There's an inverse relationship between how impressive a business sounds and how much money it actually makes. I can prove it with these five billionaires you’ve probably never heard of:

1/ Kenny Troutt - $1.5 Billion Business: Long distance phone calls Kenny grew up in an Illinois housing project. Was so poor that he had to sell insurance to pay his way through college. Fast forward to 1988. He starts Excel Communications selling long-distance phone service through multi-level marketing.

The business model was dead simple: Help people save money on phone bills and recruit others to do the same. Nine years later, Excel hits $1 billion in revenue. Faster growth than Microsoft at the time. He eventually sold to Teleglobe in 1998 for $3.5 billion.

2/ Pang Kang - $8.5 Billion Business: Soy sauce In 1995, Pang was an executive at a collective sauce shop in Foshan, China. He invested an equivalent of ~$70K restructuring the company as a limited company and in the process became the largest shareholder.

Today, Foshan Haitian is one of the largest soy sauce manufacturers in the world. When it went public in 2014, his stake was worth $2.5 billion. (This has since grown significantly).

3/ Kjell Inge Røkke - $5.4 Billion Business: Fishing Kjell started as a fisherman at 18 in Norway. Dropped out of school in 9th grade. His teacher told him getting his driver’s license would be his biggest accomplishment. That teacher couldn't have been more wrong.

At 21, Røkke moved to Seattle with no money and no network. He saved every dollar, bought his first fishing vessel, then another, and another. Built those ships into American Seafoods, one of the largest fishing companies in the U.S. Took those profits back to Norway and became the largest shareholder in Aker ASA, an industrial conglomerate that spans oil, gas, and maritime assets. By 2018, he was the richest person in Norway.

4/ Aliko Dangote - $14.9 Billion Business: Sugar and salt In 1977, the 20-year-old Nigerian got a $3,000 loan from his grandfather. He started a small trading company importing sugar, salt, and food products. By 1981, he'd expanded into textiles, flour, and oil. And in the late 1990s, he moved into cement manufacturing.

Dangote Cement became the largest producer in sub-Saharan Africa and his sugar refinery in Lagos is the second largest in the world. Now he's the richest person in Africa and owns a $20 billion oil refinery - the largest on the continent. But it all started with bags of sugar and salt.

5/ Diane Hendricks - $11.9 Billion Business: Roofing supplies The richest self-made woman in America grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm with 8 sisters. She got pregnant at 17 and started assembling pens at a factory to make ends meet. At 21, she got her real estate broker's license. Then she met a roofer named Ken Hendricks.

They married in 1975 and spent three years buying 100 old houses in Beloit, fixing them up, and renting them out. In 1982, they used their real estate money and took out loans to open ABC Supply, a wholesale distributor for roofing, siding, and windows. They decided they would stand out by providing exceptional customer service in an industry known for treating contractors like garbage.

Within 5 years, they’d grown to 50 stores and $140 million in sales. And by 1998, they’d hit $1 billion in revenue. Unfortunately, Ken died in 2007 after falling through a roof at their home. Even so, Diane kept building and over the next decade made the two biggest acquisitions in company history: Bradco in 2010 and L&W Supply in 2016. Today, ABC Supply has 900+ locations and does $20.4 billion in annual revenue. And she still owns 100% of it.

Can you see the pattern? None of these businesses are necessarily sexy...phone calls, soy sauce, fish, sugar, roofing... But they all solve problems people have had for decades and will have for decades more. I believe we've been sold a lie that in order to be successful you need to raise million from investors. I hope this thread helped you realize there’s plenty of $$$ in solving the boring stuff.