Have you ever noticed that some people seem to be playing a totally different game when it comes to building wealth?
I’m not talking about the ones chasing the next hot trend on Twitter. I’m talking about the quiet operators who build $100 million empires in a single lifetime – or even a billion – while spending the same 24 hours we all have.
What gives?
The truth is, those people aren’t just lucky or unusually brilliant. They’ve simply mastered a different set of skills. Skills that open up exponential value creation – not through grinding harder, but by playing a bigger, smarter game.
After two decades in the trenches – buying companies, exiting some, writing Buy Then Build, building the Acquisition Lab – I’ve come to believe that there are only three skill sets that actually build wealth. Everything else is noise.
The skill sets are simple to name, but they’re difficult to master:
- Entrepreneur
- Dealmaker
- Investor
Each has its own lever. Each opens a new level of value creation. And when you learn to stack them? That’s when exponential outcomes start to kick in.
Let’s break them down.
1. Entrepreneur: The Lever of Ownership
I was lucky. Owning businesses wasn’t some abstract concept in my family – it was Thanksgiving dinner.
Both of my grandfathers owned companies. So did both of my uncles. My dad. My cousins. We’d sit around the table, plates of stuffing in front of us, and it would turn into a live case study in small business economics.
My grandpa, Bob Deibel, was the ringleader. He’d take me out to breakfast when I was a kid – eight or nine years old – and give me the treatment. I’d be sitting there eating pancakes while he fired off life lessons.
“Never go into retail.”“If you’re gonna sell something, make sure it’s got margins.”
And the big one:
“Walker, the only way to build real wealth is to own a business.”
Full stop. That was the gospel.
What he was trying to teach me wasn’t just about entrepreneurship – it was about leverage.
See, when you’re an employee, you’re trading time for money. I give you eight hours, you give me a paycheck. That’s the deal.
Source: Antonio Grasso | Facebook
But when you own a business, everything changes.
You start developing what I call the owner mindset. You stop asking, “How do I get paid?” and start asking, “How do I build something bigger than me?”
You become responsible for the whole vehicle – not just one function inside it. And to move that vehicle forward, you need other people. A team. A vision. Systems.
And here’s the kicker: because it’s your capital, your idea, your risk – you own the value that’s being created. The output of that team’s work lives on your personal balance sheet.
That’s the first lever of wealth: ownership.
And then something weird happens.
You realize… everything’s kind of made up.
You start to see that the entire business world is built by people no smarter than you. It’s all just made up of ideas, legal structures, pricing models, and stories. Which means: you can build it too.
When you figure that out? Game on.
2. Deal Maker: The Lever of Access
Let me rewind to another one of those breakfasts with Grandpa Bob. I was 12. Over pancakes, he says, “Your uncle and I bought a company last week.”
I nearly spit out my orange juice.
“What do you mean you bought a company?”
“Yeah,” he says. “It’s in Southern Illinois. Let’s go see it.”
We hop in the car and drive out there. I remember pulling up to this big, boxy manufacturing building. Just staring at it. Like: How did you do this?
“How’d you find it?” I asked.
He looked at me like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“You just call a business broker.”
I was 12. I didn’t even know what that meant. But I walked away from that day with two thoughts:
- You can buy a company – like, a literal building full of machines that prints money.
- There’s someone out there whose job is to help people buy and sell businesses.
I didn’t know what was cooler: owning the business, or being the guy who finds and sells them.
Source: BizBuySell
I’ve now done both.
That second skill – the one behind the curtain – is what I call deal making. And it’s where enormous value gets created.
Deal makers are the ones who connect opportunity with capital. They understand incentives. They know how to structure a deal so it works for everyone. They’re the glue.
Whether it’s investment bankers raising growth capital, brokers packaging main street deals, or M&A advisors running sell-side processes – deal makers unlock value that wouldn’t exist otherwise.
The lever of the deal maker? Access.
Access to opportunities. Access to capital. And access to the relationships that make deals happen.
3. Investor: The Lever of Capital
Now, you don’t start here.
No one wakes up and becomes an investor out of nowhere. You have to earn your way into this role – typically by building cash through entrepreneurship or deal making first.
But once you do?
That’s when your capital starts to work just as hard as you do.
We’ve all read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, right? Robert Kiyosaki also wrote Rich Dad’s CASHFLOW Quadrant, where it spells it out: the real wealth is on the right side – business owner and investor.
Source: Coach Carson
And once you start putting capital to work in private deals – off-market opportunities, operating businesses, cash-flowing assets – you stop chasing returns… and start controlling outcomes.
I call this my pizza by the slice strategy.
You don’t need to buy the whole business. You can just own a piece. A slice. And if it’s a good slice, it’ll feed you for years.
The real kicker? When you control the capital, you control the deal.
You choose which projects move forward. You vote with your dollars. You shape the portfolio that shapes your future.
And if you’ve built the first two skill sets along the way? You’ll be able to evaluate deals, see through the noise, and back the winners.
The Flywheel
Buy Then Build was my attempt to combine the entrepreneur and investor skill sets into a single playbook: acquisition entrepreneurship.
You buy a business. You operate it. You own it.You leverage capital. You start to understand deals.And eventually, you become the one placing bets, not just running plays.
And the truth is, acquisition entrepreneurship is the perfect training ground for all three skill sets.
You learn to operate.You learn to structure.You learn to invest.
You stop seeing the world as a series of transactions… and start seeing it as a portfolio of bets you can control.
At the end of the day, all three of these skills – entrepreneurship, deal making, and investing – are just different ways to answer the same question:
“How do I create value from scratch?”
Once you can do that – once you can create value out of thin air – you’re not playing the game like everyone else anymore.
You’re playing the real game.
Ready to acquire a business in the next 12 months? The Acquisition Lab is your first stop. Reach out to us today and get on the fast track to becoming an acquisition entrepreneur.
