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Michael Lee-Chin walked into a classroom at Portmore Community College this week and did something most billionaires never do. He explained exactly how he did it.
The 75-year-old Jamaican-Canadian businessman, worth an estimated $1.1 billion, did not come with motivational slogans. He came with a formula.
He opened with a question: what is the highest value you can give someone? Then he answered it himself. The highest value, he told the students, is the one thing that, if successfully imparted, changes a life permanently. That framing set the tone for everything that followed.
Lee-Chin began with mathematics, which he described as the foundation of all wealth creation. He wrote the future value formula on the board: FV = PV (1 + r)t. Future value equals present value, multiplied by one plus the rate of return, raised to the power of time. Three variables. Three levers. All of them manageable.
The first lever is the total rate of return. Lee-Chin told the students that if you take $1 million and compound it at 11.4% for 40 years, you end up with $75 million. Drop that rate by just one percentage point and you end up with $52 million instead. Same time. Same discipline. A $23 million difference from a single percentage point. He described compounding as the eighth wonder of the world. The point was not abstract. Optimizing the rate of return, he said, is where wealth is actually created.
The second lever is time. The earlier you start, the more time your money has to compound. The later you begin, the less you accumulate. There is no workaround. The third lever is taxes. Using the same $1 million example, Lee-Chin showed how a 15% annual tax applied to the rate of return erodes the final number significantly. He was careful to distinguish between tax evasion and tax efficiency.
"I'm not saying you should tax evade," he told the audience. "I'm saying invest in such a way that you don't pay taxes. That's not tax evasion."
To illustrate how ordinary people apply these principles, Lee-Chin brought up Roxroy Kerr, a Jamaican man he described as his protege who went from working as a plumber to building a multimillion-dollar business, Principal Cesspool Services. Kerr's story has been covered previously by the Jamaica Observer. Lee-Chin used it as proof that the framework works regardless of where you start.
He then laid out a three-step approach to learning any skill or building any business. Step one: find someone who has already done what you are trying to do. Step two: ask them how they did it and get the recipe. Step three: do not change the recipe. He traced this approach back to his own relationship with Warren Buffett, whose philosophy on investment discipline Lee-Chin has followed for decades. He described having had the opportunity to meet Buffett and ask him directly about his approach to success.
Buffett's answer, as Lee-Chin relayed it, was about framework and emotional control. To invest successfully over a lifetime, Buffett told him, does not require exceptional intelligence or inside information. It requires a sound decision-making framework and the discipline to keep emotions from undermining it. Do not get swept up in good times. Do not freeze in bad ones.
Beyond discipline, Lee-Chin told the students that access matters and that access comes through relationships. Build them genuinely, he said. Do not approach people transactionally, always looking for an immediate return. Invest in relationships the way you invest in assets.
He cited advice from another wealthy individual he had encountered who told him that success is two percent strategy and 98 percent execution. Lee-Chin did the math out loud: execution is 49 times more important than strategy. He repeated it to make the point land.
Then he drew a parallel to the scientific method. Scientists observe, form a hypothesis, stress-test it under different conditions, and if it holds, they codify it into theory. He referenced Newton's three laws of motion, not as physics but as a framework for living: inertia, force and acceleration, and action and reaction. These, he said, are life laws. They are among the principles he passed on to Kerr.
Lee-Chin closed by outlining what he said wealth creators, as distinct from people who inherit or marry into money, tend to have in common. They own a small number of high-quality businesses. They understand those businesses deeply. They operate in sectors with durable, long-term growth tailwinds. They use other people's money carefully. And they hold for the long run. Beyond the financial principles, successful wealth creators also predict, plan and persevere.
He acknowledged that none of this is easy, even if it is simple to understand.
"Execution is 49 times," he said again.
His closing thought was the philosophy he said has guided his own life: one does well by doing good.
