If you want to create wealth, it will help to understand what it is. Wealth is not the same thing as money. Wealth is as old as human history. Far older, in fact; ants have wealth. Money is a comparatively recent invention.

Wealth is the fundamental thing. Wealth is stuff we want: food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on. You can have wealth without having money. If you had a magic machine that could on command make you a car or cook you dinner or do your laundry, or do anything else you wanted, you wouldn’t need money. Whereas if you were in the middle of Antarctica, where there is nothing to buy, it wouldn’t matter how much money you had.

Wealth is what you want, not money. But if wealth is the important thing, why does everyone talk about making money? It is a kind of shorthand: money is a way of moving wealth, and in practice they are usually interchangeable. But they are not the same thing, and unless you plan to get rich by counterfeiting, talking about making money can make it harder to understand how to make money.

Money is a side effect of specialization. In a specialized society, most of the things you need, you can’t make for yourself. If you want a potato or a pencil or a place to live, you have to get it from someone else.

How do you get the person who grows the potatoes to give you some? By giving him something he wants in return. But you can’t get very far by trading things directly with the people who need them. If you make violins, and none of the local farmers wants one, how will you eat?

The solution societies find, as they get more specialized, is to make the trade into a two-step process. Instead of trading violins directly for potatoes, you trade violins for, say, silver, which you can then trade again for anything else you need. The intermediate stuff– the medium of exchange– can be anything that’s rare and portable. Historically metals have been the most common, but recently we’ve been using a medium of exchange, called the dollar, that doesn’t physically exist. It works as a medium of exchange, however, because its rarity is guaranteed by the U.S. Government.

The advantage of a medium of exchange is that it makes trade work. The disadvantage is that it tends to obscure what trade really means. People think that what a business does is make money. But money is just the intermediate stage– just a shorthand– for whatever people want. What most businesses really do is make wealth. They do something people want.

Build wealth, dont just make money!

Regards

Wilbert Chaniwa
Founder
Nexus Business Network

Unfortunately in life there are only two groups of people. Its either you are a leader or a follower. An entrepeneur or an employee. You either choose to sell or be sold to. Produce or consume.

This phenomenon is synonimous throughout society and we are inherently making these decisions daily as we make our paces through the journey that we call life. There is nothing wrong with being on either side of the fence but it pretty much determines where you are going to end up as far as financial freedom is concerned.

Being a leader,trendsetter, entrepeneur, producer or seller is the difficult side of things because it involves convincing or getting buy in from other people, it means most of the time you are thinking outside the box about what the rest of society does not normally think anout. You are constantly exercising your imagination to the “possibilites” of things that have not been thought of before, and usually you are faced with a lot of resistance to change, but as with every great risk, there is a greater reward; so its either you choose the easy way..or the hard way, but whichever way you go, the rewards are reciprocated. Its in all of us to choose mediocrity or exceptional.

Wilbert Chaniwa
Founder
Nexus Business Network

Business is essentially about creating cashflows. The fewer cashflows your business posseses, the more likely the business is to be affected by environmental factors, low and high demand periods, in terms of income streams. The most successful business in the Blue Chip company group on the New York Stock exchange have their hands stuck in a lot of pots. Property, Stock Options and investments and shares in businesses that have support services to their main line products and not to mention shares in competitor companies are only but a few ways to spread the risk of your business.

And so it would apply, as an individual, you need to also reduce the risk. Its not enough to depend on a salary of one job or run a business that only has one product or service,as your means of income. Increase the pots that you have as cashflows. Have 2 jobs, set up a small business that you manage on weekends or after hours, create an investment portfolio through various hedge funds available on the market, invest in other businesses that have different product and service lines other than your own. Think actively about how to create more than one cashflow to keep your risk low.

Until you have this in place, you are in a position of high risk and low returns. Increase your options.

Regards,
Wilbert Chaniwa
Founder
Nexus Business Network

It is no secret that we face an electricity crisis in South Africa. Eskom have just not been able to cope with the increase in demand of electricity due to the growing economy. The government and Eskom are trying to find a solution to the electricity crisis. There are suggestions that new power plants have to be built over the next couple of years and more coal will need to be secured inorder to power these plants. Funding for this expansion has not been easy as consumers seem to be the main contributors to the funding with electricity tariffs set to rise.

There have been calls by many to find alternative means of power to help increase the supply of electricity in South Africa. Many wonder why there has not been a major drive to start using more and more solar power. After all, we are in South Africa where we get a lot of sun shine through out the year. There are many countries in Europe using solar energy and they do not get as much sun shine as we do in South Africa. The cost of setting up the solar power infrastructure is relatively high but it would be a good long term investment. Read the rest of this entry »

According to a recent eMarketer forecast, mobile marketing will reach more than $19 billion globally by 2012. With that said, I think it is clear for all to see the effect mobile marketing is going to play over the next couple of years and it is time for South Africa to start to make a significant contribution into this lucrative and emerging market. Read the rest of this entry »

The major topic of discussion this past week has been about the elections in Zimbabwe. At the time of writing this, there is still no news on the results of the presidential elections that took place last week Saturday. The whole of Zimbabwe is still waiting for the results, so to the rest of the world together with investors waiting on the sidelines. The question on many investors minds right now is whether or not to go invest in Zimbabwe? Read the rest of this entry »

With the current high prices of fuel in South Africa and signs that we maybe in for another petrol price hike come April, are many of us going to be able to afford driving our cars? Could the answer lie in the scooter? A report by SABC yesterday headlined: Fuel-efficient scooter sales up by 30%. This statistic is no surprise as more and more people are looking towards this two wheeler as a mode of transportation in order to save on their wallets.

On most scooters, one litre of petrol will take you 55kms as opposed to one litre taking you only 10km in an average car. If more people start to use scooters in South Africa, they would save a lot on their monthly fuel bills. Not only will scooters save one fuel but they will ease your traffic problems. A scooter can whisk in and out of traffic and one can quickly get from point A to B. Read the rest of this entry »