Making wealth creation understandable for anyone.

Most multimillionaires and virtually all billionaires owe their personal wealth to stock ownership in businesses they worked for or helped start. Understanding how this happens is not complicated and should be taught to everyone.

I'm Chris Volk — husband, parent, grandparent, business leader, author, educator and long-term student of corporate business-model fundamentals. I've taken three outperforming companies public on the New York Stock Exchange, co-founding and conceiving two of them. Along the way, I was privileged to have a “who's who” of investors. When I stepped down as the founding CEO of my last company in 2022, our largest shareholder was Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway.

Our companies did not have the best business models. But you don't need perfect business models to create wealth. You just need to optimize the business models available to you.

Ten years after starting my last public company, our equity value was approaching $10 billion. That's not the important thing. The important thing was that our equity was worth about 1.4× its original cost — meaning we created nearly $3 billion in shareholder wealth above and beyond the dividends we had paid and the cash flow we had reinvested over our ten-year history. Most of that wealth went to our shareholders, but our employees were also deserving winners, with a number becoming multi-millionaires.

Our financial success was not lucky. It started with a solid leadership team. Then we wrapped our strategy to address our market and sell our financial services into an optimal business model. That model was designed to deliver investor returns exceeding their expectations, which is how our equity came to be worth 1.4× its cost. This achievement defines being good shareholder capital custodians — and it enabled us to offer greater opportunities and compensation to our team members.