5 Brilliant Millionares Whose Stories Will Keep You Inspired in 2017

Many entrepreneurs are aware of the fact that the success stories of other individuals can offer them insight into how to improve their own businesses. Also, these stories can show us how keeping an optimistic view of the world can lead to success.

The following stories come from 5 entrepreneurs who remained optimistic and kept pushing their limits until they overcame every obstacle that threatened to deny them their success.

While each of them has his own rules for success, they all have one thing in common: they were willing to sacrifice a great deal in order to be the best.

Sam Ovens

One may say that Sam Ovens truly started with nothing.  Before starting his career in digital consultancy, he used to work from his parent’s garage!  Having dropped out of college, Ovens lacked any kind of professional training; however, he did have a lot of knowledge about advertising and digital media.  He had also spent a short amount of time as an employee and arrived at the conclusion that he would not be happy working for someone other than himself.

Ovens had three failed business attempts before finally starting his career in the world of digital products. While his initial ideas and plans had failed, he remains optimistic and continued to believe that he would find a way to be successful.

A part of Sam Ovens’ success story is the fact he realized that instead of creating digital products and services, and then trying to sell them, it was more efficient to simply ask the customers what they wanted.  After he started listening to what his customers wanted, he managed to create a 10 million dollar income in a matter of months!

A more practical insight that can be drawn from his story is that he always concentrated on the most important expenses, and always looked for ways to eliminate the unimportant ones.

Ovens recommends that, as a rule of thumb, you only work during the night, in order to spend at least eight hours per day developing your business.

Tomas Gorny

Tomas Gorny became a millionaire after moving to the US, from Poland. The entrepreneur joined a startup that would bring him millions, only to lose everything and then having to start from scratch once again.  Gorny not only proved that he knew how to become a millionaire, but that he could make money regardless of his situation.

This entrepreneur thinks that the most important advice to help a businessman be successful are:

1. Never judge people by their appearance. Looks or speech can be deceiving and underestimating someone can be extremely dangerous.
2. Don’t be afraid to fail.
3. Always put yourself in your customer’s shoes.  This will allow you to always be objective.
4. Don’t let your worries about money or an exit strategy cloud your judgment.  Your primary concern should be developing your business.

Gorny’s opinion is that entrepreneurs should spend less time trying to raise capital, and concentrate more on developing a service or a product.

Joy Gendusa

Joy Gendusa’s story started when she arrived at the conclusion that running a graphic design business wasn’t going as well as she had imagined.  Looking to increase her profits, she ordered a postcard advertising campaign to help market her company.  Through this campaign, she realized the fact that the best way to advertise a business was through direct mailing!  As a result, she started a postcard mailing company named “Postcard Mania”.

The enterprise helped her earn $45,7 million in 2015 alone, by sending 135 million postcards to over 13,000 customers. Gendusa’s company currently earns approx. $50 million per year.

It is important that while she did not discover a new niche, Gendusa’s success is due to her fast thinking when it came to using an already developed industry to her advantage. Essentially, she took a concept that had been around for a long time, and she found ways to build upon it.

Rick Hopper

Rick Hopper was always considered to have a rather unorthodox success story. The entrepreneur always seemed to ignore the traditional educational paths and create his own.  This led to him skipping college and creating a business built upon his inventive, original products.  Hopper’s story proves the fact that in order to be successful, an entrepreneur must be able to identify a need, and then to develop products in order to fill it

His original idea of sunglasses (coined ‘shades for every occasion’) was promoted when he appeared on the popular ABC television show “Shark Tank”.  ReadeREST was a holder for these sunglasses, which the council recommended sell in a bundle package.  There was a unique point to his holder that held the sunglasses using only a magnet and metal which clipped onto the shirt.  They became a success.

Matt Mullenweg

Currently, most of the readers of this website aware of the vast importance of the WordPress blog and web platform; however, many do not know the story of how its creator rose to success.  Mullenweg’s background is not as technical as many might think, considering the success of the WordPress platform.

Quite the opposite, he was extremely artistic in nature.  However, this did not prevent him from being one of PC World Magazine’s Top 50 People of The Web, and on into Business Week’s Top 25 Most Influential People Online.  Mullenweg’s current net worth is $84 million.

Conclusion

It is important to remember that the trait that can be found in each of these entrepreneurs’ approaches to being successful is the fact that they never gave up.  Furthermore, they used their skills and talents in order to develop products that would satisfy various needs.

As we can learn from Mullenweg, it is not important to be a technical individual in order to be extremely successful. However, it is essential to accept the fact that there is a lot to be learned from those who have already materialized their dreams.