Entrepreneurs are all supposed to be rolling in money but is that really true? Let’s answer the question, are entrepreneurs rich?

When people hear the word “entrepreneur” they tend to think of ultra successful billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Bill Gates. “Entrepreneur” is synonymous with filthy rich for a lot of people. But do all entrepreneurs have a ridiculous amount of money to blow on fancy watches, designer clothes and exotic cars?

No, not all of them. Obviously, not every single entrepreneur is going to be rich enough to buy yachts that they use to travel back and forth from their massive private islands.  

But entrepreneurs being rich is an interesting stereotype that deserves a closer look. Why do people think entrepreneurs are always rich? What does it take for an entrepreneur to become filthy rich? Can anyone become an ultra-rich entrepreneur? 

Let’s take a deep dive into these questions today. 

Can entrepreneurs make a lot of money? 

Yes. The simple answer to this question is that entrepreneurs are capable of making obscene amounts of money. The greatest advantage of becoming an entrepreneur is that there’s no ceiling and no cap on how much money you can make.  

If you work a normal 9-5 job, you’d usually only get a 5% increment in your pay every year if you do good enough or maybe slightly more if you did very well or got a promotion. Meanwhile, as an entrepreneur, the potential to make twice as much as you did last month is always on the table. Doubling your income in a month takes blood, sweat and tears but for an entrepreneur it’s possible. For a regular employee, getting double their pay in such a short span of time is an absolute pipe dream.  

An entrepreneur could double their income by increasing their sales if they’re selling a product or by reaching out to potential customers if they’re offering a service. Increasing your sales from 10 to 20 a month doubles your income. Getting an extra client when you only had one so far doubles your income. The point trying to be made here is that entrepreneurs can grow their profits fast and make a lot of money.

A lot of people don’t know this but entrepreneurs can make money another way.

After growing their business to a healthy enough size, an entrepreneur can sell off their business. They usually sell their business for a multiple of their yearly profits. For example, if a business makes $500,000 in profits per year, the owner could sell it off for two to five times that depending on their business. This means they could potentially make up to $2,500,000 this way.  

While you’d need to grow your business to a certain size to get such a huge multiple and the size of the multiple depends heavily on the industry, the point still stands that selling your business is a great way to get rich as an entrepreneur. 

Entrepreneurs can make a lot of money and get rich in quite a few ways.

What would it take for an entrepreneur to make a lot of money?  

If an entrepreneur wants to be rich and make a mountain of cash, they need to put a mountain’s worth of blood, sweat, tears and time into their business in order to make it successful. That or they need to get extremely lucky.  

An entrepreneur would need to be able to take their business from zero dollars in profit up to their goal without any clear, set in stone path. An entrepreneur has no boss but that means that all of the stress and responsibility is solely on them. If they succeed, it’s their victory. If they fail miserably, it’s completely their fault.  

Businesses can grow enormous overnight but more often than not, a business will take years or decades to grow. Successful businesses aren’t grown overnight and progress can look non-existent if you’re working on it day to day. Entrepreneurs need to have a lot of patience in order to see any growth in their businesses and need to be able to keep calm even when it looks like their business isn’t moving forward at all. 

Starting a business and growing it as an entrepreneur is obviously stressful but it can also be expensive. Money to make their products, money to advertise their business, money to pay for rent on physical locations or storage facilities… the list is long. If an entrepreneur saved up all that money, they could potentially lose it all if their business fails. If an entrepreneur took out a business loan to start their business and that business fails… now the banks are going to be after them.

All that work done, all that time spent, all that money they need to get ready upfront and an entrepreneur still is never guaranteed success. The point trying to be made here is that entrepreneurs must be willing to risk a lot in order to make a lot of money. Being an entrepreneur isn’t for the risk averse or the faint of heart. Entrepreneurs need guts.

Entrepreneurs need to risk pretty much everything if they want to dive in all at once to make a lot of money with entrepreneurship. 

Could anyone become an entrepreneur and make a lot of money? 

Theoretically, anyone could become an entrepreneur if they wanted it badly enough and worked hard enough. However, it takes a certain kind of person to eat so much risk and take their chances on putting years of work into something with the potential for it to amount to absolutely nothing. A lot of people think that entrepreneurs are borderline insane and there might be some truth to that.  

That being said, there’s nothing stopping you from starting a business right now. Go and find ten things in your house that you don’t need, open up an eBay or Amazon account and sell those things. Congratulations, you have a small business selling things online!

Do you want to be considered a bonafide entrepreneur? Buy things wholesale and brand them with your own brand before you sell them. Go buy 1000 minimalist watches and stamp your own company name on the front then sell them by paying influencers on Instagram or Facebook to shill them! Now you’ve got a real business running! 

All jokes aside, if you really want to, you can become an entrepreneur and start a business anytime. There’s no rule saying you’re not an entrepreneur if you start a small business first then grow it at a slow and steady pace. There’s no rule saying that you’re not an entrepreneur if you’re working a 9-5 job while you’re building a business on the side. As long as you start, you can consider yourself an entrepreneur. 

The part about making a lot of money and becoming filthy rich… that takes just a bit more work. 

That being said, becoming an entrepreneur is much easier than it was a couple of decades ago. Thanks to the internet, becoming an entrepreneur has never been easier and more accessible. The internet has opened many doors for potential entrepreneurs. 

For example, entrepreneurs: 

• Have access to multiple sites to sell their goods and services. For example, eBay and Amazon. 
• Are able to read almost limitless amounts of information about the dos and don’ts of entrepreneurship at any time for free.
• Are able to connect and talk to like minded entrepreneurs across the globe easily and instantaneously.

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And this is the most important one…

• Entrepreneurs are able to connect with and sell their products to potential customers worldwide easily and affordably. 

Anyone can become an entrepreneur and making a lot of money while growing obscenely rich as an entrepreneur has never been simpler.

What exactly does being “rich” mean to you?

This part of the article is going to seem a bit off-tangent for some readers. But you really should be asking yourself what “rich” means to you specifically. 

For most people, when they imagine being rich, they think of parties on yachts, fast exotic cars and swimming in literal pools of gold. This is the territory of wealth and excess that only multi-millionaires or billionaires can reach. But for most people, all of that would be unnecessary and being rich would cost much less than they’d expect. 

Try and think about it this way using this example. What things make the average person feel poor? 

• House payments.
• Car payments. 
• Lack of emergency funds. 
• Rising inflation that even makes buying food a headache. 

Take those four and eliminate them completely. The average person would feel fantastic and would probably consider themselves rich. Becoming an entrepreneur is a risky but potentially fast way to get rid of all the money headaches above. 

Think about it. How much would you need to handle all four of those common financial headaches? 

• Decent housing. Let’s say that this is about $100,000+ depending on where you want to live. 
• A good car. You can buy a reliable car for $9000+ and instead of having a monthly car payment, you can pay for everything straight, in cash.
• A sizable emergency fund. For the vast majority of people, $10,000+ would save them in a lot of situations.
• Rising inflation. Growing your business and raising your prices to keep pace with inflation is possible if you’re an entrepreneur who owns their own business.

All of the above is realistically achievable by becoming a decently successful entrepreneur. It works either if you’re working on growing and keeping your business forever or just growing your business to sell it off for a multiple later on. Pulling this off is not a walk in the park but it’s definitely simpler than a lot of people think.

Think about what you want and decide what the dollar amount is where you’d consider yourself “rich”. The amount could be $100,000 or it could be $10,000,000,000. It’s up to you decide and it’s up to you to go after that final number. 

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Closing 

Hopefully this article cleared up a few things for you. Not every single entrepreneur out there is filthy, stinking rich. However, every single entrepreneur out there has the potential to become filthy, stinking rich. And depending on what your goals are, becoming rich might not be as hard or far away as you think.

Entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone but it’s the most common way for people to come up and exponentially increase their wealth. While not everyone will become a billionaire through entrepreneurship, with enough effort, time and risk tolerance, almost anyone can become richer. And depending on what you want, even a modestly successful, small business can make you “rich”.

If you choose to give entrepreneurship a chance, good luck!