"How To Be One of The Next Millionaires," by Paul Zane Pilzer, Your Business Magazine, April 2006. 

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More on
The Next Millionaires:

 "Two Industries Creating The Next Millionaires," by Paul Zane Pilzer, Your Business Magazine, November 2006.

"Crisis or Opportunity - The 6 Myths and Realities of Economic Opportunity," by Paul Zane Pilzer, Your Business Magazine, October 2006.

"Crisis or Opportunity - The 6 Myths and Realities of Economic Opportunity," by Paul Zane Pilzer, Your Business Magazine, July 2006.

"Creating Fortunes in the New Economy," by Paul Zane Pilzer, Success From Home Magazine, September 2005.

"A Tale of Two Industries," by Paul Zane Pilzer, Success From Home Magazine, November 2005.

The Next Millionaires, by Paul Zane Pilzer, Direct Selling News Magazine, June 2005.

The Next Millionaires, by Paul Zane Pilzer, Success at Home Magazine, published March 2005.

A vast amount of wealth is being created over the next ten years. Here's why--and how you can be a part of it.

The Home-Based Business Boom
     The advent of intellectual distribution is one reason that network marketing offers such a favorable opportunity, but it is not the only reason. Another powerful factor is the current boom in home-based businesses.
     Small businesses today account for more than one-half of our nation’s economic output and employ more than half our private sector workforce—and more than half of these are home-based businesses. Only 20 years ago, people who worked from home were immediately suspect, as if that implied there was something wrong with them, that they couldn’t get a “real job.” Today, the sharpest and richest people we know are the people who work at home. One factor in this change is a massive shift in the dominant unit of technology, the building block of our total economy.
     When I graduated from Wharton 30 years ago, I went to work at Citibank, not because I was interested in banking, but because I wanted access to the best technology, and Citibank had the biggest, best computers available. Back then, that was the only way to have access to the best technology. Computers were expensive mainframes owned and managed exclusively by large businesses, which gave them an enormous competitive advantage.
     Today, the opposite is the case. You are more likely to find the hottest and best new technology on the desk of an entrepreneur sitting in his home office. Many of the highest-valued companies in the U.S. stock market (Cisco, Dell, Microsoft, Intel, Oracle and Vodaphone) are companies that didn’t exist 25 years ago, yet today their combined net worth exceeds $1 trillion. What do they have in common? They are all third party suppliers of affordable technologies to individual users.
     The unit of technology has changed from a $2 million mainframe that served huge corporations, to a home computer you can put on your desktop for well under $1,000—and which is far more powerful than the mainframe. As a home-based entrepreneur, you can now do business far better than someone who’s working in a large company and has to deal with the overhead. The big companies just can’t innovate fast enough.
     In the ’80s, the rule was the bigger the company, the newer and better the technology. Today, the rule often is the bigger the company, the older and more out-of-date the technology.
          In the years ahead, economic growth in the United States and other

developed nations will stem from individual entrepreneurs and one- or two-person businesses. The corporation has been decentralizing and dismantling itself, giving way to an environment of independent contractors.
     Where are the greatest opportunities today? Even for people starting right out of school, the best opportunities are not to go work for some big company (unless it’s a company that makes tools for individuals), but to go into business for yourself as an entrepreneur.

Healthy Family, Healthy Economy, Healthy Society
     The change in technology is one reason we are experiencing such a boom in home-based businesses. Another reason is that working from home is a more personally satisfying way to live.
     In the new economy, the sheer quantity of compensation is no longer enough. More and more, we have come to realize we also want a certain quality of compensation, too. We don’t simply want money; we want lifestyle. It doesn’t matter how much money you earn if you never get to see your family. It doesn’t matter how many possessions you have if you never get to use or play with them. And it doesn’t matter how great of a personal economy you create if you don’t have the health to enjoy it.
     The concept of “quality of life,” which we take for granted today, is actually a fairly recent invention. Our economy and living standards have grown to the point where we not only expect to make a living, but we also expect to have the best possible experience doing it.

     Today, we demand a quality of life that gives us not only survival, but also meaning and fulfillment. And here again, a corporate job simply can’t compete with self-employment.
     Twenty percent of the average corporate workday is spent just commuting to and from work—and up to 50 percent of the time spent actually inside the workplace is wasted around the water cooler, gossiping and talking to other people.
     Today, more and more people don’t want to spend their time chatting with other workers in the office—they’d rather spend that time with their spouse or their children.
     They’d rather get their work done in a few hours, and then get back to the business of being with their families. For these people, a home-based business today is both a more efficient way to work and a lifestyle choice.
     We often talk about the challenge of keeping a balance between our work and our families. Picture it like a seesaw, with work on one end and family on the other. When you’re constantly playing these priorities against each other, your life swings and swings, until eventually the whole thing breaks, whether that means losing your job, your family or your health.    
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