The Ultimate Investment: A Roadmap to Grow Your Business and Build Multigenerational Wealth

By Mark B. Murphy

For years, Mark Murphy has commanded large audiences, informing them of the ins and outs of entrepreneurship, garnering wealth and growing it for the benefit of generational progeny. After years of sharing the same advice on repeat with different people across nearly every sector and industry, he decided to consolidate his best practices in the form of this book. In it, he unveils the key attributes of entrepreneurship and creating a winning culture, how leadership and emotional fitness play key roles in success, and how to avoid the pitfall of feeding your lifestyle before your investment portfolio. This book doles out Murphy’s tried and tested guidance and tips to top-tier clients, helping entrepreneurs mature into true business experts and lending a game plan to anyone who is eager to adopt a secure, tactical and achievable wealth strategy for the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Forbes Books
• Release date: Feb 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781955884686

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

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I’m in Las Vegas, giving a speech to several thousand dentists. The room is vast. I stand under the spotlight to address the crowd. I see them, but I also feel their penetrating gazes and keen ears, hanging on my every word. These are men and women from across the nation who have their own dentistry practices. They are accomplished, eager, ambitious.

I ask them a question, a seemingly simple one: How many of you consider yourself to be entrepreneurs? My voice echoes from the speakers situated strategically around the room and bounces off the walls. A sea of hands shoots up. I smile, and then I deliver the bombshell: despite what they think, I tell them, they are not entrepreneurs. Not in the truest sense, at least. I watch their befuddled and wary expressions process this statement. Then I spend the next few minutes explaining. The majority of them ran their own practices and owned their own jobs, not their own businesses. Sure, they had a practice, a front-desk receptionist, even a dental assistant, but at the end of the day, unless they showed up to fill cavities and examine enamel, their offices could not and would not function, and the money wouldn’t come in. They were trading time for money—just like in a job—instead of freeing up time so they could grow their businesses, accumulate exponential wealth, and leave a legacy for future generations. You can’t achieve freedom, I explained, to work and live as you please because you’re not able to overcome the constraints of time. If they were spending their days drilling teeth, when would they find time to achieve anything else? Then I proceeded to show them what their businesses, their bank balances, and their lives could look like if they truly did learn to shift from having a day job to being an entrepreneur in the truest sense. Many were taken aback, bemused, and more than a little surprised.

Unfortunately, this story isn’t exclusive to just those thousands of people in that room. And not just to dentists either. For too many entrepreneurs hailing from all industries across the spectrum, owning a business becomes about working with such single-minded focus that they miss out on all the beauties of true entrepreneurship and the wonderful things it can yield them: more time, less dependency, more money, and a better quality of life for them and their families.

Entrepreneurs are naturally unconventional, outside-the-box thinkers. It’s what makes them successful and so great at what they do. Because if they thought just like everybody else, they wouldn’t be blazing new paths for themselves and making the world an easier or better place for others.

That brings us to me—and this book. Let’s start with me. Who am I to be giving you this guidance? Why even listen to what I say? Well, for starters, I am a key business strategist, critical thinker, and financial advisor to entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial-thinking people. It sounds fancy, I know. To be honest I wasn’t always experienced in all things money. Decades ago I graduated from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University with a finance degree. And then I started the job hunt. Fortunately, a major insurance company offered me $1,000 a month, which was $1,000 more than I was making.

I always like to say the number one job of an entrepreneur is confidence—always believe in and bank on yourself. Based on this definition, I suppose I’ve been an entrepreneur from the get-go. I took the $1,000-a-month job, and I felt pretty good about it … until I read an article that said the average person graduating from business school that year was making $28,000. Back then that was a lot of money. When I read this, the first thing I did was lease a BMW, which was around a $300-a-month payment. Why? Because I was letting that entrepreneurial confidence lead my actions. I felt a BMW was what I imagined a successful person would own—a person making $28,000. I thought, hell, if the average person gets paid that much, I would do at least double that. So I made it a goal to earn at least $56,000 a year. With that and a few good suits, I set out as a financial advisor to make other people’s lives better.

Today I can proudly say I’ve made a success of myself but, more importantly, of my clients.

For the last thirty-five years, I’ve coached entrepreneurial spirits to reach higher, go bigger than they imagined possible, and achieve their dreams. I’ve taught them to stop getting paid for what they do and start getting paid for what they know.

As of this book, I’m fifty-nine years old. I am fortunate enough to be able to easily retire this very moment if I wanted, and retire comfortably. So why am I still here? Writing this book? Running my firm? Because my job is my passion. It’s my calling. Yours should be too. Many people work to retire, to get out of their job as soon as they can. But when you have a calling or a mission where you’re transforming people’s lives, and you wake up every day realizing you’re making a difference, you won’t want to retire.

This book is for any budding or aspiring or current entrepreneur. The field or industry you’re in is irrelevant. The tips I share in this book can be applied by anyone at any level. Even if you’re an employee clocking in at a nine-to-five, I’m confident this book will help you walk away with sound guidance. Whoever you are, whatever walk of life you come from, think of it as your road map to building multigenerational wealth.

In fact I wrote this book to document my thirty-six-year journey of coaching thousands of business owners into successful entrepreneurship. To talk about how I’ve helped them attain wealth for themselves and their future generations. After decades of helping, it struck me that the knowledge I share in this book is a necessity because so many clients I’ve worked with throughout the years have felt stuck in their business or careers at similar junctures. In working with me, they’ve transformed into entrepreneurs and investors. They’ve not only built multigenerational wealth, but they’ve also liberated their minds so they can enjoy, but also love, their lives and their businesses more than they imagined possible.

In this book I give you the same guidance I give to clients so you, too, can develop an entrepreneurial mindset and create a true business, reap financial benefits, and see your money and the quality of your life grow in positive directions.

What is an entrepreneurial mindset? An entrepreneurial mindset is uncommon or extraordinary thinking—it’s thinking differently—asking the next big question. Because whoever asks the most powerful questions and thinks the deepest wins.

And that’s exactly the purpose of this book: to teach you how to win, how to create a business that eliminates or reduces costs and competition. But that takes getting the organization to grow to where it’s no longer centered around the entrepreneur’s ability to produce a function or do the work.

A terrible truth is that most companies never get past the self-employed stage because they’re still running their businesses like a start-up. A company that employs ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred, two hundred, etc. employees but still focuses on the talent of the entrepreneur cannot grow. In this book I’ll teach you the difference between being self-employed and being a business owner who can grow wealth for themselves and their future generations.

What many fail to realize is that the roles of entrepreneur and business owner require different sets of skills. Most entrepreneurs don’t go to school to learn how to hire and fire people or lead a group. And the skills that entrepreneurs are attracted to often aren’t the same as those needed from the perspective of a business owner. As a result many never graduate beyond creating a job for themselves. But in shifting your mindset, suddenly, it’s not so much about putting in the hours. It’s about creating an organization that allows you to go from self-employed to business owner and then eventually to becoming an investor in that business. That is, if you want to.

But how can you get there? In this book I’ll help you think entrepreneurially and therefore think bigger. I will show you that what you thought was impossible is not only possible, but it’s also inevitable. I’ll teach you the entrepreneurial mindset so that you can find your calling and live the life you want—and who retires from that?

CHAPTER ONE

WHEN YOU’VE BOUGHT YOURSELF A JOB INSTEAD OF A BUSINESS

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Two decades ago I had a realization that forever transformed the way I viewed business. My dear friend and CEO of Fortune Management, Bernie Stoltz, and I were working with dentists from around the country. I noticed they were a cookie-cutter type in some ways. They all drove nice cars. They all sent their kids to great schools. They all took high-end vacations at exotic and luxurious places around the world. They were living the dream, enjoying life, and basking in the glow of success. But almost none of them were creating wealth, let alone generational wealth. Meaning none of their businesses were working to make money for them, or for their families, in the long run.

It became radically clear to me that people who didn’t have an entrepreneurial mindset (as we defined in the intro), whether they were an employee or self-employed, were just drawing paychecks every few weeks. And once they had that paycheck in hand, paid taxes, scheduled bills and the mortgage, and paid for grocery and restaurant runs, perhaps squeezing a few dollars into their 401(k) or investment account, they’d be left with the bare minimum. At that pace, forty years later, they could almost indefinitely toss any notion of a comfortable retirement out the window.

Was this a guess or an exaggeration? I wish it were, but no, unfortunately, it is not. Many successful dentists take a step down in their retirement years—and not by choice. After decades of hard work running their own businesses, they’re forced to downsize from large, lavish homes to smaller ones, from two cars to one, and from the fanciest restaurants to the five-o’clock special. No doubt, it was not the life they imagined living after decades of hard work.

Unfortunately, it is only at that stage that realization dawns: all these decades, they had achieved little more than a temporarily comfortable life. Here I want to pause and say that for many people, that might be just fine and exactly what they’re looking for. I’m not here to repudiate their thoughts or ambitions. But when someone hires me and my firm, my thought is