As an entrepreneur, it can be easy to focus on making millions. After all, that’s the goal for many founders, especially those who are new to the field. However, sometimes, we spend so much time concentrating on the end goal, we forget to pay attention to the road that gets us there. While ambition is admirable, extreme ambition can actually leave us confused or even discouraged. Instead, we should focus on mastering every step of the journey that leads to our success so that the path is manageable, and more importantly, sustainable.

On season 6 episode 33 of the Making Bank Podcast, guest JT Foxx chats about how to build real wealth, instead of money. As someone who has founded, build, and sold dozens of businesses, JT has walked the path to financial success many times.
Now a coach and partner to some of the world’s wealthiest men, JT has seen first-hand the pattern of habits and mindsets that help someone not only make money but keep it. To him, keeping money and building real wealth is much harder than making a little pocket change.

So, whatever your target, JT shares the formula to reach it, including how to act at different stages of your career. Keep reading for some of his top tips.

Reverse Engineer Your Wealth

The first thing you must do as an entrepreneur is determine your target number. How much money do you want to make and in what amount of time? Rather than focusing on the number you want to achieve by the time you retire, JT encourages you to think in the shorter term. What do you want to make this month? This year? In 5 years?
By giving yourself a specific number and timeline, you give yourself direction. If you’re starting at 0 and tell yourself you want to make $10 million, that large number begins to feel obscure. You might end up discouraging yourself from taking any steps towards it at all, as it feels unrealistic. However, if you give yourself a manageable goal, you encourage yourself to work towards it. Once you have that number, begin to reverse engineer what you need to do to accomplish it. Perhaps it’s increasing your work hours. Perhaps it’s striking a new deal. Try converting your goal into steps you can realistically take.

Attainable milestones

When choosing your goals, JT believes in mastering the next doable step. As with determining your target number, you want to pick accomplishments that you know you can master. That way, you can funnel all of your energy into reaching that goal, instead of daydreaming about something ten years from now. Once you’ve reached them, set a new goal.
If you are just starting out as an entrepreneur, focus on doing everything necessary to obtain your first client. From there, aim for your first major deal, then your first $100,000. This approach has less to do with ambition and more to do with tackling your ambition, one feasible step at a time. After all, the successful person achieves their goals no matter the size, not just thinks of dreams so large they are paralyzed by inaction.

Change Your Role with the Company

One of the biggest mistakes that JT encounters is when entrepreneurs don’t evolve with the company. The truth of the matter is that your relationship to the organization will change as its size does. JT believes that in order to reach your first $100,000, you have to outwork your competition. Reaching that milestone is almost solely on you.
Once you go beyond $100,000, however, your role will change. In order to reach $1 million from $100,000, JT says that it is 80% you and 20% your people. You need to hire the right people to perform the functions of the company so that you can work on the company itself. As JT says, allow your people to focus on the transactional, while you focus on the transformational.
Additionally, he warns against being busy with being busy. If you remain the person you were to get to $100,000, which is someone who had to do everything, you will end up getting dragged down by menial tasks. You will become so busy with busy work, that you won’t be able to actually be productive for big picture items. Just because you put in 12 hours a day, doesn’t mean all those 12 hours are productive. So instead, JT encourages you to always ask yourself if that task is making you money, or costing you money? If it’s costing you money, let someone else do it so that you have the time and energy to find new ways of making more money.

If your goal is to make $10 million, your role will once again have to change. In order to enter this level of success, JT says that 80% of it will be on your people, and only 20% on you. You cannot move beyond $1 million if you don’t have great people by your side.
Here’s the thing. Try as we may, there is a limit to our time, knowledge and energy. Therefore, when our company has grown to this large size, we need to turn to others for their time, knowledge and energy. Be sure to turn to the right people.
To raise the bar from $10 million to $100 million, it will be 90% your people and only 10% you. Past a certain number, the individuals you hire will have a much larger sway on the company’s success than you will. So, if you can invest that time in hiring and training talented and hard-working individuals, you will be rewarded infinitely.

If you have reached a high level of success and hope to become a billionaire, JT believes that it is 50% your people, 1% you and 49% luck. While we can’t control our luck, we do have control over ourselves and our people. If you set yourself up in the best possible way, you’ll be ready when that luck eventually does come around.