Book extract - Unlocking Wealth: Secrets to Getting Rich at Any Age

India is on the cusp of becoming the world’s third largest economy. If that happens, then every business in India, big and small, if managed well, could grow at least five times if not more over the next ten years. India has the third largest number of billionaires and millionaires in the world and its middle class is expected to grow to 41 per cent of the population by 2031. In more ways than one, there is no better time for individuals and families to create wealth for themselves through smart saving, sound investments, calculated risk-taking, and other strategies.

A book for budding investors as well as High Net Worth Individuals (HNIs), Unlocking Wealth demystifies the process of wealth creation. It explains why it’s never too early or too late to begin building wealth and sets out clearly defined ways in which you can make yourself rich and how you can grow your corpus. However, even though it offers eye-opening ideas and tips on how to become wealthy, it is far from being just a self-help book. In addition to advice for the individual, it shows why wealth is imperative for the betterment of Indian society as a whole. It provides ideas on how wealth can be created at multiple levels so India can realistically achieve its stated goal of becoming a developed nation in the coming decades. In wealthy nations, every citizen benefits and this book sets out a vision of how as more wealth is generated in the country it can be used to develop the prospects of all Indians.

Practical, direct, and jargon free, this is the book to read if you would like to understand how money works and how to make it work for you. It will help you unlock the secrets to wealth creation no matter your age or current financial status.

The book extract that is published below with permission from the publishers focusses upon the necessity of showing up. It is widely believed that 80 per cent of the work done is in the act of showing up, the remaining 20 per cent is the actual work achieved. This is not stated explicitly by the author, but this particular chapter has sufficient examples to showcase the significance of this universal truth in business circles. Interestingly, it is not applicable to the professionals alone, but also those who inherit wealth. It is work that is constantly in progress.

Rohit Sarin is a banker turned entrepreneur with nearly three decades of experience in wealth management. Rohit co-founded Client Associates in 2002, India’s first multi-family office firm which has more than ₹ 50,000 crores (US$ 6 billion) of assets under management, owned by 1,100+ wealthy families. The company has won numerous awards and employs a team of over 250 people across nine offices in as many cities in India. In the course of twenty-five years of working closely with India’s leading wealth owners, wealth creators, and asset managers, Rohit has gathered invaluable insights into how wealth can be created, protected, and multiplied. Rohit believes that entrepreneurship is the surest way of giving back to society and is driven by the larger purpose of ‘leaving the world richer than we inherited’.

SHOWING UP IN LIFE

Even the best player in the world cannot win a match by sitting on the sidelines.

No one wins a match without being on the playground. Wealth creation, too, is the by-product of going through the process of being there and doing what needs to be done when it needs to be done. Lucky are those who act to execute their plans to convert their dreams into reality. They are always on the lookout for what is next and are the first ones to know about new skills to be acquired, new opportunities that may be there in the market, new and better ways to solve the same problem and so on. A farmer who is on his farm every day knows what his crop needs next; a business owner who is on the floor daily or is meeting customers regularly knows what his business needs next. Wealth comes only to those who are alive and alive are those who are active.

Mere existence is not enough to ensure success. One has to actively engage with one’s surroundings and circumstances and proactively take on the challenges that life throws one’s way.

Action, therefore, lies at the core of the concept of ‘showing up’. Success is the by-product and end result of concerted action. For example, attending a social event might qualify as ‘showing up’ in the social sense but will not, by itself, bring any social capital or other benefits. The ‘action’ involves networking with those present at the gathering, building bridges, finding common areas of interest, and leveraging the connection(s) made for mutual benefit. Similarly, one can play a game only if one shows up at the playground. Being the best player in the world will not count for much if one is sitting on the sidelines and watching the game from outside rather than actively participating in it. Then, a highly rated young player on the periphery of the national side will never make it to the team if he/she is not present at pre-selection trials. The player increases the chances of being selected by ‘showing up’. Here, too, merely marking a presence will not suffice. The player will also have to prove his/her mettle to the selectors.

Thus, showing up can be defined as a mindset, an approach that signals willingness to face the ups and downs that everyone has to encounter at every step of life—whether in the realm of family or friendships, job or business, sports or hobby. It is only by showing up that one can honestly gauge one’s readiness for the battles that lie ahead. It enables individuals, teams, and companies to assess the level of their readiness to face challenges, identify gap areas, and suggest areas of improvement. Those who ‘show up’ also realize over time that progress towards a given goal is often not linear but involves a stop-start journey in which several obstacles have to be overcome and roadblocks removed.

An area sales manager in an FMCG company, for example, is usually mandated to oversee channel sales—a chain of stockists, distributors, and retailers through which the product travels to get from the manufacturer to the end consumer. It is his/ her job to ensure that the company’s merchandise is displayed prominently on the shelves of retailers, that distributors are addressing the issues faced by the channel and that customer showing up in life feedback is being relayed honestly to the decision makers in the company in good time. To do this, the manager will have to be keep his/her ear to the ground. The best way of doing so will be to go on regular tours of their territory and get first hand reports from the ground. In today’s data-heavy age and extensive Management Information System (MIS) reporting systems, it is possible for managers sitting at the head office to get a lot of this information from the comfort of their airconditioned offices, but only the manager who ‘shows up’ on the ground will be able to catch the pulse of the customer and the retailer as well as the sight of the competitor’s products vying for the attention of the same customer on the same shelf. These convey a reality that no Power Point presentation can capture.

In the manufacturing sector, too, the role of the production manager is of paramount importance. Effective production managers ‘show up’ by making regular physical visits to the shop floor for first-hand accounts of the conditions prevailing there. He/she interacts with workers to assess the morale of the workforce and the challenges faced by them. All the secondary data that is captured in various data sets can be reported to superiors sitting in remote locations, but only the person on the ground gets the ‘feel’ of the shop floor and can make sense of the intangible sentiments that often make a big difference between success and mediocrity.

Even on battlefields, the legendary officers, commanders, and generals are those who lead their troops from the front on the ground. They are the military leaders who become decorated soldiers and folk heroes who continue to inspire others long after the war is over.

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Corporate Career: One will also see the difference between those who are only physically present and those who show up in any office or professional situation. For most people, a job is something they have to do to earn money to sustain themselves. They log in at the office at 10 a.m. every weekday and log out at 6 p.m., and in most cases meet the expectations of their employer. Such people usually retain their jobs and experience career progression at a moderate pace. Look around, and a majority of people you see will fall into this category. Then, there is a small percentage of people who do not perform as per expectations. Such people are soon identified and get filtered out of the system.

There is, however, a third group of executives who will take the initiative to reach the office much before time, find things to do beyond the call of their duty, not constrained by the limitations of the working hours stipulated by their contracts, and soon make themselves invaluable to their superiors. These executives give themselves greater exposure to industry trends, attend team events and festivities inside and outside office, help showing up in life add value to their departments and peer groups, and consistently deliver above expectation. Their dynamism is usually rewarded, and they are marked out for fast-track growth on the base of the trust that they build with their stakeholders—their colleagues and the organization. As they deliver beyond and more at each level of organizational responsibility they are promoted to the next level, thus, climbing the ladder of corporate growth while others either get filtered or saturated in their roles. This highlights the pyramidical structure where only those who show up rise to the next level.

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Investing: The markets are dynamic entities that are influenced by multiple factors such as macro-economic parameters—GDP growth, inflation, fiscal deficit, current account deficit, and revenue surpluses/deficits—rainfall data, floods and natural disasters, liquidity situation in the domestic and global markets, geo-political conflicts, and domestic political developments, among others. Everyone with access to the internet will have access to these data sets as they are publicly available. Yet, there are ace investors who are followed and there are others whom few people have heard of. The former are those investors who make the effort to ‘show up’. Using their proprietary research and analysis, they create an information arbitrage, which gives them an understanding of the markets that is not available to others. If everybody has access to the same information, then logically, everyone should arrive at the same decisions on buying or selling a stock at the same time. But that is not what happens in the stock market. It is by leveraging the information arbitrage at their disposal that they stay ahead of other investors.

For example, the thirty companies that constitute the BSE Sensex are on the radar of every equity analyst in the market. Everyone has access to all the information about these businesses almost at the same time. Therefore, it may not be possible to discover something different or new for any investor following these companies that might lead to multi-bagger gains. So, many analysts move to the next lot of companies below the level of the largest ones. When this level becomes saturated, they move down the pyramid to the showing up in life mid-caps, small-caps, and even micro-caps to try and find the hidden jewels that are yet to be discovered by anyone. Some of these could then turn out to be multi-baggers as they are discovered by a broader set of analysts and investors who want to own a piece of the pie. Success in investing is all about taking decisions ahead of others, which can only happen if the investor shows up to find and understand investing opportunities unknown to the rest of the world.

In all the above situations, wealth creation is a by-product of ‘showing up’. If there is one phenomenon that is visibly evident in each of these cases it is the pyramidical structure that is everywhere. Whether one is a student, business owner, entrepreneur, corporate executive, athlete, or investor, not everyone is able to make the cut. Only those who show up and are a cut above the rest are able to get to the top of their craft and game. They are the ones who end up creating wealth by either getting picked up by top firms from their campuses, creating a unicorn, getting promoted to the top management, getting a battery of celebrity endorsements or multi-bagger returns.

INHERITORS ALSO HAVE TO SHOW UP

There is a feeling that showing up for wealth creation does not apply to inheritors as they have wealth bequeathed to them by the lottery of birth. It might seem counterfactual, but the rule is very relevant for inheritors. The only difference is their starting baseline. First-generation entrepreneurs usually start with very little, so it takes them a while to earn sufficient capital to create the critical mass necessary for take-off. Inheritors, on the other hand, start with an advantage—of having capital and in most cases a pre-existing network and the infrastructure to perpetuate the success of the preceding generation. But make no mistake. The inheritor starts his/her journey from a higher base but still has to ‘show up’ to prove himself/herself worthy of the inheritance. There are several instances of inheritors who have expanded their inherited companies into billion-dollar enterprises.

Ratan Tata, Kumar Mangalam Birla, and Mukesh Ambani are three business leaders who inherited large billion-dollar enterprises and built them into multibillion-dollar global conglomerates that compete every day with the best companies around the world.

Ratan Tata was appointed Chairman of Tata Sons, which made him head of the sprawling Tata Group, on the retirement of J. R. D. Tata in 1991. Initially, he faced great resistance from the heads of various operating companies who had been given a lot of freedom by his predecessor. He consolidated his position in a few years and then set about on a global expansion drive that transformed the Tatas from a mainly India-focused business group to a genuinely global conglomerate, which now generates 65 per cent of its sales from overseas markets. In his twenty-one years as chairman, the Tata Group’s revenues grew over forty times and profits more than fifty times. He also set the stage for Indian businesses to think globally by taking over Tetley Tea, Corus Steel, and Jaguar Land Rover, thus, placing the Tata Group squarely at the front and centre of India’s globalization ambitions.

Kumar Mangalam Birla’s elevation to the top position of the Aditya Birla Group at the young age of twenty-eight was necessitated by tragedy—the untimely demise of his legendary father Aditya Vikram Birla. Rising to the challenge of heading what was then India’s most globalized homegrown business house, Birla oversaw the growth of the group’s turnover from showing up in life US$2 billion in 1995 when he took over to more than US$45 billion now. Along the way, he took over Indal, the Indian subsidiary of Alcan, bought large copper mines in Australia, acquired the cement business of L&T, and purchased Novelis, the world’s largest producer of aluminium rolled products. The group is truly multinational with a presence in thirty-six countries and 50 per cent of its sales coming from overseas.

Mukesh Ambani became Chairman of Reliance Industries after the death of his father Dhirubhai Ambani. Despite being an inheritor, Ambani set a scorching pace of growth and expanded his petrochemicals- and petroleum products-focused group into telecom, retail, financial services, and new energy. In the process, he has seen his personal net worth grow from about US$2 billion in 2002 to US$92 billion now making him the fifteenth richest person in the world.

All three—Tata, Birla, and Ambani—are inheritors. Yet, all of them are wealth creators without parallel. They attained their iconic status amongst the world’s leading wealth creators by showing up, even though they started from a much higher baseline than others.

SHOWING UP NOT LIMITED BY AGE

Did you know: Colonel Harland David Sanders started franchising his secret chicken recipe in 1952, at the age of sixty-two after failing at several professions. Ray Kroc, the founder of the McDonald’s fast-food franchise, bought McDonald’s from its eponymous owners, in 1961, when he was fifty-nine, after having been a paper cup salesman, a musician, and a milkshake mixer sales person.

Neither had done much that was remarkable till then. Yet, both went on to found global fast-food franchises that made them multi-millionaires and created billions of dollars of wealth for stakeholders across the world.

These examples prove there is no age limit for showing up. One can do so at any stage of life. Closer home, Ashok Soota, who had worked as a salaried professional all his life, resigned as CEO of Wipro in 1999 to set up Mindtree, an IT services company, which he exited in 2011. That same year, he founded Happiest Minds, an IT services company that offers global clients cloud computing, engineering digital solutions, digital infrastructure, big data analysis, and other managed services. Starting his entrepreneurial journey at the age of fifty-seven, the eighty-one-year-old Soota is a billionaire with a net worth of US$1.1 billion. What could be the motivation for Soota, who is single and has no inheritors for his wealth, to continue on the path of wealth creation at his age? He believes that sky should be the limit for wealth creation since wealth so created could be left behind for the betterment of society.

Readers will note that wealth comes only to those who show up, with age not being a limitation, as the examples of Sanders, Kroc, and Soota show. The Japanese have a term for this: ikigai. It means if you have a larger purpose in life driven by your passion and have the requisite skills to pursue it and if the world needs it too, then society is ready to pay you for it as long as you are at it. It could keep you motivated till the last day of your life, and you will never feel like retiring since you would never be tired.

Thus, wealth comes only to those who show up irrespective of their age or stage in life. One could be a forever wealth creator till the last day of one’s life. Wealth creation for such people is life’s mission and not just a means to becoming rich.

—Jaya Bhattacharji Rose

Rohit Sarin Unlocking Wealth: Secrets to Getting Rich at Any Age Aleph Book Company, Delhi, 2024. Hb. Pp. 224. Rs. 599