Presented by Unstoppable Branding Agency
There are multiple paths to wealth – some of them have worked for decades, others have only emerged recently. However, there is always room for something new, including new ways of thinking and accumulating capital. From capitalizing on joint ventures and affiliate partnerships to monetizing the fact that internet use has soared by 70 percent since the start of the pandemic, there are plenty of emerging approaches to striking it rich — and many of them would be news to your parents.
Realizing the shift in the way people do business, Gary Vaynerchuk, or Gary Vee for short, decided to step away from the accepted norms and tap into the potential of now when he launched VaynerMedia a decade ago. Over the years, the customer-centric branding agency has masterminded hugely successful social media campaigns, but not at the expense of providing tailored one-on-one services. Vaynerchuk explains, “We are a modern mix of traditional Madison Avenue thinkers of yesterday and internet-centric storytellers of today who believe a single tweet can go all the way to a Super Bowl commercial.”
Vaynerchuk says that the secret behind VaynerMedia’s success is this marriage of old-school values and modern technology. The business guru and best-selling author of Crush It and Jab, Jab Right Hook, Vaynerchuk is adamant that there has never been a better time to shift perspectives on ways to accumulate wealth. The following leaders in their respective fields are a case in point. All have taken different elements of Vaynerchuk entrepreneurial strategy to build their own business success.
According to Vaynerchuk, trying to compete on volume can be a tedious game. The CEO of the Champion Academy Ed JC Smith agrees, believing that in a world of overwhelm, coaches and consultants need to change their tactics. “If you want to generate paid clients every month and you can help someone get to their outcome then the quickest and easiest service to sell today to accumulate wealth is your one-to-one time,” he says. “Everyone wants personalization today — they want to speak to a real person.”
Smith’s venture The Champion Academy offers training programs that teach coaches and entrepreneurs how to sign up paying clients without breaking a sweat. And he certainly knows what he is talking about. Highlighting that just like most people who buy a book will never read it, Smith says that most people who buy courses with no support never even access the program they purchased. And this isn’t good for anybody. “So with this said, start selling personalized one-to-one, transition into a group coaching program but keep that personalized touch. If you do that you will be head and shoulder above the rest of the market,” he says.
Vaynerchuk believes that you should never limit yourself. So does Lawrence Ellyard, the CEO of IICT. In particular, they both maintain that you should promote your goods and services in new markets and territories, and look to replicate your business in complimentary industries.
“And never underestimate the power of mobilizing your existing customers to join your salesforce,” Ellyard says. “Capitalize on joint-ventures and affiliate partnerships to expand your operations into new territories and ensure all parties receive a generous share in the revenue.”
Ellyard also believes that promoting a flat structure within your organization and team can lead to new creative ideas. “Your team can come up with a multitude of ideas and creative thinking. Never underestimate the power of collective genius,” he says. “And promote your offering and usual price points but where possible offer a premium service or product that is 10 times more than your standard product or service, there will always be a few clients that will purchase the best, irrespective of price.”
Vaynerchuk knows all too well that self-sabotage can stand in the way of success. As such, he believes that it is important to check yourself before trying to conjure what wealth will feel like in 2022 and the years to come.
This is precisely what the founder of Lean Into Your Glow LLC, Amy Bingham, advocates. “When you are in full alignment with your soul, abundance and wealth will naturally flow in your space. Being wealthy means you have a positive net worth in all areas of your life; mind, body, and soul,” she says.
According to the coach and healer, who uses her expertise to help others release negative thought patterns through her Lean Into Your Glow program, it’s when you are serving others that
you tap into the overflow of abundance for resources and connections. “When you can reside in the energy of pure peace, where fear, judgment, and self-sabotage can’t exist. Only then will you be aligned with the full divine soul expression of opulence. This is where true wealth lies.”
Whether it’s Twitter or LinkedIn, Vaynerchuk is the heavyweight champion of social media. And so is the President of Blair Kaplan Communications Blair Kaplan Venables. The social media marketing expert who helps others reach their business goals says that the cultivation of clout is the new currency that determines wealth. “With clout comes thought leadership, influence, and the ability to empower others,” she emphasized.
According to her, the most successful way to increase this wealth is to keep planting your seeds of knowledge on social media so that you can watch your following and credibility grow. At the same time, Kaplan is quick to point out that disconnecting is just as important as connecting. “Step away from technology once in a while. Go outside, breathe the fresh air, feel the grass beneath your feet. This disconnect will help you be even more creative and productive when you get back to the screen.”
Vaynerchuk didn’t make his millions by following in the footsteps of others. He was bold and confident, risking it all to venture into uncharted territory. This is exactly what the founder of MPowered Voice Publishing and co-owner of Magnetic FM with Robert J Moore. Marianne Padjan teaches her clients. “It’s always easier to follow someone who has already been there and done that. But a lot of what is required is the confidence to move forward with a great idea,” she says.
Unfortunately, Padjan also believes that most people are too uncomfortable to step out of their comfort zone and miss out on opportunities. This is where her services can help. “A coach is a perfect person to encourage you and help lead you to your greatness. I am the person to help you at the time and when you are ready to explore, release and empower your inner self into a more confident and successful you.”
Just like Vaynerchuk, Influencer and Life Coach, Moon Maison, believes that everyone has something to teach the world. “Everyone has a story and message to share with their audience. They have a unique perspective that they can deliver in their own special way.” She believes that investing in your personal development is the key to success, she says, “Most people carry deep-rooted negative beliefs around success, money, and wealth. If you want to manifest abundance and wealth, you must let go of these beliefs to attract it into your life.”
Having a large social media influence, Maison advised it’s essential to always spread out your content in different platforms for better reach “There are so many great platforms for creators to leverage their following. I think it’s smarter to diversify your content through 3 or more different income-generating platforms. Subscriptions are pivotal for any influencer on the road to accumulating wealth,” Maison shared.
The world today is awash in entrepreneurs. Ambitious people who are willing to risk their own time and money, motivated to create a successful business and reap the subsequent rewards. But not all entrepreneurs truly possess the entrepreneurial spirit, the inner drive that compels the individual to constantly work towards these goals, an unstoppable force confidently seeking out an immovable object to overcome.
It’s the type of attitude that feeds the birth and growth of the world’s most successful and impactful companies and creates billionaires of their founders and investors. It’s the type of attitude that underpins much of the American Dream. It’s the type of attitude that, in 1973, led a precocious young boy named Michael Dell to investigate potential high school equivalency exams in an attempt to move past school and into the business world he was determined to conquer. He was 8 years old.
Michael Dell was born in Houston, Texas into a family with lofty educational and professional standards. His father was an orthodontist and his mother was a stockbroker, his parents were eager for Michael to complete his education and eventually become a doctor. But Michael wasn’t going to follow this expected path. Before he got close to advanced degrees or medical residency programs, he would find immense success in business and get the insatiable urge to find his marketplace and eventually dominate it.
At twelve, Dell’s business was selling stamps by mail to collectors across the country, earning a few thousand dollars that to most pre-teens would seem like a few million. But this barely scratched Michael’s entrepreneurial itch, and, as if forced by cliché to follow the “paper boy” narratives that form many entrepreneur’s juvenile endeavors, he moved into selling newspaper subscriptions.
It’s here we can begin to see the intellect and business savvy which separated Dell from his future competition and allowed him to become one of the world’s most successful businessmen. The young newspaper salesman wasn’t out peddling from door to door. That method was for the grinding types, the ones who were determined to outwork the competition. While he possessed no lack of determination or ability to put in the requisite sweat equity, Dell preferred to work both harder and smarter.
He used public records to target the demographics he found to be most likely to purchase a subscription, young couples and new homebuyers, increasing his efficiency and profits. An impressive insight for his age, but also one that presaged the type of leader into which the young man would grow.
The boy who once targeted sub-groups of potential customers for newspapers would one day apply the same principles to his domination of the computer industry, not only producing quality products, but marketing and selling them in ways that gave Dell and his company an advantage over his competition. Through these early efforts, a leader emerged that would build the world’s largest PC company and help shape the past four decades of technological advancement and dissemination around the globe.
However, before he could become a dominant player in the global computer industry, Dell first had to navigate the start-up phase of his company. Eager to placate his parents, Dell had enrolled in a pre-med program at The University of Texas at Austin, but had spent most of his freshman year building and fixing computers in his dorm room instead of attending class.
Convinced it was time to focus entirely on his business, Dell informed his parents of his intention to drop out of college. The parental anger that followed was only tempered when Dell promised his parents that if he wasn’t successful in growing the business, he would return to UT at a later date. The first month of the summer Dell sold some $180,000 worth of computers. He never did matriculate to his second year in Austin.
Dell called his company PCs Ltd. and in its first full year in business the fledgling company brought in $33 million. Changing the name to Dell Computer Corp. in 1987, Dell saw his company’s sales rise to $159 million by the end of 1988. The company was an enormous success, and it made Dell a multi-millionaire in the process.
It would be easy to credit the young entrepreneur’s success to a smart, hard-working businessman coming along at exactly the right time, the personal computing revolution. But the truth is that numerous times throughout Dell Technologies’ early years, Dell made crucial realizations and choices that enabled the company to take its place amongst the PC giants like Compaq, IBM and others.
Early on in his fascination with computers, Dell discovered that most PCs were made of relatively cheap parts compared to the retail price for which the full computer was being sold. So he focused his efforts on producing customized computers for clients, able to produce his PCs both at performance and price levels that the large companies couldn’t, or wouldn’t, match. By 1992, Dell Computer Corp. was raking in some $2 billion in sales annually. Soon after the company unexpectedly stumbled and stock prices plummeted. Dell brought in Kevin Rollins, an organizational expert from Bain & Company to restructure the company.
He also snatched away designer John Medica from rival Apple to help with the product lines. Most significantly he brought over Mort Topfer, a Motorola executive who would both handle day-today operations as well as serve as a mentor to the young Dell. Topfer, who took the job under the impression it would be a short-term gig, stayed with the company as vice chairman until 1999, helping Dell in creating and executing his groundbreaking business model. Dell’s humility had allowed him to seek help, not just saving the company but eventually propelling it to new heights.
Dell, with help from Topfer and others, structured the sales side of the company very differently than his competition. While Compaq and others would dominate the shelves of electronics stores and other retail locations, Dell could cut out the middleman and sell directly to his customers. At first, this was made easier by selling largely to high-profit margin customers like businesses, but eventually was carried over to the consumer market as well. He brilliantly alleviated original concerns from customers weary of buying a computer remotely by offering unprecedented return options and levels of customer service.
This plan truly came into its own with the spread and advancement of the internet. The Dell website was the ideal way to reach customers without a middleman, and Michael made sure that the company bearing his name leaned heavily into this world-changing technology. E-commerce became a major part of the company’s business model, and remains so, even as the company has shifted from focusing solely on desktop PCs to laptops, servers, and numerous other technologies.
In 2001, Michael Dell achieved his long-held goal of topping Compaq, making his titular organization the largest PC company in the world with a 12.8% market share. Today, Dell Technologies, boasts revenues of $101 billion a year and employs over 130,000 people around the world. Clearly the model works.
The scale of Dell’s growth seems almost infinite. In 2013, backed by some of the biggest financiers and tech firms in the industry, Michael Dell took his company private. This alone was earth-shaking as a private acquisition of one of the world’s biggest tech companies, but Dell was just getting started. In 2015, Dell truly swung for the fences and executed one of the largest financial deals in history, the acquisition of storage, software, data and cloud services companies EMC Corp. and VMware, paying more than $67 billion by the time the deal was completed the following year.
Dell hadn’t retaken control of his company as a private entity to simply maintain the status quo. The purchase of EMC and VMware, and the pivot of Dell into the profitable areas of big data and cloud storage, show that the company is far from content with its current state. It will continue to evolve, develop and reevaluate itself, just as its founder has over the past four decades. Where some names from the early days of PCs have disappeared from the market (Commodore, DEC, etc), it seems like Dell not only survived the wild west of the PC industry’s early days, but has emerged as a tech giant helping lead the way into the cutting edge fields of the 21st century.
Finally, in 2018, Dell Technologies bypassed the traditional IPO process and rejoined the New York Stock Exchange as a publicly traded company. Being a primary shareholder of the company, Dell is today estimated to be worth more than $48.2 billion, solidifying him as one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs on the planet. But that fortune won’t remain idle for long if Michael and his family have their way.
In 1999, Michael and his wife Susan founded the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation. With the mission of transforming the lives of children living in urban poverty, the foundation provides resources and opportunities in education, health and family economic stability, helping both children and their families. They work both domestically in the United States as well as in India and South Africa. That might be Michael Dell’s greatest achievement. The man who defines the entrepreneurial spirit using his personal wealth to enable the next generation of builders and creators, collaborators and yes, entrepreneurs.
Maybe the next Michael Dell will rise from one of these programs, ready to create the next great technology or tech company. But even if that should happen, providing further competition for the company that still bears his name, one gets the sense that Michael Dell would respond simply. He’d take pride in helping the youngster’s achievement, laugh at the irony of the situation, evaluate the new competition and insist to that young man or woman, “I welcome the challenge, bring it on!” After all, that’s the entrepreneurial spirit.
Presented by Ascend Agency
The iGaming industry is unique and has been around for a while; nevertheless, the rapid rise in the sheer market size has brought it once again into the spotlight. And in this article, we will be expounding on the reason(s) for this growth and why it is a promising emerging market.
Right off the bat, what is iGaming? In layman’s terms, though often misleading, it stands for “internet Gaming.” However, more elaborately, iGaming typifies all forms of online gambling, including regular online casinos, crypto casinos, poker rooms, e-sports betting, as well as binary trading. Setting it aside from all other forms of gaming that occurs on the internet.
Currently, the online gaming market value is estimated to be valued at about $173 billion and is projected to more than double in 2027. The exponential growth of the online gaming industry could be linked to the internet penetration — the increasing availability of smart devices such as smartphones, laptops, and, even more recently, Virtual reality headsets. Also, the covid-19 pandemic restrictions acted as a catalyst to help further drive this increase as people find it easy to engage in online gaming and gambling activities from the comfort of their homes. In order not to miss out on action going in the digital space, many land-based casinos quickly developed mobile and web versions of their casino games, bringing these games right into the comfort zone of the players.
Quite spectacularly, online casino games proliferated and adapted. One notable adaptation is the development of cryptocurrency casinos, where specified cryptocurrencies can be used as a means of transactions. These crypto casinos further bridged the gap for players across the globe who will be interested in the online gambling world, especially casino games but are limited by several financial institutions and country regulations. This formula appears to work, with over 5 million crypto gamblers visiting crypto casino sites daily to play their favorite game and earn money. Even now, when these restrictions have been eased in the post-pandemic era, online gambling has come to stay.
The iGaming industry has made giant strides since its inception into the mainstream market in 1994 following the passing of the Free Trade and Processing Zone Act in Antigua and Barbuda. As a standalone, the global online gambling market size has been on the increase, and as of the year 2021, the market was valued at about $57.54 billion, which is projected to exceed a worth of $90 billion by 2023, expanding at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.7% from 2022 to 2023.
With major stocks performing their worsts in years, the cryptocurrency market toppling, and the United States bordering on the brink of its worst inflation in over 40 years, it is no news that the general financial market is in a current downturn. And as with other industries riding on the financial market, the iGaming industry sits in an eccentric position and may not have been absolved from the far-reaching effects of the economic downturn.
However, despite the rising inflation and the increasing consumer prices indices being a concern in 2022, the casino industry, including iGaming and sports betting, has seen a positive increase in profit margin, with the Gross Gaming Revenue totaling about $5.1 billion in May 2022, which is a 1.5% increase from the previous month and about a 9.5% better than May 2021. And of the available casino games, slot machines appear to be a high-performer, delivering the highest revenue, generating over $2.9 billion— about 58% of the entire month’s income.
In conclusion, the exponential growth of the iGambling industry is like a projectile set off on a perfectly timed opportunity, and despite the friction, it is gaining momentum. The online gambling market has the ingredients to expand, adapt and, by harnessing the latest technologies, even grow to ineffable size.
Dua Lipa’s birthday week has been a bikini-clad affair. The “Love Again” singer and Maxim Hot 100 stunner turned 27 on Monday and marked the occasion by sporting a denim-inspired halter top with a matching shall and bottoms.
“27 feels like heaven,” she captioned a carousel of sun-addled images showing her many beautiful angles. In response to the influx well-wishes, she added, “Thank you for the birthday wishes!”
But it was on the eve of Lipa’s big day that she wore her most striking “birthday suit”—a complete Marc Jacobs ensemble culminating in a itsy-bitsy, blinged-out bra top comprised of glistening crystals.
“I gasped when I saw the bday girl wearing this iconic look WOW,” designer Ludovic de Saint Sernin commented on Lipa’s Instagram post, per the New York Post.
“Wowww she’s serving,” added singer Liza Owen, while a fan chimed in with, “ok but this fit is everything.”
Jacobs even shared some of the pics, reinterpreting the phrase “birthday suit” and firing off complimentary hashtags.
While less revealing, Lipa’s choice in birthday dinner attire was just as stunning. The birthday dress, as W Magazine emphasized, was a vintage leather Thierry Mugler gown covered in a pink, black and purple flame motif.
“Pulled this dress out my vault for birthday dinner,” the singer captioned snaps flaunting the dress.
Celebrate Lipa’s 27th birthday with a few more hot IG highlights below:
