My method is quite different from yours. When you work for someone else, no matter how good you are, you get paid only a small percentage of what you earn. The best road to success is spend all that energy developing something of your own.
Evaluate your strengths and play to them. At sixty-eight, I just started my fourth business. The former businesses were in three diverse fields and each of the first three both made money and sold for a nice profit.
The latest one is real estate purchase, rental and management. I started small but if I am still half the entrepreneur I was when I was younger, five years from now, this enterprise should be two things: greatly increased in size and gross profits and ... sold. I tire of any one kind of business. Turning them over as functioning, valuable enterprises has been half the fun. The other half is defying the statistical probability that businesses will fail 80 % of the time.
My first business, in high-end retail, is still flying high 26 years after I sold it. The second was a private practice so I could not say what it is doing today. When I sold it, it was to a group practice who took over my client list. By now, if they are as competent as I am, all those people moved on.
The third was a group of clinics I built from a two person start into a five branch addictions treatment center. They have all but one been converted to other uses than the addiction treatment centers I started but are still still functioning in the general field.
I worked for others for part of my career ... the sad part.
As for friends, there are no such things in business. There are partners and employees but everyone is looking out for number one, perhaps as it should be. After all, if you don't feed your family, the next guy certainly won't do it for you. Friends are people I love to spend my time with, talk about everything under the sun except business and enjoy seeing the relationships evolve as we age and go through stages of life. Business is a place where I test my acumen against a world in which everybody wants to be on top and some even want to see the successful ones fail.
The picture below will have at least one person you will be able to identify. Both are entrepreneurs and live on the shores of Lake Washington, across from Seattle. One started out working for the other as a consultant. He is now one of the top in the field of programming complex systems. The other one is a damn astute businessman, college dropout and the most prominent philanthropist in the USA. The other is my wife's nephew.
