I teach people how to be a millionaire and how to create a million-dollar business. But honestly, what I'd really like to say first is that just because you're a millionaire, it doesn't mean you don't have any problems, or learning how to make a million dollars doesn't necessarily mean that you know how to be a millionaire and a successful millionaire and continue to grow and hang on to your wealth. In fact, Brian Tracy has a quote, which I think is really, really worth remembering, "Being a successful millionaire is not about learning how to make a million dollars, he who wins is the one who keeps the million dollars." What you really want to learn first is how to manage your money. It's super important to learn and grow on an evolving basis and take responsibility for being a money manager, look at your money as your business, because it doesn't matter how many times you make it, if you keep losing it, then it actually has a lot of wear and tear on you emotionally.

To give you some examples, I really like to encourage my clients to start with, how am I going to make my first $10,000 in a repeatable way so that I can continue to do that over and over. And then how am I going to manage that money and really start getting educated on the whole process of money as a business? Because over my lifetime, I built a lot of businesses where I started out with no money or very little money down, I used the business itself to kind of bring in funding to get started. Then everything I earned for years and years went back into the business or into the house that I was renovating. As money would come in I would pour it back into my investments. So I lived very leanly, in fact, I still live very leanly. I always liked to keep reinvesting what I'm earning.

What ends up happening is, when you finally sell the business, you have a big payout, and all of a sudden you're cashed up and you've got money again. Or when you have a really big year, I've had some years where we've made millions of dollars in our business, you got to be careful that you don't end up with a massive tax bill because you haven't prepared for it, for instance, because then you're just losing half the money that you worked so hard to make. I've had lots and lots of really bad experiences with taking on business partners. I actually love working with business partners, I get really tired of working on my own. I'm very social. I'm very collaborative. I love brainstorming. I love working with smart people.

I have gone into quite a few partnerships that have been great for the first few months or the first year, but then because we haven't been managing the money and I take responsibility for that, it's quite often I'll get so excited about being the creative rainmaker, bringing in all the customers and getting out and building up the business that I stopped looking after the money side of it. And my partners have taken advantage of me for not taking an interest in the money. And I have had partners that have just blatantly stolen the money right out of the business and set up quite complex fraud schemes so that I wouldn't notice for a while.

You've really got to take responsibility for the management of your money. And if you can't do that, if it's not something that you're ever going to be interested or skilled in, then you got to make the effort to find a responsible money person, to be your chief financial officer, to be your CFO, to manage your money on a monthly or at least quarterly basis, to sit down with you and say, here's how much you're making, here's how much you're spending you talk about what you're going to invest in and they tell you whether they think it's a good idea. Quite often, what you can do is you can say, I want to do this now and you have a discussion about it. And you say, well, let's sit on this for two or three months and see if we still want to do it in two or three months because that gives you some breathing space to decide if it's a good idea.

What happened in my life was that I kept reinvesting in businesses and reinvesting and growing and reinvesting and growing. And then eventually one of our businesses, we sold for millions and millions of dollars and suddenly we had so much wealth that it was a whole new set of problems, because we'd never had to look after that kind of money before, and it's just a constantly learning and growing process. You want to make sure that you've surrounded yourself with people who have an experience that can guide you, that you can trust. Because sadly, when you have a lot of money, you will also attract, there's an awful lot of con men out there who are looking for people who have money and who are naive about how to manage it. Learn how to surround yourself with people who you can trust and how to do your due diligence on these people. And double check, if you're not sure if you're getting financial advice from one person have another person from another company that you feel you can trust and compare their advice. And if you have to bring in the third one, if you can afford it, because you'll find that there are as many people dispensing financial advice, is there a different type of people. It's worth looking at your money as an investment and a business in its own right.

When we became multi-millionaires, we ended up with all these people coming out of the woodwork, asking us to bail them out, bail out their businesses, bail out their mortgages, help them with their divorce. It seemed like everybody was coming to us with their hands out. So then you need to learn how to deal with that. Honestly, it's a never ending process, just becoming a millionaire isn't going to solve all your problems, but learning how to manage your wealth, that is a skill worth learning.

Cydney O'Sullivan, Founder of Millionaires Training

Growing up, I always loved books. I think it was because my parents were given a set of beautiful, hardbound classic books that I loved to read. I loved to have people read to me when I was little, and go live through and look at the beautiful color pictures in them. Unfortunately, when we in lived Hong Kong, where I grew up, we gave the books away because I would have loved to have kept them to give my children. But I think I developed this love of books. In fact, when I was growing up, we didn't have the internet. So when we had to prepare for a school project, we had one of those great big encyclopedias that I used to get in and read and study, so I've always had an affinity with the physical book.

I loved to read it. I was the kind of kid that on vacation would always have their face in a book instead of looking at the scenery. I started dreaming of writing my own book when I was quite young. In fact, I can remember when I was about 12, reading … There's an actress who was in a lot of those Brat Pack movies. Ally Sheedy. Ally Sheedy was the youngest published author. She wrote a book called, I Was Nice to Mice when she was about 12 years old. I remember reading about her in the newspaper and thinking, wow, that's really cool. I'm in Hong Kong reading about her writing this book and this was before she became an actress, reading about this 12 year old who's published a book. I want to do something like that. That's really cool. I think I had a desire to be famous and do something that people would read about in the newspaper, even at that young age.

But I couldn't quite figure out how to write a book. There's a whole skill around that, in creating a story from beginning, middle, to end. I would very often start books, but I'd get about halfway, and I didn't quite know how to finish them. I was always good at writing, always could ace my English exams, and write lots of poetry and stuff, but nobody taught me how to write a book. I remember going over on a trip to Hong Kong once I'd retired. I've retired many times in my life. Every time I sell a business, I retire. I had retired. I was in my 40s and SARS had just hit Hong Kong. I came up with this whole concept for this novel, and I started fleshing it all out.

I made the mistake of telling my mother, who … I love her, but she can be a little bit negative. I said to her, "I've got this idea for a book," and I told her all about my plot. She said, "Yeah, I've read books like that, and they didn't sell very well. What do you know about writing a book?" It just took all my fire out. It took all my desire out of finishing the book. I don't know. I just went …, and I abandoned the project.

Then I taught myself how to trade the stock market and invest in real estate. I was doing really, really well with that, and I happened to meet a woman at a women's networking event who was a multi-published best-selling author. She said to me, "You should write a book about what you're doing. I think a lot of people would be interested in learning about all this investment stuff that you're doing." There'd be lots and lots of women who'd like to learn how to trade the stock market, and invest in real estate, and start businesses.

I was doing a lot of stuff with spreadsheets, so I went home, and I did a book outline, and I sent it over to her in a spreadsheet. She said to me, "What am I supposed to do with this thing in Excel?" She showed me. She said, "You want to do it in Word doc so that it can actually be turned into a document that can ultimately be turned into a book." She started to teach me how to get a book written from start to finish, and so I started writing a book, which was taking me months, months, and months. I just couldn't get past about three-quarters of the way through.

Now that I've helped hundreds of people to write books, I recognize what that was. It was actually fear. It was fear of being judged. I kept thinking, this has to be a really, really good book. What if I write a book and people say it's bad? They're going to judge me. I think what happens to people when they're writing books is they're putting themselves out there in a way that is very permanent. You're putting this book out in print and it's going to be out there for years, and years, decades, maybe forever, and you're worried that people are not going to think it's very good, and then that is a reflection on you. I was holding myself back and a lot, a lot of people tried to help me.

I had a lot of great people in my world like Mark Victor Hansen, Eckhart Tolle's literary agent. He was like, "Just get your book written, and we'll get you on Oprah." There were all these amazing opportunities coming up, but I couldn't get out of my own way. I was actually really self-sabotaging, and I just couldn't finish the book. I was never happy with it. I hired a ghostwriter. I wasn't happy with what he produced, but it was more about what was going on with me and my own limiting beliefs.

Finally, what ended up helping me get out of my own way was I started with writing a chapter in another bestselling book called, Secrets of Inspiring Women Exposed, which was a book series, the Secrets Exposed series. They invited me to write a chapter about what I was doing, and I started with just getting one chapter out. Then I wrote a bonus book as a giveaway with that one chapter, which I then later expanded into a full book called, How to Be Wealthy Now.

I then decided that I would like to interview 30 other people who are building multi-million dollar businesses and write a book about how each of us would make a million dollars if we were starting over. That one, because I'd made a commitment to all these other people who contributed to the book, I forced myself to get that book finished and put it out with a publisher to the world. I still remember even at three-quarters of the way through that book, panicking and thinking, god, what if people think this is a terrible book?

Then I thought, well, hang on a minute. I've made a commitment to all these other people, and they've given me their time and their expertise. I have to see this through. I'm just the interviewer in this process. If people don't like the book, then it's nothing to do with me. I think that it's when you actually finally let go of worrying about what other people think of you, that you have real freedom, and you can really get out, and start making a difference in the world.

Cydney O'Sullivan, Founder of Millionaires Training

I think one of the most challenging things for me when I started building my own businesses was that I didn't actually know anything about finance. I was always interested in English and drama, and I was more interested in the art classes at school. I can tell from my diary that I studied economics, but I have no memory of the course. I used to keep a journal, a teenage diary, and there was some stuff in there about when I was at an economics course, and I don't even remember doing it. I guess that mathematical stuff, I failed maths in school, the economic stuff just went straight over my head. I wasn't particularly interested in it. And then when I got out into the world and started making a living, I figured out how to save my money by just putting some aside and spending the minimum that I needed to live, and that way I would have saved.

But it became apparent to me when I was working and my mom actually sat me down one day and started showing me how to balance my checkbook that my parents had never taught me how to manage money, and I certainly hadn't learned it in school. I think as parents we need to start thinking about, what exposure are we giving our kids to creating wealth? Because, honestly, it's hard for us as adults to completely readjust all our behavior and learn how to go from being consumers, which frankly, we've all been raised to be consumers. Any of us that has grown up in the industry of the TV, since TV became mainstream in every household, we've been groomed from a young age to go out and spend more than we earn. So we actually have a responsibility to retrain our kids so that they understand the concept of delayed gratification, saving for the future, learning how to invest.

So to give you some examples of how this can be applied and I wish I'd done it better is when your kids are young, a really big one that I started early on because my husband and I had already become quite wealthy when my kids were young, we had to start figuring out how to say no to the kids because what happens is it becomes a conundrum. They want to buy everything, and if you keep saying yes, then it's like a bottomless pit and they become spoiled, unfortunately. You can't just give kids everything they want all the time. They have to learn how to manage their expectations. So what I did with my kids early on was I started giving them an allowance, which actually just went straight into their bank account. I actually went through a period with my kids when they were young where there was a company that was putting racks of cheap toys everywhere, at the pharmacy, at the post office, the supermarket. Everywhere, you took your kids, there were these racks of toys.

My kids would say, "I want one, I want one," and I started saying, "Well, do you want it enough to pay for it out of your own money?" And they would say, "Oh no." So right away, they actually started to learn how to make choices about what was important in life. Would they rather have their own money so they could buy something better? My son was saving up because he wanted to buy one of those three-wheel ATV things. My daughter was saving up because she wanted to buy, I don't know, some fancy dollhouse. I would say, "Well, do you want to take the money out of your savings account to buy this thing?" And they would weigh it up and usually say no. And then when my son was about eight, I decided I wanted to do an options trading course. I wanted to do this thing over the weekend and learn how to trade the stock market using options trading, and I didn't have a babysitter for him. By then, I was divorced and my husband couldn't take him.

I took him along with me to the options training course, and he really picked it up fast. He was at this sponge stage of his life where he was really open to learning new things. He picked it up much faster than I did and really enjoyed it. Now, unfortunately, he doesn't have any interest in that now that he's in his 20s, but I think he'd be really awesome at it, and I'm hoping to get him back into it because he just had a natural aptitude for investing in the stock market. He's very bright and I would love to see him applying that skill towards something like investing. But I find that if you leave it until they're in their 20s and they have other interests, it's a lot harder to engage them. You need to get kids learning about financial stuff when they still think you're the bee's knees before they're 12 to 14 when they think their parents are really smart and have a lot of good things to teach them.

Unfortunately, what happens is once they get into their teen years, they just naturally want to break away and be different from their parents. And so then they start wanting to do something else. I was very lucky with my daughter in that she was just naturally driven. And when she chose to go to boarding school, she was separated from me at age 12, she lived nearby so I still would go and visit her and have her on the weekends and all her friends, but she's always had a very strong sense of herself and she decided that she wanted to start working when she was about 14. And I said, "Well, you can't, you don't have a car, you don't drive, and you're at boarding school." Instead she started volunteering for charitable work so that she could start building up her, what we call, a CV, or what do they call that in the States? See, I haven't had to go for a job so long, I can't remember what they're called.

She then wanted to become a lawyer so she started working in law firms and now she's doing her master's in law and she's very, very responsible with her money and is interested in investing now because she's earning money and paying taxes, and so now she's wanting me to teach her about crypto and she wants to learn about investing. So I think the earlier you can get them through interested when they're open to it then the better off you'll be with your kids.

Cydney O'Sullivan, Founder of Millionaires Training

It seems I've been an entrepreneur most of my life. I started working in the family business when I was just a child, and when I was about 16, my parents got me a job working for a friend of theirs who had a TV production house. They made commercials for the TV industry in Hong Kong, and I think the founder said that he would give me a job just because he wanted to help my parents out and companies often take interns. So I went in there as an intern and they said, "Oh, you can just help us with the filing."

And I was there for about three days watching them make TV commercials when I realized that they were having a lot of problems with their models being unprofessional. So we're talking about Hong Kong, and they were making a lot of TV commercials for the Chinese speaking channels and for the English channels, and I noticed that a lot of the English speaking models were not very professional. They were getting them through an agency and sometimes they wouldn't show up which would really mess up the production schedule, or they'd come unprepared and then they'd have to have all their hair and makeup and nails and everything done, which again messed up the production schedule.

And I started thinking, "Well I have all these friends that are home for the summer vacation. They'd love to be in TV commercials." I suggested to the owner of the agency that I bring in some of my friends and we actually set up our own little modeling agency within the production house. And he loved it. He said, "Why not?" I put a call out to a whole bunch of my friends and they all started coming in and he gave me a photographer, one of their in-house photographers, to work with. And we got all these kids to pose and we learned quite a bit about posing people for professional modeling shots and that kind of stuff.

And I put together a whole portfolio of models that our clients could choose from. And of course, it was great for me at school because everybody thought I was awesome because I'm getting them in TV commercials. But also I ended up being in a commercial because one day a group of clients came in and they walked past my desk and they pointed at my skateboard. I used to ride a skateboard back then and they said, "Oh, you have a skateboard." And I said, "Yeah, you know, makes the journey to work a little faster." And then they went in, they had their meeting and they came out.

And the owner of the agency, Robert Chua, said to me, "Hey they want to use you in their ad." I said, "Really?" And he said, "Yeah, because it's a skateboarding ad. They've been running a very, very successful skateboarding ad in the U.S. for Pepsi and they wanted to repeat it in Hong Kong. They wanted to do one with Caucasian, non-Chinese kids and Chinese kids skating together. I reached out to my network and I found kids at the Hong Kong International School, which had a lot of American kids. Some of whom were American Chinese, and some of my friends and my brother and I all went and made a Pepsi commercial which was really fun. Skateboarding and drinking Pepsi.

And for years when I would go around Hong Kong, people would point at me and say, "Oh, it's the Pepsi girl", or in Chinese 'Pepsi girl'. It was a fun time and great to be in a commercial, and then I actually worked with quite a few of my friends to get them in commercials too.

Cydney O'Sullivan, Founder of Millionaires Training

I think a big part about building million-dollar businesses and being successful in whatever you do, is understanding people and being able to be empathetic and build rapport with other people. It's been a key for me because I've been successful in the corporate world, I've been successful in retail businesses, and I think a lot of that comes back to my childhood and growing up in Hong Kong, where there was a constant change-over of people. So many people came to Hong Kong for two-year stints, up to maybe five years, max. It was unusual to live there as an expat for an entire childhood like I did. A lot of people would come and then leave within sometimes even a year period. I got really used to meeting people, making friends very quickly, and being okay with the fact that they then had to move on. But I was actually quite shy as a child and wasn't really naturally forthcoming in groups.

I think what made a huge difference for me was getting into my first school play. One of my teachers, (I was taking drama - we all had to take theater arts in school), and one of our teachers was directing the school play. She invited us to come and audition for the play, and I had a friend who was pretty experienced; she was in most of the school plays. She rallied to get me the part, she was like, "Oh, Cyd was the best." So even though I was shy, I got this first part, which was only one line in Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol." But the experience of being in the school play environment, which was… I think we're talking three to six months of rehearsals with people from all different age ranges in the school, and our school went from right after grade school up to when you graduate to go to university, so we had a range of ages from 11 up to about 18. I found myself in this environment where we were rehearsing together with all these different kids of different ages, and I really loved it; I loved the whole community of it.

Then of course, once I stepped on stage, said my one line, which actually turned out to be funny, had the audience laughing and responding, I was hooked, I just loved it. And then I was in pretty much every school play I could fit in around my busy work schedule, because I was also dubbing in the film studio, when I could fit in a school play and the rehearsals, then I would do almost every school play, and usually get one of the lead roles because I got better at it. I think being able to stand on stage in front of thousands of people just gives you a lot more confidence around people, and that's a really good thing to have;

Confidence is a great thing to have in business. Being able to build rapport with people will make everything a lot easier for you.

You don't necessarily have to be a friendly person who gets along with other people to succeed in business, but certainly the businesses I've gotten involved in, definitely the more you can make friends with people, understand what's going on with them, understand everybody has a different reality, a different version of the world, and try and be understanding of what their experience of the world is and not try and make them fit your experience of the world, that can be really, really helpful, too, in your customer service and providing a great experience for your customers. If you want to learn more about how you can build rapport with people, and understand what's going on with them psychologically, I highly advise doing at least the basic level of neuro linguistic programming, NLP.

This really opens up your whole mind frame around how people think, how to communicate with them more effectively, and I've found it to be super, super helpful in all of my relationships, from personal right through to business.

Cydney O'Sullivan, Founder of Millionaires Training

I grew my wealth initially by taking over rundown businesses and fixing them up and building up the customer base and selling things at a profit.

For instance, my big moneymaker was catering events. I could charge thousands of dollars and provide food, the food part is actually very cheap. So the profit is in the service that you provide, solving a problem.

After I had built and sold a few businesses and then flipped a few houses, I started running out of money to buy houses. I started investing in houses over the longterm and building a property portfolio, and funnilyy enough, one of the women that worked for me had been a financial adviser. She used to teach people how to trade the stock market, and she said to me, "I think you'd really like trading the stock market. You're good at this whole retail thing, I think you'd really enjoy trading the market."

It kind of stuck with me, but I had no experience of it, other than floating a company on the stock market, nobody had ever taught me how to trade or buy and sell shares, and to be honest, I don't really trust brokers because I've had some bad experiences with stockbrokers. A lot of the people I knew from my days of floating the business on the stock market found that there were a lot of unethical people who are in the industry. So I just kind of thought one day I'd like to… then I was talking to my finance broker, the guy who was helping me get the loans for my houses, and he said, "Do you still have some shares in the company that you floated?" And I said, "Yes, I've got like about a million dollars worth of shares in this company."

And he said, "Well, do you know that you can borrow the equity out of the shares, just like you can borrow equity out of a house? And you can invest in other shares so that you don't have all your risk in one company." And I said, "Oh, well, that sounds really interesting." So he said, "Yes, it's called margin lending. Look into it." I started asking around and I found a financial advisor who could teach me how I could borrow against the shares that I owned, just like I would borrow against the equity in my homes, and I ended up arranging a loan with a company called ETRADE, which a lot of you might have heard of. I basically moved all of my shares into ETRADE, in my ETRADE account. I set up an online ETRADE account and now, of course, there are way more trading platforms than there were then.

But at the time that was one of the biggest trading platforms, and so I moved the management of my shares, which I guess is kind of like moving a domain from one hosting platform to another or moving your website from one hosting platform to another, or your bank loan from one bank to another.

I moved my shares into this ETRADE account, where I didn't need a broker to manage the shares. I could buy and sell them myself with an understanding of how to use this software. And then I organized with ETRADE to borrow against the value of these shares, and I still have a million dollar margin loan to this day that they loaned me all this credit that I could use to trade the stock market, even though I'm not actively trading right now. Anyway, what they did was they gave me this budget, but I didn't know anything about stock market trading.

And I didn't know who to ask to teach me. So I thought, well, what I'll do is I'll just take 10% of this borrowing and I will invest it across at least 10 shares. So I'll put like $100,000 into the stock market, $10,000 each into 10 different shares. And this is pretty much what I teach people to do with their business. It's like diversifying your risk, always be looking to how you can diversify your risk. And I started reading magazines that talk about investing. There are Money Magazine and Share Magazine and all these different magazines and I picked one up that had the top performing 200 shares of the year on the overall stock market. And of course, there are a few different platforms and indexes you can trade as well. So there's like the NASDAQ, which is all the tech stocks, and then there's the main one, which is the S&P, the Standard and Poor.

There are quite a few different portfolios of stocks that you can look at that you can choose to invest in. And this one was, I was trading in Australia, it was the top 200 shares on the Australian stock market or the ASX for that year. What I did was I started learning how to use E*TRADE, and I could look at charts, which was the share price movement charted over a period of time, and I could see which shares were volatile, meaning they go up and down in price a lot, or the ones that had had steady, regular growth. And because I'd been buying things at a discount and selling them later at a profit, I understood this whole concept of 'buy and hold' and look for things that are undervalued for various reasons. Like buying real estate when the market is down because of a turn in the economy and then holding onto it and selling it when the market's up.

For instance, when I was buying a lot of my real estate, I bought in a fast-growing area outside of the city that had just gotten a freeway. So I had a pretty good idea that the properties that I was buying had already started to boom, because of this new freeway into the city, and were going to keep going up in demand as people started moving out to that area of growth. And I had a pretty good chance of making a quick return on my property investments, which I did. It's the same sort of thing with the stock market. Like if there's a big downturn in the economy and there's a big fall in the stock market and you're in it for the long haul, and you could start investing across a portfolio of shares and just hold them and wait for the market to recover.

But I'm not saying go and do that. I'm saying it to understand market conditions. And obviously, I'm not licensed to teach people how to trade the stock market or invest, but this is what I did. I'm just sharing my experience of how I started investing in the stock market. And what I did was I made this list. I started with the top 100 shares on the list, and then I focused on companies that I understood their business. There was one in particular in Australia that made poker machines for people to gamble on … slot machines. They made slot machines. And I understood that that was a fast-growing business because the laws had changed and more venues could put poker machines in their lobbies and in their bars and so on. That was a growing industry and they were having quite a lot of growth, so I invested in that company.

Another one was the gas company, I understood the gas company as an overall business model, and I invested in that, I had this plan, I did this spreadsheet. I was going to invest $10,000 in this one, $10,000 in this one, and then I made a terrible mistake. I made a mistake on my spreadsheet and when I placed my first trade … I had a spreadsheet that told me how many to buy to get $10,000 in shares, like by the share price, and I think I did like a divide instead of times or something on my spreadsheet. And I placed my first trade on, I remember it was the gas company because it was A, AGL the top of my list. And I placed my whole $100,000 on the first share on the list, and I freaked out because it was like. "Oh no, I've spent my whole $100,000 pot on one share instead of 10 shares!"

And I watched it for a few days and because the stock market goes up and down on a daily basis… you don't actually take a loss or make a profit until you sell the shares. But you can watch the value going up and down every day by the price going up and down every day and what the market is trading at. And finally, and I didn't have anyone to talk to because I didn't want to tell anyone that I was teaching myself to trade the stock market because I thought everybody would tell me I was being a gambler and I was crazy. So finally, I reached out to the financial advisor that had helped me set up the margin loan, and I said, "What should I do? I've invested my whole a hundred thousand in this stock. And I've already lost like $5,000 in share value."

And he said, "Well, just sell. Take your $5,000 loss and reinvest in all the other shares like you were going to." So a bit the bullet and I did it, I sold the shares and got back down to $10,000 in that company, maybe I went down to like $8,000 to accommodate for the loss. And I fixed my spreadsheet and invested the rest of the now $95,000 in the basket of shares. But the lessons that it taught me were very, very valuable to me moving forward as a share trader, and that was that the wonderful thing about investing in the stock market, as opposed to say, investing in real estate or businesses is - if you've made a mistake, you can correct it and very, very quickly. You can get in and out really quickly. Whereas with houses, if you make a mistake and the market starts turning against you, you've got to sell the house, you've got to pay all the associated fees and the taxes and the commissions.

With the stock market, it's a very, very liquid investment. I learned a very, very valuable lesson. And that was, if you realize you've made a mistake, cut your losses, and that takes… that's a very, very important lesson. You don't just sit there and go, "Oh, no, no, no, no." Watch it go down and down. You've got to have discipline. You've got to learn how to take those losses and move on, keep that money flowing. So what ended up happening was I invested in these other shares and remember, I was telling you about the poker machine company. Well, they just exploded up in value, so although I'd lost like $5,000 on the gas company, with that initial week's worth of trading, and the gas company did continue to go up over time, like over the next year, I made money on that stock.

But Aristocrat, which was the gambling poker machine company, had a really good year. I made tens of thousands of dollars in profit because that share just kept doubling.

And then basically, what I would do was every couple of months I would review… Actually, every month, I was a bit paranoid about it because I was always learning it. But what I would do is I would review those shares every month. And I would say, are these on track? Are they continuing to grow? Or would I be better off just closing out this position and moving the money into a stock that is showing growth? And that's pretty much how I taught myself how to trade. And I ended up making… I started making millions of dollars a year by doing that by just continuously managing it, just like I teach you guys to manage your money. Well, if you're going to be a share trading investor, you also want to look at your shares as active investments that you have to keep an eye on every month and manage.

And you have to keep very, very accurate records because you're going to have to report all those profits and losses at the end of the year when you go to do your taxes. So that's kind of how I got into the stock market. And I actually loved trading. And I do plan on getting back into trading. I do crypto trading now, but if I was going to…and I do want to get back into the stock market trading, it's just that I found that I couldn't manage my online business, my education business, my publishing business, and property and look after my shares. I chose to stop doing too many things because you just have to recognize that you've got to focus on one thing at a time and get each thing working properly.

When you try to spread yourself too thin, that's when you get into trouble.

Written By Cydney O'Sullivan, Founder of Millionaires Training

When I was growing up because my dad worked in film and television censoring he was really fascinated with everything that went on TV, it was a different upbringing from a lot of people in that my dad loved to watch the TV commercials.

He was really a connoisseur of a good commercial versus a bad commercial, and so he passed this on to me and I'm still fascinated with how TV commercials are structured, and what's their intention, and who are they marketing to, and which ones engage people emotionally, and growing up in a studio like I did, where I would go to school, and I was on stage at school in the school plays, and then working in the movie industry in dubbing, and working in a production house making TV commercials, and then later working in a radio station where we did talk-back radio, when the internet started to become really big and I started seeing people moving their messages directly from TV onto YouTube, and now Facebook, and LinkedIn and all of these amazing platforms, we got TikTok, we had so many of these places where you can actually start posting your own message directly to the public with video, and in fact video is one of the most exciting emerging markets now for an individual who wants to build an audience, the social platforms are responding really well and encouraging you to do so.

I can see that what's happened is all of this messaging to market and getting out in front of the masses, you used to have to get through gatekeepers, you used to have to actually be able to get a job as an actor, or get your own TV show or your own talk show to have that access to the masses. Now, we all have access to that, and it's how well do you do it? Anybody can do it these days. You can take a phone, make a video of yourself, go straight to Facebook Live, and then there's a whole bunch of techniques around making that video get seen by more people, but what are you going to put in those videos? Why do some people do so well with it and build huge audiences while others just annoy the people that see their videos and end up losing friends over it? That's the question I really like asking myself, and it's the question you should be asking if you're wanting to know how to market your business and build your brand.

I teach you how to use your expertise and build businesses and investments that are worth millions of dollars. Let's talk about how important it is to focus and diversify. And when I talk about this, it's because I've learned from my own experience that where you can really get into a lot of trouble is when you spread yourself too thin and you're trying to manage too many different areas of your life. And any of you who's a parent and is trying to raise kids and start a business, or run a job at a side hustle, you know how hard it can be to stay focused and keep the momentum going. Well, it's the same thing when you're building businesses and your investing.

When I first started investing in houses what I would do is would find a property that I thought had really good long-term value, was a nice little home that a family would always want to live in, it was near the school and it would have some renovation potential. I was a specialist at finding really ugly houses that I could make more attractive. And I don't do all the like total reconstructing and contractor work, although I did have a team of contractors that came in and helped me do a cosmetic makeover. I'm talking about houses that you can do a little work on the garden and things that are not majorly expensive, but make a huge difference to the look of it.

So I would find a series of small ugly houses and I would borrow… Because at the moment when times are lean like they are with the lending, you can get more leverage. You can either buy smaller, cheaper places and try and buy them outright. Or you can borrow a percentage from the bank, say 25 to 50%, and this is just what I do, I'm not a licensed financial advisor, so I'm not giving you financial advice. I'm just saying that I felt a lot more comfortable having a lower rate of borrowing so that I owned a fair chunk of the property and then my rents would always cover my mortgage payments. When interest rates are low like they are now, it just means that you can have a bigger portfolio, you can spread yourself further because you're using the leverage of some of the bank's money as well.

I was doing really well with that strategy. I was buying these houses, borrowing a little bit, the rents would cover them, and I was pretty much set for life. I mean, I had a whole bunch of houses and some commercial properties. I enjoyed fixing them up. I would get long-term tenants, even if my tenants moved out for a little while, it was fine because I had insurance to cover me for periods of anything that went wrong with the property or periods of where I didn't have tenants, but because they were little family homes near schools that usually wasn't a problem for me.

Then I sort of ran out of borrowing power, I ran out of money to buy more houses, but I really enjoy doing it so I started teaching myself to trade the stock market and I was able to make more cash with my stock market trading that I could then invest in the houses. This also meant that the money that I was making in the stock market was being invested, which kept my tax obligations down a little bit. And then I decided that I wanted to learn how to write books and educate people on how to do what I was doing. And it seemed like it wouldn't be that hard except that I was taking on a whole new skillset. I was having to learn how to write books, how to be a speaker, how to create online training programs and all my attention started going into that and I stopped looking after my… I was doing a lot of managing my real estate, looking after the properties, and managing my stock portfolios. And eventually, I was spending so much time trying to learn all these new skillsets that I kind of neglected my investments until I got to a point where I realized that I was going to have to sell some of my houses because I'd over-leveraged and I started lending some money to people to help them with their businesses. And honestly, I ended up losing some of my houses.

My advice to you is to take your time, really learn this, get it managed, make sure that you understand what you're doing. Don't try and do too many things and spread yourself too thin. You really want to stay focused on what's working for you and gradually leverage and diversify. Hope that's helpful.

Written By Cydney O'Sullivan, Founder of Millionaires Training

A lot of people ask me, "Why do you teach people how to be millionaires? Not everybody wants to be a millionaire." Honestly, I do it because I really wanted to be a millionaire. Growing up, I wished I could find somebody to teach me this stuff I'm teaching you, so I really want to take the benefit of my experience and give it to the people who really are looking for it. Can't help everybody; none of us can be all things to all people.

If you're interested in being a millionaire, you might have some questions for me. Is being a millionaire enough? What happens if you become a millionaire and it's not enough? Let me be honest with you, there's a whole conversation around, is a million dollars enough? Because, in reality, it comes down so much to, what are your goals? What are you investing in to create that wealth? Is it highly profitable? Is it high-risk or low-risk? Ideally, when we're helping people come up with a plan for how to become a millionaire, what we're looking at is, what is their skillset? What do they love to do? What are they starting with? Do they have an investment nest egg they can then start to leverage and grow into a low-risk, high-return wealth portfolio? What do you need to be aware of?

Obviously, you always want to be thinking of, what's the worst case scenario? What can I lose? If you think about it in terms of, if you've been working all your life, which most of us do… Most of us get out of school, and we get into a job, and, if we're lucky, we like the job, and we then continue to grow and mature in the job, and evolve, and maybe get promoted. But there's still no guarantee of a golden future for you when you have a job. It's the same thing with running your own business and being an investor to create wealth. There is never any 100% guarantees. There are ways you can protect yourself. When you have your own business, at least you have a little bit more control of your future, or you have your own investing business, you can make more decisions about what you get into and how you protect yourself. There's insurances and things you can do to make sure you've covered your divesting; having a diversified portfolio, for instance.

If you have your own business, you don't want to just be doing one thing. You might want to have multiple ways of generating revenue so if something comes along like what we just went through, which was a global pandemic, which affected retail businesses all over the world, and the travel industry, and the hotel industry, and that kind of thing, it's good to have another way of generating income to keep yourself going, and have that all built-in. Always be thinking about your risk. When you work for other people, you have very little control over your future, and I did work for many companies over the years.

I have taken time out of running my own businesses to go and work in other companies, and to be honest, I just am not cut out for it. Because I've had my own businesses and I've had control, I get really frustrated with the way other people run their businesses, as I'm sure people get frustrated when they're working for me. But I find that, once you've been an entrepreneur, once you've had your own business, you become almost unemployable, because you want more control, you want more say, and you don't always like the way other people run their businesses, and you definitely don't like being told what to do, is generally what happens. I don't really regret leaving the companies I worked for to go out and do my own thing.

I'm the kind of person that, at the end of my life, I would rather say, "I tried everything. I didn't make the best of everything I tried." I'm the kind of person that would have more regrets over having not tried a lot of different things, and had a lot of adventures, than being the kind of person that came to the end of their life and said, "Well, look, I loved, and I lived, and I had a good life." For me, I just want to push boundaries, I want to find out, what else can I do? What other difference can I make? What's possible that I haven't tried yet? I'm always surprised at how a few basic, principle business skills can be applied to so many different areas of your life to achieve success, and learn, and grow.

One way to think about moving your business online is as if it was a TV show.

What's been interesting being in business for gosh, 40 years like I have, and watching the world go from, well I started working in TV, for instance, and one of my very first jobs was working for a company that made TV commercials, and in fact, the guy that started that production house; he went on to have one of the biggest TV channels in China, so I was learning from one of the best as it turns out. And then watching at the time when I was a kid, what was really big was the Sonny and Cher Show and Donny and Marie. So people like the Osmonds and the Jackson 5 became huge international best-selling brands because of their exposure on TV. I mean, think about all the brands that were suddenly household names because they got onto the Ed Sullivan Show.

Well, all of that we've been growing up with, what's really interesting for us in our generation is that we are the generation that grew up with the beginning of TV. Many of the Millennials and X and Y Gen, or whatever, they actually don't even watch TV anymore. They've grown up with the internet. They have no idea of what it was like before the internet, but for many people of my generation, we remember when the internet first became available to us, and it changed our lives. And, of course, I can remember one of the companies I worked for, had some of the first portable computers, which were like the desktop towers that people have now, but it was something that you could take home with you, and I remember the engineers that I worked with saying, "There are companies that believe that everybody will have one of these on their desk at home, at least one computer per household."

And we were all like, "No way!" because none of us could imagine that the technology would advance as quickly as it has and that we could have the computing speed and power of one of those giant tower personal computers at that time now in the palm of our hand in an iPhone, a mobile phone, smartphone. And the technology has just moved so fast, but the opportunities for us as marketers and business owners are astounding. In fact, I'd say probably it's one of the things that overwhelms a lot of business people today is how accessible the internet and the technology has made the mass market to us. And I've worked with many international speakers and marketers who have done incredible things. Taking their message, honing it, and taking it out to the mass market using different platforms like YouTube and Facebook, and just email. I mean, think about it, there are people who've built multi, multi-million dollar businesses doing that.

To give you some examples. I have a friend in Australia who is making around $100 million a year right now. He just focuses on advertising to bring in people who are looking for business opportunities, and then he markets highly productive people who are very good at selling their products, he markets other people's investment programs to these people in the masses who are looking for business opportunities. So he will spend millions of dollars a month on advertising to bring in the leads, or people who are interested in attending online seminars, which is webinars or Zoom meetings, to learn from somebody to teach them about, for instance, stock market investing or real estate investing. And then he'll just keep marketing these investment programs with all different angles to these leads that he's generating.

That's one very focused area type of business where you just become masterful at a particular type of lead gen and then you offer other people's programs, which is not that unlike what they do on TV. All the TV networks, when you think about it, they're just interested in having audiences because they make most of their revenue from the ad campaigns that they run on their networks. So their main focus is on getting audiences, and what they're looking for is quality content to attract those audiences and keep them on their channel. Think about using the internet today as if you were a person who was trying to run your own TV show or run your own ad campaigns, or you were a TV network who's actually looking at building audiences, providing them with high value content that they really want to consume, and then maintaining that standard so that you can continuously grow your audience and then be attractive to the people that will help you generate revenue.

Cydney O'Sullivan, Founder of Millionaires Academy