#429 - How Boring Businesses Can Make You “Stealthy Wealthy”

Selling on Amazon with Andy Isom

Andy Isom

Amazon, Business, Amazonfba, Selling, Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Personalbusiness, Productbusiness, Ecommerce, Onlinebusiness

4.9 • 816 Ratings

🗓️ 25 May 2025

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Forget tech startups and viral apps—some of the wealthiest entrepreneurs in America are getting rich off carpet removal machines, beer distribution, and car floor mats.

In this episode, Andy break's down the Wall Street Journal’s article on the “Stealthy Wealthy” a growing class of business owners quietly building serious wealth through unsexy, traditional industries. These aren’t influencers or venture-backed CEOs. They’re founders of mid-size regional businesses pulling in millions through operational excellence and boring-but-needed services.

You'll Learn:

Why boring businesses are outperforming flashy startups
Real-world examples: carpet, car mats, and beer trucks
How AI and smart ops are quietly scaling boring businesses

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Forget the tech startups and crypto. The more realistic path to wealth looks more like
0:05.1	carpet glue, car mats, and beer trucks.
0:16.2	Entrepreneurship has been glamorized for I feel like the past decade. And while it may be slowing
0:23.4	down a little bit, there's still a lot of allure to becoming the next social media superstar,
0:30.3	YouTuber, Instagram influencer, or being the mom at the fitness center who owns her own brand and products.
0:39.6	These are the flashy online business models where most naive people think all the wealth is.
0:44.2	But as someone who is a wannabe content creator and someone who owns an e-commerce brand,
0:49.1	I'll be one of the first people to admit that the real power play for building wealth is hidden in plain sight.
0:55.6	Boring, blue-collar, overlooked industries that quietly print cash.
1:01.7	Today we're talking about a recent article from the Wall Street Journal called The Stealthy
1:07.5	Wealthy and how boring businesses are quietly building generational wealth.
1:11.2	Owen Zidar, a Princeton economist from the article, calls these boring blue-collar business owners
1:17.1	the stealthy wealthy, because most of the top 1% of income earners don't come from tech or finance,
1:23.6	but from owning boring regional businesses.
1:27.3	2022 data shows that almost 35% of the top 1% income came from business ownership.
1:35.9	That's up from 30% business ownership in 2014.
1:39.9	And for the top 0.1%, it's 43% in 2022 versus 37% in 2014.
1:49.2	So it's becoming more apparent if you want to be in the top 1 or 0.1% of income earners,
1:54.7	you need to own a business.
1:57.7	IRS data also shows that these businesses are typically S-corp's or partnerships with
2:03.8	around $20 million in annual revenue and around 100 employees. There were three great examples of
2:10.7	boring but lucrative businesses and owners in the Wall Street Journal article. The first is
	...

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