How to Make a Few More Billion Dollars

The blueprint for building billion-dollar empires

By Brad Jacobs

Category: Money & Investments | Reading Duration: 20 min | Rating: 4.3/5 (13 ratings)

About the Book

How to Make a Few More Billion Dollars (2024) lays out the mental frameworks and strategic playbook required to consolidate fragmented industries into massive, tech-forward enterprises. You’ll discover how to rewire your brain for resilience, select the perfect industry for disruption, and execute complex integrations with military precision. This guide challenges you to use technology for profit while potentially shaping the future of human evolution.

Who Should Read This?

Entrepreneurs seeking a blueprint for large-scale industry consolidation
Corporate executives looking to optimize mergers and acquisitions strategies
Investors interested in the mechanics of high-growth value creation

What’s in it for me? Learn to transform a resilient mind into a billion-dollar empire.

Sometimes, the gap between where you are and where you want to be has nothing to do with effort. You might find yourself working harder than ever, yet the massive, structural changes you dream of remain just out of reach. It’s often the subtle shifts in how you view chaos, how you select your battles, and how you architect your days that determine whether you remain a participant in your industry or become its architect. The difference lies in fundamentally rearranging how you approach the game itself.

In this Blink, you’ll learn the precise mental and strategic frameworks used to build multibillion-dollar enterprises from scratch. Think of it as a specific form of high-stakes alchemy – turning a disciplined mind into a consolidated industry, and eventually, into a legacy that shapes the future. By the end, you’ll possess a new lens for evaluating risk and opportunity, equipping you to move through the business world with the calm lethality of a seasoned consolidator – and one who knows exactly where the leverage lies. Standing in front of a mirror and staring at your hands until they seem unfamiliar might sound strange – but for author and serial entrepreneur Brad Jacobs, who’s founded multiple billion-dollar companies, this kind of deliberate mental exercise is professional discipline.

Chapter 1: Mastering the inner game

The ability to generate massive wealth starts long before a single dollar is raised. It starts with training the brain itself. Jacobs views the entrepreneur’s mind as an asset class requiring rigorous, almost athletic conditioning. He calls this capacity mental synthesis – the brain’s evolutionary ability to combine distinct, unrelated memories into completely new mental images.

This is how we picture what doesn’t exist yet so we can eventually build it. For example, when Jacobs starts a company, he constructs a vivid, high-resolution mental picture of exactly what that business will look like in one year, five years, and ten years. He visualizes the culture, the scale, the profits with such intensity that actual execution becomes a process of catching up to the reality he’s already created in his head. Maintaining this clarity requires what he calls a nonroutine routine to access flow states – moments of awe that trigger extreme creativity. The practice gets surprisingly physical. One technique involves “feeling the brain” – closing your eyes and visualizing a string running from the right side of your brain to the left, another from front to back, a third from top to bottom.

You focus your entire awareness on the exact geometric point where those three strings intersect, using it as a fulcrum to trigger creativity and sensory awareness. Another exercise, adapted from Qigong, is more expansive. You visualize the entire observable universe – all 546,000 billion trillion miles – compressed into a golden egg, known in Hindu texts as Hiranyagarbha. In your mind’s eye, you lift this egg to your lips and swallow it, repeating: “The universe is in me. ” Esoteric, sure. But the practical result is a shift in perspective.

When you contain the cosmos, a bad quarterly report feels significantly smaller. Now, meditation alone won’t make anyone immune to chaos. Business is a series of problems disguised as opportunities, and losing your center is easy. When pressure mounts, Jacobs leans on Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, or REBT, pioneered by psychologist Albert Ellis. The core premise: external events don’t upset you – what you tell yourself about those events does. Most high-achievers suffer from what Ellis called stinkin’ thinkin’ – an internal monologue dominated by rigid demands.

“I must be perfect. ” “People must treat me fairly. ” These beliefs are irrational because perfection is impossible and fairness isn’t guaranteed. When reality fails to meet these demands, anxiety and paralysis follow.

The fix is reframing rigid demands into rational preferences. Instead of “I must succeed,” the script becomes “I would prefer to succeed, but if I don’t, it’s not a catastrophe. ” This subtle linguistic shift drains the toxicity from failure. A potential identity crisis becomes a problem to solve, allowing you to step back, re-center, and get back to work.

Chapter 2: The perfect battlefield

Once the mind is disciplined and internal noise quieted, the entrepreneur faces an even more critical decision: choosing the battlefield. You can be the most psychologically resilient leader on the planet, capable of synthesizing brilliant strategies and reframing every failure. But if you plant your flag in the wrong soil, you’ll starve. The difference between a modest success and a multi-billion-dollar empire rarely comes down to working harder than everyone else.

It comes down to the physics of the industry you choose to enter. So let’s talk about what that selection process actually looks like. Before launching his latest venture, QXO, Brad Jacobs spent over a year evaluating nearly 600 companies across 55 different industries. He wasn’t chasing passion projects like music or art, but hunting for a specific mathematical profile that would allow for massive scale. The first nonnegotiable requirement is what’s called the Total Addressable Market, or TAM. If you want to build a company worth $50 billion, you can’t play in a sandbox worth only $25 billion.

You need an industry with a market size in the hundreds of billions, ideally approaching a trillion dollars. That immense size means you can capture just a single-digit percentage of the market – say, six percent of an $800 billion industry – and still possess a dominant enterprise. But here’s where things get counter-intuitive. The smart consolidator deliberately hunts for what’s known as tech backwardness. In an era where every startup claims to be on the bleeding edge, you want to find the dinosaurs. You want competitors still running operations on yellow legal pads, Excel spreadsheets, and gut instinct.

If incumbent players are already tech-savvy, you have no edge. But walk into a sector where supply chains are opaque and pricing is based on guesswork? Simply implementing a modern technology stack makes you the apex predator. Now, to understand just how rigorous this selection process is, it’s important to look at what got rejected. The convenience store industry seemed perfect on paper: massive addressable market, highly fragmented landscape of mom-and-pop operators ripe for consolidation. It checked almost every box.

But it failed the test of the trend. Looking ten or 20 years out, the rise of electric and autonomous vehicles poses an existential threat to the gas station business model. If people stop stopping for gas, they stop buying the high-margin coffee and snacks that drive profit. This is the discipline required to build at scale: the ability to stare at a profitable opportunity, see a single fatal flaw in the decade-long trend, and walk away.

Chapter 3: How to execute and integrate

Once the deal is signed, there’s no time for champagne. The period between signing and closing is one of acute vulnerability. This is where what the author calls blind date syndrome kicks in. The thousands of employees you just acquired are suddenly terrified.

They’re wondering if they’ll lose their jobs, if the culture will turn toxic, if the new owner is a tyrant. Left to fester, this uncertainty can destroy the value of the asset before you even take the keys. To kill this fear, you have to break one of the cardinal conventions of mergers and acquisitions: waiting. Lawyers and boards typically prefer a neat boundary where integration begins only after the deal officially closes. But the successful playbook demands access immediately. You negotiate explicitly for the right to speak to your new people the moment the agreement is signed.

The goal is to be in the room – virtually or physically – before the rumors can start. Here’s what that looks like in practice. When the deal for Beacon Building Products was announced, an invite for an all-hands Zoom town hall hit 3,600 inboxes within minutes of the press release going live. Three hours later, thousands of anxious faces appeared on the screen. The format wasn’t a polished corporate presentation or a lecture from on high, but an open mic. The new leadership stood there, took unscripted questions, absorbed the anxiety, and projected stability.

This “rip the Band-Aid off” approach applies to everything. Rebranding doesn’t happen over months – it starts immediately. New email signatures, new swag, new signage – all of it appears almost overnight to signal that a unified, stronger entity has arrived. So, how do you actually manage all of this chaos? Through a mechanism of absolute control called the Tracker. It’s a massive, living master spreadsheet that captures every single integration task – sometimes thousands of line items.

The genius is in its accountability structure. Every item is assigned to one specific individual who owns that outcome. There’s no “we’re working on it. ” There’s only a specific person delivering a specific result by a specific date. The Tracker operates on a simple traffic light system. Green is on track, Yellow is at risk, Red is in crisis.

In the early days of an integration, management meets daily to stare at this spreadsheet, obsessively focused on turning Reds into Greens. It turns the nebulous, messy process of merging two complex organisms into a clear game of discipline. Through this lens, the team hunts for what are affectionately called WOT-WOMS – or Waste of Time, Waste of Money. These are the inefficiencies hidden in the legacy business that, once identified and removed, fall straight to the bottom line as profit. There’s no room for sentimentality here. Speed and clarity are the only things that keep the wheels on the bus.

Chapter 4: Designing a profit machine

With the operational skeleton of the new company locked into the Tracker, what remains is the messy, beating heart of any enterprise: the people. Inheriting a company means inheriting a history of compromises – org charts built around personalities rather than logic, fiefdoms protected by long-tenured managers. To turn this legacy structure into a profit machine, you can’t layer a new vision on top of the old map. You have to burn the map and draw a new one from scratch.

This brings us to what’s called Zero-Based organizational design. Most leaders look at the people they have and try to find seats for them. The successful consolidator does the opposite: design the perfect, theoretical org chart first – one elegant enough to fit on a single page – and only then look for humans to fill it. The structure serves the strategy, not the egos of incumbents. If two talented executives exist, but only one seat appears on the new chart, the math is cold but necessary: one has to go. Keeping a spare manager because they’re talented creates ambiguity, and ambiguity kills speed.

The physics of this new organization follow strict rules around what’s known as spans and layers. In a poorly run company, you might find a manager supervising just one person – a “span of one” – which wastes a salary. Or a leader drowning under 30 direct reports, leaving no time to actually lead. The sweet spot sits between seven and 14 direct reports. This keeps every manager busy but not broken, and information flows from the frontline to the CEO without getting garbled through a dozen layers of bureaucracy. So, the structure is set.

Now comes the sorting process – and this is where the A, B, C player framework kicks in, demanding ruthless honesty. A players are the stars: intelligent, hungry, full of integrity. The strategy for them is simple – remove the ceiling on their earning potential. Compensation plans should be uncapped, letting a salesperson who delivers exceptional results make extraordinary money. You want them chasing upside with the same ferocity as you. B players are steady hands who can be coached up or moved to roles that better suit their strengths.

But C players – those who drag down the culture or refuse to adapt – are a different story. The instinct is often to give them time, to be nice. In a high-speed integration, that patience turns toxic. A bad attitude spreads fast, and as the old saying goes, a fish rots from the head.

The most compassionate and strategic move is to exit C players immediately. You do it graciously, often with generous severance that preserves their dignity, but you get them out of the building. This decisive pruning sends a powerful signal to the A players who remain: a championship team is being built here, and the standards required to play are serious.

Chapter 5: Technology as the multiplier

With the right people in the right seats, you now have a high-performance engine. But to truly dominate a fragmented industry, you need to pour rocket fuel into the tank. This is where the strategy of buying “tech backward” companies pays its ultimate dividend. You didn’t buy those dinosaur companies just to keep running them on paper and intuition – you bought them to weaponize their data.

The mandate here is absolute: “One Source of Truth. ” In the chaotic aftermath of a roll-up, you might inherit 35 different enterprise resource planning systems – a tech heap of disconnected ledgers that makes it impossible to know if you’re winning or losing. The first order of business is a forced march to a single ERP and a centralized data lakehouse. This is the only way to gain visibility. You can’t fix what you can’t see, and you can’t see anything if your data is trapped in 30 different silos. Once the data is unified, it feeds a radically simple management tool: the dashboard.

While some executives drown in complex reports, the successful consolidator runs the business on a clean, real-time visualization of roughly 15 key performance indicators. Picture a simple bar chart: a black bar shows the goal, a colored bar shows the actuals. Green means you’re good, red means you have a problem. This eliminates storytelling in meetings. You don’t ask “how do you think we’re doing? ” – you look at the dashboard and you know.

Now that you’ve got visibility, let’s talk about what you can actually do with it. This clarity unlocks specific, algorithmic profit levers that human intuition simply can’t match. Take pricing. In many legacy industries, pricing is an emotional decision made by salespeople desperate to close a deal. They discount instinctively. Algorithmic pricing removes the emotion entirely.

The system analyzes elasticity and demand to set a floor, stopping margin leakage cold. The same logic applies to demand forecasting. Instead of guessing what to stock, predictive models peer 18 months into the future, ensuring you have exactly what customers need without drowning in dead capital. So, we’ve covered how unified data and smart algorithms create operational clarity. But there’s a bigger picture here worth considering. This obsession with technology points toward something much larger than squeezing out a few more percentage points of margin.

The integration of human ingenuity and machine intelligence suggests a trajectory that goes beyond quarterly earnings. It hints at a future where technology solves the fundamental scarcities of the human condition – poverty, disease, perhaps even mortality itself. By building efficient, tech-forward enterprises today, you’re laying groundwork for a state where humanity, aided by its tools, transcends biological limitations. The ultimate opportunity isn’t making another few billion dollars, but actively participating in the next great leap of our species.

Final summary

In this Blink to How to Make a Few More Billion Dollars by Brad Jacobs, you’ve learned that building a multibillion-dollar legacy requires a deliberate fusion of psychological resilience, rigorous industry selection, and the ruthless execution of technological integration. To truly succeed on a massive scale, you must first master your own mind, replacing anxiety with rational preferences and using meditation to visualize future victories. Choosing the right industry is a mathematical exercise rather than a creative one – prioritize massive markets and tech-backward competitors that are ripe for disruption. Once the deal is signed, value is created through speed and discipline, utilizing tools like the Tracker to guarantee accountability and implementing a single source of data truth.

And as you saw in the final section, leveraging advanced technology like AI maximizes profit margins today while positioning you to contribute to a future where human potential is uncapped. That’s it for this Blink. We hope you enjoyed it. On your way to making a few more billion dollars, please take the time to leave us a rating – we always appreciate your feedback. See you soon.

About the Author

Brad Jacobs is a serial entrepreneur who’s founded and led seven multibillion-dollar public companies, including United Rentals, XPO, and United Waste Systems. He’s the author of the precursor title How to Make a Few Billion Dollars, which details his earlier career milestones and business philosophy. Jacobs currently serves as the chairman and CEO of QXO, a building products distribution company he launched in 2024.