The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime

by M.J. DeMarco

Years ago, when I started my career with Internet media, I could have easily quit and leaned on the obvious: I don’t know how! I don’t know how to program a website! I don’t know how to design graphics! I don’t know how to manage a server! I don’t know how to write marketing copy! These excuses are like a plastic bag ready to smother your dreams, but only if you stick your head in the bag. Instead, my vision of a website didn’t end with “I don’t know how,” but started there. So, get your head out of the bag! Today I own a publishing company and a discussion portal for entrepreneurship. When planning those ventures, I started green with zero knowledge. To overcome the challenge, I had to learn. Study. Investigate. Solve problems. Search engines were my teacher. Had I not refreshed my skill set (my oil), all my journeys would have ended prematurely. My religious pursuit of knowledge kept me efficient in an ever-changing world and primed me for Fastlane opportunities. Education didn’t end with graduation, it started. And best of all, my self-taught education was a twin-turbo acceleration into the Fastlane; my skills didn’t come loaded with parasitic debt or conformity.

Interest is looking rich; commitment is planning to be rich.

Yes, the Fastlane is a risk. Failure is imminent. I learned how to code computers by trial-and-failure. I’d fail a code block hundreds of times before I found the right way. My other failures ranged from moronic network marketing gigs to jewelry retailing to direct marketing programs. Each time, I brushed it off, reanalyzed, learned, adjusted, and tried again. I acted, assessed, then adjusted. The brakes were disengaged, baby! I once heard, “A smart man learns from his mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others.” You can learn from my failures. I didn’t learn the Fastlane overnight. I found it by the light of failure. Fear of failure is normal, yet failure creates experience and experience breeds wisdom.

Here’s another moronic risk, and it took me this chapter to uncover it. I’m writing this book on a cloud computing application. That means I’m writing to an external source, or an external server. I have not made copies of my work. If the cloud server fails, my work is gone. Yes, moronic risks come in all sizes and flavors, and this makes me the idiot of the day. Excuse me while I go back up my work. OK, I’m back. Now let’s talk about intelligent risks. When I invest $100,000 in an Internet company, I’m engaging in an intelligent risk. When I sold my Internet company, I reinvested part of the proceeds back into the company. Why did I invest $100,000 and expose myself to the risk? I assessed the acquiring company’s probability of success to be decent. Their goal was to take my small company and transform it into a $100 million company. If they succeed, my small $100,000 investment would be worth millions. The downside? The company could fail and my investment’s value would lose most of its value. My downside is limited while the upside is substantial. This is an intelligent risk. If you quit your job to pursue a Fastlane business, it’s an intelligent risk. Your upside could be millions. The downside? You might have to live below your standards: mop floors, flip burgers, eat rice and beans, and ride your bike to the grocery store. Or worse, deny your child the latest iPhone. Is that really that bad? Not if you know your destination and your commitment to the roadmap. Again, ...

The Law of Effection says to make millions you must impact millions.

The best roads and the purest Fastlanes satisfy the CENTS FRAMEWORK; the Five Fastlane Commandments: Control, Entry, Need, Time, and Scale.

Businesses that solve needs and provide value win. Businesses that solve problems win profits. Selfish, narcissistic motives do not make good, long-term business models. Think about the purpose of businesses. Why do they exist? To satisfy your selfish desire to “do what you love?” To satisfy your craving for wealth and financial freedom? Seriously, no one cares about your desires, your dreams, your passions, your “whys” or your reasons for wanting to be rich. No one cares that you want to own a Ferrari and prove your parents wrong. No one cares that corporate America wronged you. No one cares! Yes, the world is a selfish place and nobody gives two shits about your motives to “go Fastlane.” So what do people care about? People care about what your business can do for them. How will it help them? What’s in it for them? Will it solve their problem? Make their life easier? Provide them with shelter? Save them money? Educate them? Make them feel something? Tell me, why on God’s green Earth should I give your business money? What value are you adding to my life? Reflect back to our producer/consumer dichotomy. Consumers are selfish. They demand to know is “what’s in it for me!” To succeed as a producer, surrender your own selfishness and address the selfishness of others.

STOP CHASING MONEY—CHASE NEEDS Never start a business just to make money. Stop chasing money and start chasing needs. Let me repeat that, because it’s the most important thing in this book: Stop thinking about business in terms of your selfish desires, whether it’s money, dreams or “do what you love.” Instead, chase needs, problems, pain points, service deficiencies, and emotions. Entrepreneurs fail because they create businesses based on selfish premises, and selfish premises don’t yield profitable businesses; they lead directly into the 90% failure wastebasket. “I need a new income stream.” “I’m an expert in [blank] so I’ll do that.” “I read a ‘get rich’ book and it says to start a business.” Wrong. Wrong. And wrong. Again, selfish, narcissistic premises are VIP invitations to violate the Commandment of Need. You and your business attract money when you stop being selfish and turn your business’s focus from the needs of yourself to the needs of other people. Give first, take second. Needs come first, not money! Charm the marketplace with your own selfish needs and my bet is placed on your failure. Joe was a martial arts expert and he loved his craft. Following the advice of gurus, he set out to “do what you love” and opened a martial arts studio. Within 10 months, his studio closed, as he could no longer support his family on his $21,000-per-year business profit. Before Joe started, he was destined for failure. He got into business based on a faulty entrepreneurial road ...

Joe failed because there wasn’t a genuine need in the marketplace and his motives were selfish. Had Joe analyzed these questions foremost, his odds of driving a successful road would have dramatically improved. Several years ago, during the economic expansion, I noticed a standalone storefront being built in my mother’s neighborhood of Chandler, Arizona, a suburban bedroom community south of Phoenix. As the building went up and the store tenant moved in, the heat of failure percolated. How did I know? This new store was a hip-hop apparel boutique. Fasten your seat belt here comes failure! Why? The store violates the Commandment of Need. The neighborhood doesn’t need a hip-hop store. The area isn’t urban, there are no dance clubs nearby, and nothing looks remotely hip-hop. In fact, not 100 yards away there is an elder care retirement home. Is a 91-year-old grandpa the target market for hip-hop gear? The obvious problem here is selfishness. The owner is following his passions, and his love for hip-hop music and culture. Maybe a life co...

MONEY CHASERS CHASE MONEY, NOT NEEDS Frequently I read posts from aspiring entrepreneurs with grandiose goals of making a fortune by starting a business. Hang out at any business forum and you will see the misdirected, selfish foundation poisoning the well. How can I make money starting a business? What business can I start with $200 and still make $5K per month? What home-based business can I start? I have a friend who manufacturers widgets; you think I can make money selling them? What can I sell on Amazon so I can get passive income? What’s a good product to import from China and sell on eBay? What’s the best business to start on a shoestring? If you sit around and ask yourself these types of questions, you’ll likely fail because these dialogues expose your preoccupation with money, and not needs or value. You’ve got it backward! I call these entrepreneurs “money-chasers.” They hop from one business to the next, scalping and arbitraging market imbalances, rarely solving needs or creating momentum. Sometimes these selfish business owners use questionable business practices as customer needs are neglected and money is pursued with disturbing zealotry. Money chasers are consumer...

TO ATTRACT MONEY IS TO FORGET ABOUT MONEY Want to make big bucks? Then start attracting money instead of chasing it. Money is like a mischievous cat; if you chase it around the neighborhood, it eludes you. It hides up a tree, behind the rose bush, or in the garden. However, if you ignore it and focus on what attracts the cat, it comes to you and sits in your lap. Money isn’t attracted to selfish people. It is attracted to businesses that solve problems. It’s attracted to people who fill needs and add value. Solve needs massively and money massively attracts. The amount of money in your life is merely a reflection to the amount of value you have given to others. Ignore this symbiosis and money will ignore you. Successful businesses share one common trait: The satisfaction of consumer needs as reflected by sales in the marketplace. The marketplaces and consumers, not you, determine if your business is viable. If you sell 10 million anything, 10 million people have VOTED that your product will help them, or satisfy one of their needs. The only Fastlane road that works is a road paved with cement—rock hard needs, wants, and solutions—not sand. A rock hard pavement gives you the unfa...

A profitable business doesn’t guarantee wealth or time detachment. Some business owners are married to their businesses. Their business ostensibly is a job and a lifelong prison sentence. While giving up your heart and soul for a business is perfectly normal in the startup, growth, and maturation stage, it isn’t a prescription I’d want to endure for 40 years.

my favorite quote

If your business is based on a money-tree seedlings, it should be capable of growing a money tree. Content systems, computer systems, software systems, distribution systems, and human resource systems are all seedlings to money trees. If your business isn’t based on one, can one be added to make it passive?

Can the net income of this business scale limitlessly, say, from $2,000 per month to $200,000? Can the asset value of this business scale into the millions? Can this business impact millions? Or does it impact hundreds? Is its customer pool the world or a small community in the city? Can this business be replicated and expanded beyond the local trading area by franchising, chaining, or additional units? Best-case scenario, what is the units-sold potential? One hundred or one hundred million? Best-case scenario, how pliable is unit profit? Does it have magnitude? If you can’t affirm these questions, you might be stuck in a restrictive business where wealth creation is stifled. Tiny habitats create tiny wealth. Scale is large numbers. Think big, nationally, and globally. Big numbers, or scale, is the inroad to The Law of Effection. To make millions, you must affect millions. That doesn’t happen in a small store on Main Street, but in hundreds of stores across the country.

THE PRICE OF FREEDOM: MONEY Freedom has a price, and that price is money. Big dreams, from materialistic Ferraris to altruistic nonprofit foundations, cost money. You can’t travel the world by swimming in the oceans. You have to pay your way, and if you think money is evil, you’ve already lost.

No matter how big or small, dreams have a price, and that price is money, responsibility, accountability, and commitment. Yes, it will cost you money, but how much?

Get started today by looking three feet in front of you, not three miles. A long gaze at the mountain crest will overwhelm you, so stop looking at it. The key to achieving enormous tasks is to break them down into their smallest parts. You can’t run a 26-mile marathon by focusing on the 26th mile. You attack the first, then the second, third, and so forth. I see this repeated at the Fastlane forum (TheFastlaneForum.com): “I’d like to make $5,000/month; how do I do this?” Aside from the flawed “money chasing” logic, the first step is to make $50/month. You can’t make $5,000 per month until you learn how to make $50 per month! It’s amazing how people love to skip process and want events. To start your money system, find a quarter and drop it into a coffee can. Congratulations, you are 25 steps closer to your goal.

Then they decide if they want to invest time money and enter the space. To the untrained entrepreneur, a big company will scare would-be entrepreneurs almost like it scared me … “Oh jeez, how can I compete when they have 12 employees against little me?” If an entrepreneur thinks they can’t compete because you’re too big and too well-funded, you’ve won before they’ve even started. They either commit halfheartedly or defer to another industry with duller competition. Look big, but act small. CHAPTER SUMMARY: FASTLANE DISTINCTIONS Complaints are valuable insights into your customers’ minds. Complaints of change are difficult to decipher and often require additional data to validate or invalidate. Complaints of expectation expose operational problems in either your business, or in your marketing strategy. Complaints of void expose unmet needs, raise the value of your product or service, and expose new revenue opportunities. Great customer service is as simple as violating your customer’s low expectation in the positive.

When I started my entrepreneurial career fresh out of college, I trusted everyone. I bought all kinds of crazy schemes that promised wealth. What happens when you trust everyone? You get burned. You get lazy. You hire criminals. When you trust everyone, you chase business opportunities that violate the Commandment of Control. Others get to dictate your financial road trip. And when that happens, you crash and burn. There is only one person you can blindly trust in this world, and that is YOU. Why so cynical? If you don’t understand now, you will later. When you serve millions, you come in contact with millions. Only then will you understand the truth of the consumer/producer equation. Your eyes will be opened to how many people will go the extra mile to try to screw you. There is no place safe from liars, con artists, and crooks. These people commiserate in the least likely of places: your community church, that harmonic dating website, and at your posh country club. If I lose $10,000 on an investment that I meticulously investigated, I can deal with it. Easy come, easy go. Yet, if I have $10,000 stolen from me because I blindly trusted someone who I let into my vehicle, it’s different. Today I trust no one but give everyone the opportunity to prove trust. There are a lot of good people in this world, and they do outnumber the bad by a wide margin. It just takes a mild effort to find them and keep them in your life. Just be careful who you pick up on the side of the road. ...

This incongruity represents a one-way street: Fanatical customer service—service that SUCS—can help compensate for shortcomings, but fanatical features cannot compensate for poor customer service, or poor human interaction. The Venetian’s floor could have been made of solid gold. It wouldn’t have mattered. Nothing overcomes poor human experiences! You could own the best hotel located on the best beach, but if customers are treated like inconveniences and requests go unanswered, they won’t return. Exponential business growth is fueled by fanatical customer service, and your frontline employees must share your vision. It doesn’t come from boastful mission statements plastered on the CEO’S office wall.

Commoditization occurs when you get into business based on a false premise—“I want to own a business” or “I know how to do this, so I’ll start a business doing it.” If you are too busy copying or watching your competition, you’re not innovating. Use your competition to exploit their weaknesses, differentiate, and skew value.

Unique Selling Proposition

It’s ironic: To succeed a Fastlane we must forsake selfishness yet satisfy the selfishness of others. Did I say this would be a cozy stroll down the beach? The first human behavior you can count on is selfishness. People want what they want. People don’t care about you, your business, your product or your dreams; they want to help themselves and their family. It’s human nature. Therefore, our marketing messages must focus on benefits, not features. People need to be told exactly what’s in it for them. How will your product or service help them? What’s the benefit? In marketing speak, it’s called the “What’s In It For Me?” (WIIFM) principle. My customers were small-business owners and yet I served millions of consumers, too. This intermediary relationship allowed me to study the behavior of both consumers and producers in a powerful, accelerated fashion. I learned things in weeks that would take educators months to learn. I noticed that small-business owners fall into their own selfish trap and love singing the praises of their company. They sell features, not realizing that people rent convenience and events, not limousines. As consumers, we buy things to solve needs. We participate in transactions to fill voids.