Loral Langemeier is the author of The Millionaire Maker and two New York Times bestsellers, The Millionaire Maker's Guide to Wealth Cycle Investing and The Millionaire Maker's Guide to Creating a Cash Machine for Life. She runs Millionaire Maker® and Live Out Loud wealth building events around the world, and currently acts as a financial expert on the Dr Phil Show, mentoring families in financial crisis. Langemeier believes that everyone has the ability to generate cash and build wealth.
I met with Langemeier at the end of her three-day seminar in Sydney. The 215 attendees of the seminar had all made money over the last three days Langemeier was happy to report, a total of $51,949.29 in fact. “I know how to teach people to make money, the youngest person at the event was 10, the oldest in their mid-70s and everyone made money,” says Langemeier.
One of Loral’s biggest themes for creating wealth is learning how to be an entrepreneur. “People are losing jobs at extraordinary rates,” says Langemeier, “so people are turning to entrepreneurship.”
“Everyone is an entrepreneur. People just don’t know how turn it on,” she says.
She believes we all have skills that we can market and sell to generate wealth: “One of the biggest challenges for women is asking for enough money. So often women don’t see their skills as being of value or service. In the case of things like childcare they may not even ask for any money at all.”
What Langemeier teaches is how to turn your skills into a multimillion dollar business (her own business was worth $19 million in five-years). She believes there are four pillars for building a business:
1 When you start a business, draw on your skill set, don’t try something new. If you are a teacher, start coaching. If you are a web designer, do web designing. Do what you know how to do even if you don’t like the skill very much.
2 Understand how to market your business or get people with marketing skills.
3 Learn how to sell, and it’s the owner who needs to do the selling. If the owner doesn’t ask for the money, the business will struggle. The owner needs to be the heart and soul of the business.
4 Know how to bring in the right team. Don’t employ people with the same skills as you, get people who will compliment your own skill set. Remember you don’t have to do all the work. Because you run a cleaning business, it doesn’t mean you have to clean every house.
Budgets are like diets, they don’t work. With the economic downturn, many people are caught the mindset of budget, scrimp and save, but this doesn’t generate wealth. There is a difference between good debt and bad debt. Bad debt is money spent on disposable items like flat-screen televisions and cars that don’t generate wealth. Good debt is investing in your company to help it grow. If you are swimming in bad debt you need to construct a debt plan (which Langemeier can help you do) to get out of the hole, but Langemeier believes that was is also important is that you also turn your mind to wealth creation.
“It’s a messy time. It’s amazing to see what greed has done to the US. Now a lot of people are so caught in the debt hole that it’s difficult for them to see a way out, but there are ways. Teaching people how to make money is an enormous gift I know that I have. And I believe you have to do something fabulous on the planet,” Langemeier says.
See the July 2009 of MiNDFOOD (on sale June 15, 2009) for an article by Loral Langemeier.
