10 Steps to Build Wealth By: Dale Rector

Even if you don’t have two pennies to rub together, don’t be discouraged. There is a

proven way for you to build and sustain wealth. If you have the desire, motivation and

the discipline to become more than you are then you possess the qualities necessary to

develop wealth. In this article, I will provide a practical and achievable approach to help

you design your plan for prosperity.

The principal benefit of wealth is freedom. It allows you to choose your actions without

compromising your lifestyle. The assets and amount of money you accumulate in order

to achieve wealth, depends upon the lifestyle you dream of, and the choices you make.

It’s true. Many people have amassed large sums of money, and are by most standards

rich, yet they lack the true freedom wealth provides. Some are trapped by the fear of

losing their money, while others feel the need to continuously accumulate more and

more, simply to validate themselves. To obtain true freedom you must avoid these sorts

of traps. We are thus led to what I believe to be the first action of building wealth — the

kind of wealth providing freedom, contentment and true security.

Step1: Define Your Wealth Vision.

Consider for a few moments, your definition of wealth. Envision the lifestyle your wealth

can provide. The definitions of wealth and lifestyle are unique to every individual. Each

must be based on your personal ideas and decisions. So the first thing you must do is decide

what each means to you. There can be no right or wrong definitions, but you must have

definitions personal to you. What is the lifestyle you want for you and your family, and how

much wealth will it take to live your lifestyle?

Before moving on, you should have a clear understanding of what you want; your vision

of your future. For example, your vision of wealth might involve having a modest, paid-

for home with a self-sustaining small business to provide passive income in retirement

which can be passed on as a legacy for your family. Alternatively, you may have a

vision of wealth involving a high-profile career, having multiple offices, providing for

international travel and frequent networking engagements. Now write down your vision

— your “end game,” and keep it where you can quickly look at it and reflect upon it.

Reflecting on your end-game scenario is important for three reasons. First, it creates a

way to measure the cost — in time and talent — of achieving your vision. Second, it

helps define your path and highlights the benchmarks you must achieve on the way to

your vision. Finally, it discourages you from hastily changing your vision without first

considering the consequences. With vision clearly defined, pursuing the principles and

steps in this article will help you achieve the type of wealth your vision demands.

Step 2. Know Your Passion.

What is the driving force getting you out of bed in the morning? Would you say, “it’s my

job?” Millions of people would. They set their alarms each evening so they can be on time to

catch the subway, get to their cubicle or office, or clock in at the production plant or

warehouse. The job, however, often has very little to do with passion, unless of course,

you’re one of a select few, whose job is perfectly aligned with passion.

Those are a select group indeed. In

a 2015 Gallup poll, only about

31% of workers in the United

States reported being engaged at

their job. The remaining 69% don’t enjoy or feel invested in what

they are doing. When you’re passionate about what you do, you are always engaged.

Your passion is not a vision of things you own in the future. Staring at pictures of pristine

beaches, fancy cars and opulent homes can only motivate you temporarily. Material

possessions can certainly be benchmarks or goals, but ultimately they’ll be the

result and reward of pursuing your passion.

A passion is therefore some activity or initiative you undertake for a specific purpose or

outcome. The incredible thing about engaging in your passion activity, is loving everything

about it — just the act of engaging in it, gives you a sense of fulfillment and purpose. When

you’re working within your passion, you have a metaphorical internal combustion engine

driving you and providing you the commitment, stamina and tenacity to accomplish your

goal even in the face of overwhelming obstacles.

Wealth Advantage was founded out of my sincere desire to help others reach their full

potential, and experience financial and emotional freedom. The work I do is very

rewarding and provides me with a great sense of personal fulfillment — it is my passion

and my purpose. Know your passion and work toward living it everyday. Then you’ll

realize the power you have over circumstances and can plan to accumulate real wealth.

If you are having trouble identifying your passion , consider the following questions:

• What was I doing the last time I felt really proud of myself?
• Have others expressed sincere gratitude for something I’ve done or provided?
• What subjects do I search out in the library or on the internet?
• How can I help the greatest number of people?
• What was I doing when I felt “in the zone” and time passed quickly?
• What topics do I find myself talking about repeatedly?
• What activities energize me and reduce my stress?
• Do people seek me out for advice, and if so, what about, and did I help?
• What problems would I like to solve?
• What legacy do I want to leave to my family and society?

You can certainly add many questions to this list. The more questions you ask yourself,

the greater the insight and better the outcomes. Simply by brainstorming these

questions and writing out your answers, you should see commonalities or patterns

emerge. Reflect on your relationships with family and friends. Do you typically have

harmony or discord? What about work? What career decisions have you made in the

past, but more importantly, why did you make those decisions? Taking stock of all this

is important. You can make conscious decisions to work toward activities from which

you derive energy and purpose, and modify or eliminate activities which are sources of

stress that drain you physically and emotionally.

Step 3. Align Your Passion.

This is where you can begin to

see your passion, your purpose, as

being more than something which

simply makes you happy. To

create wealth, you must determine how your passion can create value for your community and society. After all, we don’t get

paid to have fun, we get paid to create value. It is up to us to create value in a way that is fun

and fulfilling for ourselves.

I'm confident the passion providing you with fulfillment and purpose will also fulfill a

need in society. Your objective then, is to connect our passion to high-value societal

needs to create a mission statement for your life. Your passion will then drive your

mission statement to help you make decisions which create value for society.

Extracting this value is the secret to a powerful wealth engine.

Aligning work with your passion also helps avoid internal conflicts. Too often, we don't

connect our passion to high-value societal goals. We're hard-wired to believe our work

must be difficult, otherwise it wouldn’t be called work. As a result, our passion can

become more of a hobby and our lives become divided between work and that "other

part of our lives." The result is a loss of focus and distraction due to competition

between the two for our time and talent. The error is compounded if you work for

someone else and end up applying your time and talent toward pursuing their goals,

which of course may not be aligned with your own. The consequences are magnified

again if you don’t know how much your passion and personal mission statement are

really worth to others.

Step 4. Assess Your Personality Style.

Knowing your personality style will help determine a strategic path for you to pursue

consistent with your character and nature. A common metric for assessing personality is the

DISC model which simply asks; (a) are you outgoing or reserved? and (b) are you people

oriented or task oriented? From the answers, your profile will fit into one of the quadrants

below. This simple tool can help you gain insight to your personality style.

Dominance – driven, decisive, forceful, direct, results-oriented.

Influence – enthusiastic, optimistic, relationship-oriented.

Steadiness – Loyal, patient, even tempered, team-oriented.

Compliance – Precise, analytical, systematic, process-oriented.

Like your view of wealth, there isn’t a good or bad. The personality profile and the

above model certainly doesn’t cover all of the variables which make up a personality.

Wealth Advantage utilizes a more detailed method with clients. However, knowing how

your responses fit into the DISC model quadrants, can help you understand how you:

• Perceive and motivate yourself
• Prefer to learn and deal with stress
• Interrelate with others and address social challenges
• Make decisions and solve problems
• Deal with risk

Beyond the general personality type identified in the DISC, you have picked up a host of

personality characteristics and values over your lifetime, such as honesty,

resourcefulness, integrity, reliability, and a responsible work ethic. Of course the

opposite could also be true, and bad habits do not create value and actively work

against every aspect of building wealth. Purging bad habits, eliminating negative self-

talk, and freeing yourself from guilt are critical to a firm foundation for building wealth,

which requires confidence and high self-esteem.

Step 5. Assess Your Skills.

Later, you will be asked to choose a wealth building strategy. Regardless of the one

chosen, each has a core set of essential skills essential to success. You can probably rattle off

quite a few things you do well, and quite a few you perform not so well. However, in

assessing your skills, you’ll need to go deeper, not simply random thoughts.

In order to identify your skill sets, I highly recommend reviewing your past

achievements, taking a skill assessment survey and engaging in peer reviews.

When reviewing your past achievements, consider:

• Your resume
• Classes you have taken in school
• Hobbies
• Community roles

Skill assessments that ask you to self-rank yourself are valuable, but also subjective.

As such, surveys are more valuable in conjunction with peer reviews. Peer reviews

involve having people close to you review your self-rankings or rank you independently

and anonymously on a survey. Let them know their input is very important to what

you’re wanting to accomplish. Some of the information you gain in this way may

pleasantly surprise you, but don’t discount the value of harsh or negative feedback.

Remember your goal is to accumulate objective data to process.

In the table below are some of the most powerful interpersonal skills for building

wealth. The good news is, it only takes mastery of a few of these powerful skills to

create tremendous value and none require a formal education.

Your interpersonal skills will become the backbone of creating value, and therefore

essential to building wealth. This is why I truly believe anyone can build wealth. Simply

put, it costs very little, if anything to develop a skill set that creates tremendous value.

Look at the skill sets you’ve placed into your personal profile. Rank them by how

proficient you believe you are in each. Have you taken the time to invest specifically

into any or all of the most important skills? Are you the proverbial “jack of all trades, but

master of none?” From my experience, the majority of people are unable to

turn their skills into wealth. This is mainly because they are satisfied with just the basics

of a skill, especially true for those who’ve satisfied the minimum requirements for a job. The

result is an expert in a job description, instead of expertise in a set of skills. This is

shortsighted, and leads to opportunity blindness and a sense of dependence upon a job

or a job title.

You are not what you do. You do what you are. When you’ve honed a skill to

perfection, you’ll see countless ways to utilize it. This in turn provides you with

opportunities and creates competition for your time and talent. Imagine all the fields

which utilize the skills of a top-notch negotiator, project manager, influencer,

communicator or researcher. The compensation for the best in a field is much higher

than for the mediocre. Skills allow you to rise above your competitors and invest the

difference in your future.

Step 6. Determine Your Wealth-Building Strategy (WBS).

A wealth-building strategy is a proven method of creating value for yourself and society,

which has withstood the test of time. By aligning your passion, personality, and skills, with a

wealth building strategy, you create value for society in a way that creates fulfillment for

yourself and a mechanism to extract value. You might think the fastest and simplest wealth-

building strategy is to get a job. However, in today’s economy, this may only be an illusion

of financial security and ultimately abdicates control of your earning potential to an

employer. There are many creative wealth-building strategies, including but not limited to:

Each of the strategies above generally lend themselves to a particular personality profile.

For example, a person with an influence personality may be more apt to excel at a sales and

marketing strategy compared to a compliance personality. On the other hand, the discipline

of the investment and commodities strategy lends itself well to compliance rather than an

influence personality. That said, a number of the strategies have sub-categories which will

allow different personality styles to thrive. The real estate strategy for example, can appeal

to a dominance personality who desires to build custom homes, a compliance personality

who wants to start a property management company, an influence personality who desires to

buy and sell, or a steadiness personality with a passion to restore old homes.

There is no shortage of information about every wealth-building strategy imaginable.

Once your passion is aligned with a WBS, it will be easy to learn everything you desire

about your chosen strategy. This is a critically important step though, because learning

from other’s successes and failures saves the most critical of all resources – time. Start

looking for opportunities to acquire knowledge, resources and contacts to help you fulfill

your wealth vision.

Step 7. Define Your Action Plan.

Create a strategic and tactical plan with a defined timeline and benchmarks to improve

towards your wealth vision daily. Your plan should include the following:

• A fully written version of your wealth vision along with the timeline in which youhave given yourself to fulfill it.
• A breakdown of the individual milestones needed to achieve your wealth vision and the time frame for each.
• Commitment to a wealth-building strategy which is consistent with your passion and personality.
• An honest assessment of your personality characteristics and a defined plan to eliminate bad habits and strengthen habits which build confidence.
• A gap assessment between your current skill set and that needed to succeed in your chosen WBS, along with an ongoing training plan to address shortfalls.
• A resource assessment to determine what services, capital and partnerships you have that can accelerate your plan.
• A defined time to recharge, reflect, and celebrate success on at least a monthly basis.

Step 8. Relentlessly Work Your Plan.

It is absolutely true the only things you need to become wealthy are an exemplary skill

set and consistent focused effort. This is because all other resources you need can be

exchanged for your skill. You will face challenges, obstacles and setbacks, but if you have

developed a plan consistent with a passion that fulfills your purpose, you will be motivated

to weather the storms.

The biggest challenges will

come from other people. Be wary

of those who would encourage

you to settle for less than your

vision of wealth. Some are

genuinely concerned for your

wellbeing, afraid for you to take

risk. However, they shouldn’t be

concerned because your confidence comes from your skills, which can’t be taken away.

Others will unknowingly encourage you to settle for average. This is what they've done

and their self-esteem would be hurt by comparison. And yet others will want you to

share your gains with them, as soon as you’ve accumulated them, for any number of

heartfelt reasons.

Hard as it is, the best action you can take is to fulfill your wealth vision first — then

share from your abundance. Robbing the nest egg along the way will severely delay your

plan and could reduce or eliminate what you’d like to give later. Money consumed by others

is not invested by you, and can’t be leveraged. Share with them the principles you’ve

learned in this article and other resources, and become a mentor to help them resolve their

short-term and long-term issues with money.

Step 9. Extract the Full Value of Your Skills.

As you work through your

wealth building strategy, always

look for opportunities to increase

your skill and maximize your

share of the value you provide to

others. There are nuances to each

skill, and with a little practice and

application, you can unlock the true value. How much more cost, time delay, and material

risk could a highly skilled project manager avoid on the construction of a $20 Million dollar

office building, compared to a novice or even average project manager who is there for a

paycheck. Let’s say the highly skilled project manager can look over the details and

blueprints and confidently say, “I can skillfully run this project and save at least 10%.” Your

skill therefore represents a value of $2 Million dollars to the project owner, who would

likely be happy to pay an additional 1% or $200,000 when the project is completed for $18

Million. Your skills have given you the opportunity to be invested in this project outcome

and for the owner to be invested in you.

You must constantly consider the value of the outcome, not necessarily the time spent.

Value comes in the form of avoided cost, avoided time, increased profit, increased

flexibility, increased response time, improved relationships and any number of other

measures. The more ways to quantify and communicate value, the higher the

compensation you receive, and subsequently the more you can invest in your wealth

vision.

Step 10. Leverage Your Skills.

Skills can be leveraged in many ways. The first is to use your skill to build a reputation.

You take on opportunities with progressively larger value and perhaps more risk, thus

greater compensation. For example, begin by using your communication skills to resolve

conflicts between individuals in a business partnership, then move up to brokering an

agreement between two small businesses, and later between large corporations. There is no

end to the number of conflicts which need to be resolved or common ground which needs to

be reached. The value associated with the skills of communication and negotiation, over

time, can be tremendous.

Another method is to use your

skills to compliment those of

others. You may want to partner

and share the profit on a high-

value project which would benefit from the skills of both partners. For example, using your

project management skill to partner with someone who has outstanding sales skills, could

result in a number of lucrative projects you could not achieve alone.

Yet another is to utilize your skill in multiple fields such as using your negotiation

expertise to broker the sale of a business one week and the purchase of an investment

property the next. Opportunity is everywhere for the vigilant and prepared.

Conclusion

Take the first step today by investing in yourself and your skills. Follow

the process above and you will achieve the success and wealth you desire. How

quickly that happens depends on your determination and focus, as well as how adept

you are at recognizing opportunities for your skill. Don’t be discouraged by challenges

along the way. Your skills will allow you to overcome or recover as needed. These

challenges will allow you to appreciate your future wealth and freedom. Use this

freedom to pass on your knowledge. Share your successes and failures, so others may

be encouraged and inspired to pursue their own passion to prosperity. There is, after

all, enough for everyone.

Dale Rector, MBA

Co-Founder

[email protected]

www.wealthadvantage.net