A toll booth is the closest substitute to a machine that prints money. It is usually unavoidable and fairly innocuous to the user, extracting small amounts of cash from a steady and constant flow of traffic. A toll booth creates a revenue stream so strong that it can sometimes be securitized and packaged in bonds to thousands of investors.
Many of us are striving to create our own “toll booths” – unique, regular systems for successfully generating recurring income. Ideally, the toll booth should have minimal maintenance costs, thereby acting as a genuine “passive” income stream. Easier said than done, as a thousand would-be internet shopfront millionaires have found to their frustration and eventual cost. So how is that elusive beast – stable, regular, multiple streams of income, to be generated?
There are several main toll booth ideas that you can explore. As the example of Warren Buffett has shown, there are often significant revenue opportunities in overlooked, unglamorous or plain unfashionable areas. Avoid the madness of crowds. One of the most obvious solutions is to develop esoteric, specialist knowledge about a particular industry or investment class. Don’t worry if you have no prior background. Jim Slater’s book the “Zulu Principle” showed that consistent, incremental focus on one topic or area could over time yield devastatingly powerful results. Think of it as the intellectual version of the power of compound interest. There are authors on hubpages who have achieved over 1 million hits purely by deploying specialist knowledge in a very limited field, but in an entertaining and informative way.
The toll booth’s charge is ideally never excessive, so that customers should barely notice the little salami slice of revenue they contribute. They soon accept it as part of the cost of travel and most rarely question its function. A few people will make long detours on slower, less useful roads simply to avoid paying the toll, but they are in the minority. Day after day the traffic keeps on flowing through the toll booth, and, to use the famous Warren Buffett analogy, the snowball of cash keeps rolling, larger day by day.
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