If you want to be rich, work for free
Do you know what’s ironic? Most people start a business where they’ll have to sell something, but they don’t take the time to learn how to sell! And they wonder why they fail.
I’ve always studied the ultra successful and the rich and sought to understand how they achieved what they did. Even though everyone got there differently, I discovered that they all possess similar skillsets, and they’re all masters at one particular skill—selling.
Are you selling? By understanding and mastering sales (the study and ability of how to get money), you’ll avoid the days of struggling to get clients, of just getting by, which is the bottleneck I’ve observed most often through my years of working with entrepreneurs. And the best way to master selling is to put yourself in a situation where you have no other choice but to sell. It’s going to be forced on you anyway. That’s just the nature of business. So, either get a coach to teach you or start with a commission-only sales job. I’m so thankful I was repeatedly told that if I wanted to be rich, work for free—because everything that has contributed to my success in life, I learned and mastered in jobs that paid commission only.
My first commission sales job was selling real estate online. I had already failed with six online business startups and struggled to monetize my services through a constant stream of high ticket sales.
Before that job, I sold my time hourly in construction. However, I knew I could do more, and I wasn’t satisfied with my income or lifestyle. I’ve always been the type to take risks and push the boundaries of what’s possible, and since people who build wealth tend to gravitate toward real estate, I used my last $200 to sign up for a conference about house flipping. I thought this would be my final attempt to start a successful business.
A friend and I showed up at the conference at lunchtime. As I was standing in line waiting to get coffee, I met a fellow who had an online business. He was walking in circles and said out loud three times, “Is this the back of the line?” Nobody replied, so I called him over and said, “Hey, jump in with me.”
He joined me, and I was going to leave it there. But he noticed I was wearing a gold watch and said, “Nice watch.” We began to talk about real estate, building wealth, business, and sales. We shared what we had tried in the past, and I told him I wanted to start an online business to fund real estate investments because construction work just wasn’t quick enough. He already had a multi-million dollar online business selling real estate education, so I figured this was the perfect opportunity to learn how to start successful online businesses and do real estate.
I did my best to sell myself, but my limited sales knowledge only got him to follow himself on Instagram using my phone.
As my friend and I walked back to the seminar room, I asked, “Do you think I sold him on me?” He said he didn’t know, so I decided I hadn’t done well enough and went to find the businessman again.
I said, “You mentioned expanding your sales team. How serious were you?”
He looked at me and replied, “I’m dead serious.”
In a final attempt to show him my drive, I said, “Well, I’m dead serious too, and if you told me I had the job, I would drop everything—my job, friends, family and the life I’ve built—to start tomorrow. And I’ll work harder than anyone else in your office.”
He studied me and said, “Spencer, that’s exactly the type of guy we want working here!”
I got the job but didn’t start the next day because they gave me two books to read, two book reports to write, a 97 question test, and a sales script to practice. However, I finished my homework within a week, then drove west on the TransCanada highway for 26 hours, in the midst of winter, stopping only for gas. My destination was Winnipeg, and I arrived there with only $300 in my pocket, which I immediately spent on groceries. The job I had taken was to help the team run their weekend seminar on wealth building. It was commission-only, but within 30 days, I was the highest performing member on that team, earning six-figure monthly paychecks. I was 19.
That experience taught me a valuable lesson about follow-up and urgency. I would never have gotten that role if I hadn’t gone back to follow up with the businessman and show how serious I was. I later found out that he had flown from Manitoba to Ontario for the conference to interview someone who had been “considering” the sales position for two months. You guessed it! The fellow lost the opportunity to someone who had urgency and knew how to create it in others (something I had no idea I was doing); I took his place.
It’s hard to describe how magical it felt seeing the different ways I was going about my businesses wrong and finally understanding how simple it can be when you have the know-how. There was also the realization that you can only learn some things through experience. For example, I had just worked two weeks of hard manual labour renovating houses to earn $1,200, yet a seven-and-a- half-minute sales call on my second day in Winnipeg netted $1,700. It was surreal. At that moment, I knew I would never go back to a regular job again. Learning that it’s possible to earn that kind of money in mere minutes, with the right systems and skills, helped me understand that building wealth is within reach for anyone who learns how. I’ve since acquired an addiction to constantly get better, sharpen my skills, help more people, and earn more doing it. And now that I have three successful online businesses, I’ve also realized the most important thing I learned while working for “free” was how to make money. Because of this, I’ll never have money problems again, nor have to rely on anyone else, and I’ll always determine how much I make.
Want to be rich? WORK FOR FREE or go all in like I did. Put everything on the line, and give yourself no other option but to master the making of money. You need to understand sales at the deepest level and master it. That’s just the way it is.
