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

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More on
The Next Millionaires:

"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.

Distribution in the New Economy
     In my 1990 book Unlimited Wealth, I wrote that the new wealth in that decade would be created mainly by people who distributed things, rather than by people who made things. The great fortunes of the 1990s would be made in distribution. But that opportunity has come and gone. The fortunes to be made today and in the years ahead will be made by those who are involved in teaching people about new products and services that they either didn’t know existed or didn’t know were now affordable. Intellectual distribution, as opposed to physical distribution, is where the greatest fortunes are being made today and will continue to be made for at least the next decade.
     Manufacturers today report that the greatest bottleneck they have is not in creating the next great new product; it’s how to reach people and teach them that these new products exist.
     People like to do things the old way. They fight change. In everything we do, from shopping and cooking to taking care of our health, we often have the nostalgic view that the good old days were better, that the good old ways are the best ways. But the “good old days” were times of manure in the streets and rampant diphtheria, of abject poverty and wretched living conditions.
     The truth is that the “good old days” were not so good. Nevertheless, people tend to cling to the known and resist the unknown. Consequently, when they watch television, read magazines or surf the Internet, they tend to look for things that reinforce what they already know.
     So where will they learn? There is really only one place: from other people. The most effective way we have to teach people the new method is one-on-one, word-of-mouth communication. This is why, even though we have sophisticated video-conferencing tools available, businesspeople will still fl y clear across the country to meet face-to-face when they have important issues to decide.

Network Marketing in the Years Ahead
     I have always been keenly interested in education; I taught college students for 20 years at New York University, and in the 1990s, I developed an educational software product line. One of the most exciting 

things I’m seeing about this new crop of 10 million millionaires is that they are more often teachers at heart, rather than conventional businesspeople. They are people who learn about a new product or new service and adopt it for themselves and their families—but they don’t stop there. They then go out and teach new people what they just learned.
     Network marketing is both the oldest method of sales communication and also the newest. And it’s the best method we have today to change someone’s paradigm and teach them about a new product or service—a new way of doing something that they wouldn’t have gotten by reading a magazine, surfing the Internet or watching television.
     Person-to-person, word-of-mouth communication represents the cutting edge of intellectual distribution. This is why we are seeing so many Fortune 500 companies jumping into the direct selling arena, and Wall Street investors such as Warren Buffet entering the business.
     Network marketing has grown steadily over the last 20 years, increasing 91 percent in just the last decade. With more than 13 million Americans and 53 million people worldwide involved, it is now a $100 billion global industry. Yet as impressive as this is, it’s not hard to see that the real growth in this business model has only just begun.
     For one thing, demand is increasing exponentially. Because of the ever-accelerating pace of technological advancement, there is a growing flood of new products and services that desperately need their story told in the marketplace—stories which no amount of screaming TV ads or sprawling Internet pop-ups and banner ads can effectively tell.
     Neil Offen, president of the Direct Selling Association, predicts that, at the current rate of increase, worldwide some 200 million people will enter this industry over the next 10 years, effectively quadrupling its current percentage of the population.
     Network marketing is already a force to be reckoned with—but its growth will explode in the coming decade.

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.
     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.
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