The Next Millionaires-
Wellness Entrepreneurs

If you are an entrepreneur, or considering becoming one in wellness, there has never been a better time in history to own your own business.

When I was growing up in the 1950s, millionaires were fictional characters on television shows like The Millionaire or in comic strips like Little Orphan Annie. Nobody actually knew or saw a millionaire. Even on the The Millionaire the "millionaire" John Beresford Tipton never appeared on camera. I remember asking my dad to go out to dinner and hearing his reply: "What do you think we are, millionaires?"

But by 1991, the amazing U.S. economy had spawned 3.6 million U.S. households that had a net worth of $1 million or more. Then, in just the next 10 years, the number of millionaire households doubled to 7.2 million. It took the U.S. economy 215 years to create the first 3.6 million millionaire households, and then just 10 years to create 3.6 million more.

Sir Isaac Newton said, "If I have seen further than others it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Since I began tracking the wellness industry back in 1996, my giants have been the wellness revolutionaries I first began profiling in The Wellness Revolution-men and women pioneers in wellness who had already made a major difference by 2002. People like:

• Frank Yanowitz, the wellness cardiologist who created a business specializing in preventing heart disease versus just treating it;

• Jill Kinney, the personal trainer who built a $100 million fitness club business that delivers exercise at the workplace; and

• Steve Demos, the "soy wonder" who founded SILK soymilk and assembled the first billion-dollar national wellness brand.Wellness today is primarily a grass-roots movement driven by individual entrepreneurs and small businesses.

  In 2002, I wrote mostly about the larger $100 million wellness companies, since that is how I originally became acquainted with the wellness industry. Yet the majority of wellness sales, then and today, are made collectively by individual entrepreneurs, direct selling professionals, chiropractors, osteopaths, other health professionals, and small businesses. This is because becoming a wellness customer requires a paradigm shift on the part of the consumer, and direct person-to-person contact is the best way, and sometimes the only way, to make this paradigm shift in a person's thinking take place.

  The New Wellness Revolution explains why the majority of opportunities in wellness still await the individual entrepreneur or health professional, and how new management techniques and forms of business organization (like direct selling and franchising) can allow such individuals even better technology than if they were part of a large corporation. This will continue for at least another decade, until wellness is a mature industry and the majority of wellness consumers are not new to wellness.