?  How big do you want your company to be?  Do you want to be financially successful in your lifetime?  Then realize that some answers don't go together.  Make $100,000 a year and work 10 hours a week is an example of two answers that don't go together.  The higher the $$$ you want, the more the hours go up. 

 

Once again there are exceptions.  The kid who made the milliondollarhomepage.com made $1 million in three months, and someone hits the lotto every week too!  His concept was to sell pixels as add space and once all the pixels were sold and the page was full of ads, he made $1 million.  This was actually done several times before but none of the other sites made any money.  The kid’s secret to success was when he threw in this “feel sorry and help me out with college story” that the media ran with and it caused advertisers to actually try to help him succeed with this quest.  They didn’t even care about the ad space, they just wanted to help him make a million dollars.    

 

Note: Technically even this lucky break took hundreds of hours of work since this wasn’t the kid’s first attempt at business.  He struggled for years with failures before lucking up with this.  He didn’t just make a page in two hours and become a millionaire months later like so many would like to do.

 

In business, how much you make vs. time and passion isn't an "exact ratio."  There's always luck and chance involved in everything you do, along with your experience and expertise level.  Some jobs or businesses require a set number of hours to be successful no matter what you're willing to put in.  There's no way around it.  This next example shows that you can't change the ratio and get the same results.  One year I worked 60 hours a week and made $800,000.  You can’t say, "I don't need $800,000 a year.  An extra $40,000 a year on the side is fine.  If it took Pat 60 hours a week to make $800,000 for the year, I can work three hours a week and make $40,000 a year."  Business doesn't work that way.  There's a minimum amount of time it takes to run a successful business.  Plus it takes time to establish your business.  It might take you 70 hours a week to make that $40,000 a year until you establish something that really works well.  Then you'll be able to cut your hours down. 

 

All I'm trying to say is, if you want to make money, you MUST drop the "barely get by", "I don't want to do anything" attitude.  If you REALLY want to make money, you have to do what it takes to make it.  Most people just look at the time and work as the main focus and won’t even attempt to be successful.  Have a passion for something and focus on being successful with it.