Building your own personal wealth team is perhaps the most important step you can take to creating massive amounts of wealth. Why? Quite simply, it's a matter of leverage. At ProVision, we are fond of saying that the three most expensive words in the English language are, "do it yourself." When we try to do things all by ourselves, we are ignoring the fact that we all have only 24 hours in the day. By building a wealth team, we are leveraging those hours into hundreds or even thousands of hours each day.

Imagine, for example, a man like Bill Marriott. Suppose he told himself when he went into the hotel business that he was going to manage his hotel all by himself. If that were the case, rather than building the mammoth chain of Marriott hotels, he would likely have a small bed and breakfast. Instead, he built a team of thousands to locate, build and manage hotels around the world. He used his wealth team to leverage his time.

But that's not all he leveraged. Don't imagine for a minute that Bill only leveraged his employees' time. He also leveraged their intellectual capital. He knew from the start that if he were going to build a hospitality empire, he would need ideas from all of his employees, advisors, vendors and other team members in order to be successful.

You can do the same. There was a time when Bill Marriott's father, J. Willard Marriott, only had a single store. He didn't start out with a large team or lots of money. But he understood the value of other people's time, knowledge and wisdom, as well as his own intellectual capital. He used these to begin and empire that his son, Bill, has taken to a level that perhaps even J. Willard never conceived.

How do you get started? As I suggest in my coaching, begin with a mentor. A mentor is a teacher. Someone with ideas that you like and who you feel you can follow to financial freedom. It doesn't have to be anyone you know personally. It can be a well-known financial guru or a lesser-known financial professional whose ideas strike a cord with you. This mentor will be a critical part of your financial team.

The next person you need is a strategic wealth coach. This is clearly the most important member of your team. A wealth coach brings everything together. They hold you accountable for your activities and provide quality advice about how you should proceed. Your wealth coach should be a financial professional and preferably a certified public accountant or have similar credentials and experience.

Your wealth coach should be your primary source for many of your team members. They should be able to recommend several of the members personally or they should help you learn how to find and interview team members. Team members will include such individuals as attorneys, financial advisors, tax strategists, bankers and insurance agents. If you are in business, of course your team will be much larger and will include all of your employees, contractors, vendors and customers.

Can you imagine how powerful your wealth creation machine becomes when you have all of these team members working towards your success? There is no way you can be as successful on your own as you will be with all of these talented people helping you. So go out and begin creating your own wealth team today, beginning with a mentor and a coach.

Warmest Regards,

Tom