Review: Seven Years To Seven Figures, by Michael Masterson
Seven Years to Seven Figures is Michael Masterson’s latest book on the topic of generating personal wealth. He set about looking for seven people who had built up a seven figure annual income and interviewed them about the steps taken to reach this goal in seven years or less.
The book is aimed at baby boomers who are waking up to realize that they do not have enough money to fund the retirement they want and they do not have enough time to save the money in a conventional retirement plan. But the book is not just relevant for baby boomers. It offers valuable information on wealth building for anyone interested in a fast track to a high net worth.
Masterson claims to have thought up the idea for the book and then pitched it to his publisher before determining if it was even possible to find seven people who fit the profile. He ended up finding eight.
The principles involved in every person’s story track with the recommendations Masterson made in his earlier book, Automatic Wealth. The process involves:
- Increasing your income
- Saving most of the extra money you earn
- Investing in real estate, stocks, and bonds
- Starting your own business in your spare time
The stories are inspiring and illuminate the concepts that Masterson introduced in Automatic Wealth. They are not tales of genius programmers or reckless risk takers. They are stories of individuals like Monica Day, a middle class wife and mother of two who went from earning $26,000/year to $134,000/year in only two years by learning the skill of copywriting and starting a freelance business with her newfound skill.
As a fan of Mastersons earlier books and regular reader of his Early To Rise newsletter, I also admired how the stories that are told connect to the informational training products that Masterson creates and promotes. It is impressive how, in the later stories, the keys to each person’s success was to engage in the learning skills that Masterson teaches in his business. The writing course that Monica Day took is the same one that you will find regularly promoted in the Early To Rise newsletter.
I guess it is logical that the successful people that Masterson knows would also be the people he has personally helped through the businesses he has created. Still, it is a very clever cross-promotion and extremely well done. The book never feels like a cheap sales pitch for something else.
Seven Years to Seven Figures lives up to the hype of its promotional copy. The stories ring true and offer powerful insights into the steps required to build wealth quickly.
If you have already read Automatic Wealth, I highly recommend this book. If not, I suggest you start with the earlier book and then read this one – or buy them both, I’m sure Amazon will offer you a discount!
The Go-To Guy!
Michael Masterson makes a living selling cheap, usless, hyped get rich quick books and CD’s. Perhaps his best known is Michael Masterson’s Accelerated Program for Six-Figure Copywriting. It’s sold by his company AWAI although it is sometimes offered thru his ezine ETR. Honesty is not their best suit. This whole “get rich copywriting” thing is comparable to the old envelope stuffing con of decades past. It’s all done with careful omissions, half-truths, lies, distortions, deceptions, selective memories, phony testimonials, exaggerated claims, over-simplifications, forced conclusions, unsubstantiated “facts” and good old fashioned trickery. It really is a remarkably involved and finely crafted charade that convinces people they can truly earn $100,000+ a year after taking some poorly written, lame correspondence course or attending a silly 3-day rah-rah “bootcamp”… for a hefty price. It’s all designed to separate you from your money. They even have people whose job it is to search for negative comments online and respond with favorable and phony testimonials. Unfortunately, the scam is so good, and so convincing that many people are into it for quite a while before they begin to realize they’ve been continuously shelling out money and still don’t have a career. The truth is, this weak correspondence/home study course will not prepare you to compete with others who have master’s degrees in business and marketing and universities around the world are cranking such graduates out by the hundreds of thousands each year. There is a new book coming out later this year entitled Copy Crooks which highlights AWAI and the Michael Masterson’s copywriting course as prime examples of direct marketing scam. I’ve only seen part of the introduction and part of the table of contents, but it looks devastating. It “dissects him like a frog in a biology lab.” And with the success of the copywriting course, they branched into other areas like travel writing, resume writing, etc. AWAI operates out of a dinghy little building on a side street in Delray Beach in Florida. If you ever visited the place, you’d never buy a thing from them. And Michael Masterson isn’t even the guys real name. It’s Mark Ford and he uses testimonials from other family members to sell his products. It’s all pretty shameless.
Tim,
I have not done enough research into Mr. Masterson to answer your specific claims, but I do know that he markets the AWAI copywriting course very heavily along with several different ‘bootcamp’ style seminars. I have not purchased or participated in either, so I cannot comment on what you’ve said.
I was able to find another blog post about Mr. Masterson in which you offered similar negative comments: http://nhartsock.typepad.com/nettie_hartsock/2007/02/michael_masters.html but I had a really hard time finding any other negative comments like your own. (BTW, I do not know Michael Masterson, am not married to anyone in his family, do not work for or profit from any of his companies, and stand to make $1 or less if you click the link above and buy his book from Amazon.)
What I can speak to directly is the content of this book and his Automatic Wealth book – I’ve purchased and read both.
In these books, Masterson’s teaching on wealth building is the most logical, complete, and hype-free path to wealth that I have seen. His ‘chicken entrepreneur’ approach encourages people to hang onto their day jobs while they learn the ropes of self-employment. For those not suited to run their own businesses, he encourages you to look for opportunities within the workplace to work on projects where there is a direct connection between your efforts and company profits. People who’s work is tied to profits (like sales people) are often better compensated than others in an organization.
When it comes to investing, he advocates investing in real estate and new businesses because that is where the highest returns are available. He’s not pushing ‘no money down’ stuff, or Forex trading, just identifying the two markets with the highest return rates measured against risk. But, it must be said, investing isn’t the foundation of his approach to building wealth. Primarily he advocates starting new businesses and making yourself more valuable in the places you already work.
This is sound advice from my perspective.
Unlike other ‘wealth gurus’, I feel I actually got an enormous amount of sound information from these two books. Information that I could put into practice whether I ever buy another thing from this man. I have read other books like this that never give you anything of immediate use – you must buy the next thing to get what you really need (and of course the next thing leads to another thing. The strategy there is to never give you what you need only enough to make you buy more.)
As a member of Masterson’s Early To Rise newsletter, I get plenty of pitches for other products he sells. The sales copy is very intense. I even bought one – The content of the materials was very good, just not the sort of business I planned to start at the time. I did not feel cheated, and I am hanging on to the materials because I thought they were very well done in quality and content – they will serve as examples for training materials I create in the future.
When you read enough of Masterson’s material you will see how well he weaves his various businesses together. He provides enough quality content that I don’t feel tricked or cheated, but he gets a good cross-promotion in there too! I happen to think that is excellent copywriting, but I know you disagree.
If, as you claim, Masterson is a complete conman with no redeeming qualities, I still think there is something to learn from him. A Google search of his name returns more than 80,000 results. The majority are positive and include sites like CNN Money. Even the ‘Scam Buster’ sites speak well of him. If he has engineered all of that as part of one huge scam, the man has skills.
For readers who don’t know what to think, get a copy of Automatic Wealth from the library and read it for yourself. Just be aware that Masterson wants you to buy more things from him and he’s going to sell you something else – if you give him the chance.
The Go-To Guy!
Tim,
I notice from the traffic logs that you keep checking in on this post. It is making me wonder if, in fact, you work for Mr Masterson and are hoping to incite folks to write glowing recommendations of his products and character to defend him against your ‘attacks?’
Or, you just might be hoping to start a flame war on my blog.
Either way, I just want to let folks know that I am closing the comments on this post. I’ve spoken my peace and am leaving Tim’s negative comments intact, so there is enough info here for visitors to form their own opinions.
I’m getting the feeling that this site is being manipulated by this exchange.
The Go-To Guy!