THE 4 WAYS TO MAKE MONEY IN BUSINESS AND THE ONE I CHOSE

I was listening to Alex Hormozi break down business-building recently and he made a framework click for me that I want to pass along. Most people stumble into one of these by accident instead of choosing it on purpose. And the wrong fit will quietly cost you years.

There are really only four ways to build wealth through business. Every one of them works. But they demand different things from you, carry different risks, and reward completely different temperaments.

1. Bootstrap

Fund the business with your own money and its own cash flow. You keep all the equity and all the control.

The upside: nobody to answer to. Every dollar of profit is yours. You move at your own speed and you owe no explanations.

The cost: it is slow, and your growth is capped by your own capital. You carry 100% of the risk on your own back. Plenty of good businesses die not because the model was wrong but because they ran out of runway before it could compound.

2. Raise Capital

Bring in outside money, debt or equity, to fund your own business.

The upside: you can move faster and bigger than your own wallet allows. Other people's capital lets a good operator scale a good idea.

The cost: you have taken on an obligation. Equity means you have sold a piece of the thing forever. Debt means you have made a promise that does not care about your excuses. And the moment you hold someone else's money, you have taken on a responsibility that should keep you up at night, in a good way.

3. Invest Your Own Money in Other People's Deals

You become the passive investor. The LP in a syndication, a share in a private company, a slice of someone else's fund.

The upside: truly passive. You can diversify across operators and asset classes without running anything yourself. Your money works while you do something else.

The cost: you are trusting someone else's judgment, someone else's underwriting, and someone else's discipline. I have made 50 plus of these investments, so I will say this plainly: when one of these goes wrong, you usually find out late, and there is nothing you can do about it. You handed over the steering wheel when you wired the money.

4. Invest Other People's Money in Other People's Deals

This is the allocator or fund-of-funds model. You raise capital and deploy it into other operators' deals, taking a fee or a spread for the diligence and the access.

The upside: the economics can be excellent. You can earn on capital you do not own, deployed into deals you do not have to operate. Leverage on leverage.

The cost: you have stacked two layers of trusting someone else. You are trusting the operators you fund, and your investors are trusting you to have vetted them. When the operator fails, you own the conversation with the people whose money is gone, even though you never controlled the asset. That is a hard seat.

The Part Most People Miss

You do not have to pick just one. But you do have to be honest about which game you are actually playing.

A lot of pain in this business comes from people who think they are in one box and are really in another. The investor who believes they are in real estate but is actually in box 3, fully dependent on an operator they never pressure-tested. The allocator in box 4 who markets like they control the assets, right up until they do not.

For me the answer is simple and I have made peace with it. I am boxes 1 and 2. I put my own capital into my business and I raise capital into that same business. The business happens to be lending, but the structure is what matters. Every dollar, mine or raised, goes into loans I originate and control under my own credit standards.

I deliberately do not live in box 3 or box 4 with my core capital, because both require me to trust someone else's discipline more than my own. And the one thing 9 years in the NFL taught me about risk is this: you control what you can control, and you do not outsource the things that can end you.

That is not the only right answer. Box 3 has built fortunes for patient, well-diversified people. Box 4 is a genuinely great business for the right operator. But you should be able to say in one sentence which box your money lives in and why. The people who get hurt are almost always the ones who could not.

Before you put another dollar to work, ask yourself which of the four you are really in. Not which one sounds best at a dinner party. Which one fits your temperament, your capital, and how much control you actually need to sleep at night.

Choose it on purpose.

Which box are you in? Reply to this email and tell me. I read every one and the answers always teach me something.

Devon