Graham Cochrane (00:01.108)
Most people think becoming a millionaire requires outrageous risk, insane luck, or some genius idea that no one has ever thought of. But the truth is, the fastest way to seven figures is surprisingly boring. No flashy moves, no overnight miracles, just three simple steps. Repeatable, predictable, and available to almost anyone willing to learn.
I call it the boring $1 million playbook. And once you hear how it works, you'll never look at wealth the same way again. Let's dive in.
Graham Cochrane (00:47.918)
So take it from someone who, as a musician and then audio engineer by trade, never thought I would make a million dollars or see a million dollars in my lifetime, but have now since generated $20 million online and have become a multimillionaire. I've been surprised at how it worked. I had assumptions about who millionaires were. I had assumptions about how millions were made.
because that's what we do when we don't actually know the truth. In our ignorance, we assume. And ignorance doesn't mean you're stupid. It just means you don't know how something works. Just like I'm ignorant about how to fix a car. Not because I'm stupid, but because I don't understand car mechanics or engines or any of that kind of stuff. That is an area of ignorance I have, right? So we all have areas of ignorance. In fact, that's how we came into this world.
as babies ignorant of everything until we learn. That's why learning is the most valuable thing you can do. That's why you're enjoying this episode right now. I was ignorant of what millionaires were, how you became one, or how you just generated wealth in big numbers, right? Like I didn't know how it was possible. Now there are a lot of ways to generate millions of dollars. But what I want to share with you today is
If you boil it all down into three steps, like if you were my friend and we sat down and you said, Graham, help me become a millionaire, the most predictable, simple, doable, and therefore fast way, what would you tell me to do? These are the three steps I would tell you to do. Are you ready? I'm going to walk through them high level, but I think this is going to click for you because it's no more complicated than this. And the great news is these are principles that will work in any economy.
in any country, in any season of life, no matter who you are, if you apply the principles, principles don't discriminate, right? They just work. So this is not tactics. These are principles. So you can take them and run with them. Are you ready?
Graham Cochrane (03:01.518)
Step number one is you gotta build a business. Now, if you're already a business owner, you're like, great, you're gonna enjoy the rest of this episode, it'll give you some clarity. If you haven't started a business, you're like, wait, what, I gotta start a business? Now, you don't have to start a business to become a millionaire, but a recent stat showed that 91 % of those with a net worth of $5 million or more, so really wealthy people, people that have a net worth,
of $5 million or more, 91 % of them are entrepreneurs. What does that tell us? That tells us that the most sure way to become a millionaire is to own your own business. Don't work for somebody else. You can become a millionaire working for someone else. That's not what I'm saying. But if the majority of $5 million and up asset class people or net worth people are entrepreneurs, we should pay attention.
Business is the fastest, most reliable way to become wealthy. Not day trading, not investing in crypto, not becoming an inventor, not becoming a celebrity. All of those can work and there are always outliers, but the data shows us that 91 % of those who have $5 million or more of assets, net worth, are entrepreneurs. So, the first and most reliable way to become a millionaire is to build your own business.
And when I say business, I'm talking about build a solopreneur online business. Now, this is where I'm getting a little more specific because you can really go with any business, but I want to give you the easiest path. Building a simple one person solopreneur business on online coach, content creator like that is the easiest type of business to build. There's no overhead. You maybe start with a domain name and some hosting, right? You maybe need a hundred bucks a month to get started.
Everyone can come up with a hundred bucks a month if you want to be wealthy, right? It's the most accessible path to becoming a millionaire. There are no gatekeepers. You don't have to have an education. You don't have to go to college. You don't have to have a office space. You don't have to have a lot of equipment. There's just so few barriers that that's why I would say starting a solopreneur business is the number one step because you need the business to create cash. So it's a boring decision. Start a business.
Graham Cochrane (05:25.42)
but it'll change your life. I was a musician and an audio engineer. I lost two jobs in the great financial collapse of 2008, 2009. I had a wife and a baby and a mortgage at age 26. I was broke. We were on government assistance, food stamps. I didn't know what to do. And it was in that world that I got this whisper from the Lord to start a business. I was like, what are we talking about here? don't know anything about business. I don't want a business. I just want money.
I now know that starting a simple business was the most transformative thing I could ever done to become wealthy. I don't need a job. I haven't had a job in 16 years because I started a business. But more importantly, that business made me a millionaire and then a multimillionaire. Okay, so you start the business. How do we do this at a high level? I'm gonna keep it super high level for you today. Do not get into the weeds. Do not get stressed out. At the end of the day, businesses that thrive, you have
one core offer that solves one specific problem for one specific person. Okay, it can get more complicated than this, but one core offer, which is something you sell, could be a product or service, that solves one key problem for one specific person. That's your business. You get to decide who the person is you want to serve. You get to figure out what problem it is you want to own and solve because that person probably has lots of problems.
and you get to craft the type of offer you want for that type of person. Now, an exercise I take my clients through is something I call the perfect client code. And the perfect client code breaks this all down in a lot more depth. But at the end of the day, imagine three circles and a Venn diagram coming together. There's three core elements to your business. Who is the person you wanna solve? What's their name? What's their backstory? What's their age? What kind of season of life are they in? Just get to know this type of person.
or hint hint that kind of that person might have been who you used to be before you solved your own problem. So you probably know that person intimately if you do an audit of how you felt who you were in that season. But you need to get a clear picture of who you want to serve not everybody. Your business can't be for everybody. It's got to be for one person. And the beautiful thing is when you make it for one person you will attract lots of those types of people you'll actually sell more. So it's not limiting yourself it's actually
Graham Cochrane (07:45.454)
business strategy to have one type of person that you serve. So pick that person, identify their one overarching problem, right? So is it I help moms over 30 lose weight? So it's moms over 30, so it's women that have children that are over the certain age group that's a very specific type of person. What's the big problem? Losing weight, okay? What's their big dream? To be in the best shape ever, to be able to...
wear a bathing suit at the pool or the beach and feel proud of their body to not, I don't know what it like, you decide what that big dream is that they have. It's the antithesis of the problem and vice versa. And you're living in this sort of triangle. This person with this problem with this dream outcome and your offer is gonna help them solve that problem and get them from that problem to the dream outcome. That's all your business is. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.
However you want to serve that person, however you want to interact with them, however you want to get them the payoff, it's up to you. But that's all business is. And a solopreneur business, creating content for that one type of person, creating offers for that one type of person, serving that one type of person is so easy. You can do one-on-one coaching on Zoom. You can do a group coaching program. You can create an online course. You can write a book.
You can be a speaker. There's a lot of different ways to monetize that solving of that problem and delivering the dream outcome. But it's all around that one person. Does this make sense? So I go way more in depth in the perfect client code from within my other trainings and things like that. But just at a high level, don't make it more complicated than that. Pick the person you're going to serve. And show up powerfully for that person. Speak to that person's needs, that person's pain points, that person's deepest fears.
When you get online and you should have an online presence as a personal brand, you have a YouTube channel, you have Instagram, you have a podcast. This is where you show up powerfully and speak to that one person over and over again, mention the problems, to talk about the payoffs and the dream outcomes they have, and then people start to realize, she's my girl, he's my guy, I need to work with him, I need to work with her, how can you help me? Now if you need help creating an offer that will crush,
Graham Cochrane (10:05.41)
You just need to come to my 10K offer challenge. I run a live five day coaching experience where I teach you to build a high ticket, $10,000 or more or less, whatever price you really want to land on, how to create a high ticket, irresistible offer that you can sell and how to sell it to people, regular people, right? How to have the confidence to sell, how to do it without one-on-one sales calls. We'll build out your offer live in five days with me. So just
Go to the link in the description, 10koffertchallenge.com. You can see the dates for the next one. Come hang out with me. We'll set up your offer once and for all so you can build a highly profitable business.
Graham Cochrane (11:01.506)
This is step one, build a profitable business. This is something that I teach in my upcoming book, The Effortless Business, a high income, low maintenance business, right? It is going to serve one avatar, solving one core problem with one core offer. And what that's going to give you once you get this up and running is profit. And profit is a wonderful thing, meaning after you've paid yourself,
a salary or whatever for doing the work and you've paid your expenses which will be very low because these online coaching style businesses are very high profit, low expense businesses. Once you've got that profit coming in, you move to step two of the boring million dollar playbook and that is you reinvest in your growth. When it comes to investing,
and I have invested a lot of different things. I have stocks, I have real estate, I have private equity, I've done private lending, I have oil and gas, I've got buying individual businesses like venture capital startup, I've done all kinds of stuff. The one investment that has paid me the highest ROI by a landslide is reinvesting in myself and my business.
So here's what this looks like for you. There's two ways to think about reinvesting this profit. Because here's what you're gonna be tempted to do. The moment you start this kind of business and you get some traction and now you've got some extra money in your account and the profits coming in. The number one thing people are gonna do is increase their lifestyle. They're gonna increase their lifestyle. Don't do that. The lifestyle will come later, but do not blow that profit on lifestyle. Don't buy that nice car. Don't upgrade your house. Don't take that crazy vacation.
yet. If you do that, you will never become a millionaire. this is just, if you can just delay it for a year maybe, maybe two, like you can change your life, you can change your financial future. So profit comes in and the key is to put it where it's going to grow and multiply even more. The goal of your business is multiplication. You serve somebody powerfully and you get rewarded with income.
Graham Cochrane (13:20.502)
you bring in more profit, if you spend it, then you're just in a cycle of, gotta make it and I spend it, make it and spend it. Now you never become a millionaire. But if you break that cycle, take the profit that's coming in and view that profit as seeds that you replant, you reinvest, you'll get more than those seeds. You take the profit. If the profit is a seed and you put it in the ground, you get a whole nother tree with tons of fruit, with tons of seeds inside that. Now we have more to play with. So the number one investment you can make
is in your personal development and in your business. So there's two ways to think about this. One is you personally and the other is your business. You personally is the highest investment you can ever make because you are the greatest asset in your business. So this is going to look like at a base level, buying personal development books to read and actually read them, buying courses to grow your skills, your emotional intelligence, your sales skills, your copywriting skills.
You're presenting in communication skills, right? If you're a coach, invest in coaching skills. How to become a better coach? Ask better questions, right? So you invest in yourself, your personal development, mindset work, how to become more resilient, time management, whatever. Relationships, how to relate to people better, right? Like one of the best investments you could ever make.
is buying a simple book called How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie. Like, if you read that book and you learn how to have better relationships and interact with people better, like everything gets better. So personal growth, personal development, and then business growth, business development. The business growth side can look like very similar business growth books, money books, courses.
but then really take it up another level. Join coaching programs, join masterminds, hire a private coach. Best money I've ever spent is in my coaching and masterminds. This year alone, I spent over half a million dollars in coaching and masterminds. It's insane. And I've, because of those coaching and masterminds, because of that $500,000 investment this year alone, I've generated an additional
Graham Cochrane (15:46.534)
$1.3 million that I wouldn't have had otherwise. So, I mean, that's insane. What is that, a 230 % rate of return? It's insane. I've never had anything in real estate, private equity, stocks, nothing has returned like investing in coaching, consulting, mastermind, stuff like that. And the great thing is, now that you have a business, you have an entity,
your investment in a coach or a mastermind or a coaching program or even a course is a tax deductible expense. Obviously check with your own accountant. This is not financial advice or legal advice, but if you are using profit for the purpose of creating more profit in the business and growing the business, including your training and continuing education, in most instances, that is a tax deductible thing. So then you get a tax break on investing.
and yourself, just like putting money in a 401k gives you a tax deduction, you get a tax deduction by investing in yourself. The 40 me-k, whatever you wanna call it, right? So it's insane how it compounds. I spent $500,000 on coaching in a 40 % tax bracket, whatever I'm in, it's gonna save me $180,000 in taxes, and then I get the $1.3 million return, like then your ROI is even crazier. So.
Best investment you can make, right? But then another way reinvesting in your business looks like is new software or tools that will help you buy back more of your time. So AI tools or assistance and VAs or employees or team members that you can offload some of the important things in your business that you no longer have to do. So you get your time so you can think, so you can execute, so you can sell, so you can grow, so you can ideate, so you can reflect, so you can get coaching, so you can travel, all those different things.
invest money back into the business to grow the business. This creates a virtuous cycle. They have vicious cycles that go the other way. A virtuous cycle goes in the positive direction, where now you are taking money from the business, not your own money, just profit from the business, reinvesting back into the business, back into your personal development, back into your growth as an entrepreneur, and now you're making even more money because of it. This is step two. This is how
Graham Cochrane (18:09.262)
a $50,000 a year business or a $100,000 a year business becomes a million dollar a year business, right? This is the way. You can't do it on your own. I've generated tens of millions of dollars and I still have a coach. I still am in masterminds. I still buy books and courses and coaching. It's never stops. It's the best investment you'll ever make. Once you do step one, build the business. Step two, reinvest for growth and you get this beautiful cycle.
then you need to do step three because those things just give you a highly profitable business that can grow. They don't make you a millionaire because by definition, a millionaire is a net worth millionaire, meaning you have a million dollars accessible to you or assets that total up to a million dollars, right? Minus the debt on them. Assets minus liabilities is your net worth. So income comes and goes. Business comes and goes. As much as I reinvest in myself,
and I encourage you to do the same. The real key to becoming a boring millionaire is to once you've got that reinvestment going so that the business is really growing and multiplying, start to pull out a portion of that profit every month and invest into other assets outside of the business. This is step three. You wanna buy assets with your overflow. And this is going to be the place where most people get tripped up because the more money you make,
the more people come out of the woodwork to tell you how to invest that money and talk about all these random schemes, or you get on TikTok for your financial device, which is generally a bad idea, because what you're going to see is trendy stuff, stuff that gets clicks, and stuff that you don't understand, and it may not be a good fit for you in your situation. If you're an entrepreneur, this is the way I think about it. You can do whatever you want with your money. This is the way I think about it. As an entrepreneur, I'm already taking on a lot of risk. I don't have a guaranteed salary. It is up to me to go make money.
So in theory, I have a risky asset in my business. Now I don't view it as that risky because I have control over it and I'm willing to do whatever I need to do and pivot and evolve. I'm not dependent on a market outside of my control. So I like being in the driver's seat of my business, but it's inherently risky. It's not a guaranteed income. Therefore, why would I take the money from a risky business and put it into something speculative and risky as an outside investment? It just doesn't make a lot of sense.
Graham Cochrane (20:36.21)
I want to lock in my gains, as it were. So I want to take profit from my business. Now that I've been coming to reinvest a lot of that into my business, so the business keeps growing and I keep growing, I will now take a percentage of that extra profit and buy boring investments, boring asset classes. And you know what the best ones are, in my humble opinion? Stock index funds and real estate.
It's as simple as that. I mean, you can go wild, but the most boring two asset classes you can be in are stocks and real estate. And I don't buy individual stocks because that's risky. Who knows what Amazon or Dell or Nvidia or Tesla stock is gonna be doing in three months. why would I bet on any other one other risky company? No, no, no, I buy a stock index fund, meaning I own a basket of all of the companies.
I bet on the market as a whole because the data historically shows us through multiple world wars and bombings in the World Trade Center and pandemics and inflation and stagflation and nuclear threats and whatever, through all of that, the market has returned a healthy 10 % on average in the US. So that tells me if I just keep buying into the stock market as a whole,
dollar cost averaging, betting on the market long term, betting on human ingenuity, not any one company, because Pepsi might be gone, but Coke might do well, or this one AI company might go out, but a new one will come in. I don't know the future, so I'm going to buy all of them. I own all the horses in the race. And yeah, I might not have any great massive gains, but I'm going to win the race because I own all the horses. The big massive gains come in my business. I own 100 % stock of my business, so I already have
I'm all in on this one business and that's risky enough and I'll take the big gains there and then I'm going to lock in those gains in something a lot more guaranteed to be stable. Now obviously the stock market is not guaranteed. It goes up and it goes down. I don't look at it because I don't need that money. I'm building assets for the future. So stock index funds, boring, predictable. You're going to be glad you owned them for 30, 40 years. Okay. And then the second is real estate. Can't go wrong with real estate long term. Now I don't have a ton of real estate. I own a handful of properties.
Graham Cochrane (23:04.204)
But to me, it is stable, it is boring, there's some simple tax benefits, it's tangible, it's real, people will always need a place to live. And so why not invest in something that I can know my equity is safe and it's gonna grow at a reasonable rate of return? Again, those are very boring asset classes, but they're historically proven to make people millionaires. So I'm not gonna say real estate's gonna make me a millionaire or stock index funds are gonna make me a millionaire.
my business, my reinvestment in myself to grow the business and be more valuable in the marketplace creates the profit that then I park in these stable growing asset classes. And that is the boring path to becoming a millionaire.
I hope this is making sense. When you do this, you got a cash flowing business, you're constantly growing and constantly evolving so your business can grow and then you're parking that cash flow into very boring, stable-ish investments, then millionaire status becomes inevitable. But you're not gonna have anything really cool to talk about at the Christmas party or at the lunch table with your colleagues.
You're not going to be able to flash your strategy or your investments or what you're doing, but you will literally be worth millions of dollars, if not tens of millions of dollars. And you'll have continuing cash flow to not only fuel your investments so you can become a millionaire, whatever that means to you, but to fuel your lifestyle. The lifestyle we talked about earlier, I said don't invest your profit into your lifestyle in the first year or two. Yeah, so that you can grow. And then now I have
extra, extra profit to build my millionaire net worth and then I can enjoy the extra lifestyle. Get that car you want, upgrade your house, take that vacation, do it all. But there's an order to it. And that's it. That is it. My question for you is really, really simple. How badly do you want to become a millionaire? Because if you really want to become a millionaire, this is the play you run.
Graham Cochrane (25:19.416)
become a business owner and build a simple, lean, solopreneur online business. Reinvest that profit into yourself and into your business, putting fuel on the fire. And then out of that overflow, invest in boring asset classes outside of your business, outside of yourself, like stock index funds and real estate. That's the play, my friend. So.
If you're watching on YouTube, leave me a comment. Let me know, have you run this play? If so, which step are you on?
What do you think about it? Is this exciting? No. Does it work? Yes. This is the way. So what would you rather have? An exciting, scary, risky plan that probably won't work, but sounds cool and titillating to talk about at the Christmas party? Or would you like a steady, reliable, repeatable, predictable playbook to becoming a boring millionaire? I'll choose the latter.
But that's just me. Again, the business is the most important part. That's why I teach how to do this. Because I built my business to build the life I want and serve my life, not the other way around. So the reason I like business is because it fuels my life goals, my generosity goals, my personal financial goals, life with my family, all that stuff. So business building is what I'm all about. If you need more help with that, come to the 10K Offer Challenge. I'll help you build the offer that will build your business.
Faster, low ticket pricing ain't gonna do it. Low ticket courses ain't gonna do it in this era. We need to have a high ticket offer that's irresistible and I can show you how to do that in the most effortless way possible. It's a five day live coaching experience with me. It's an incredible time. We have a lot of fun. You walk away with your 10K offer and a business plan to blow your business up in the next year. So come check it out 10kofferchallenge.com. See when the next one's running.
Graham Cochrane (27:20.396)
Otherwise, my friend, have a great rest of your day and your week and thanks for checking out this episode. It means a lot. Your time is valuable and I hope I served you well. See you on the next one.
