Perhaps one of the greatest "secrets" of the richest people in the world is summed up in those 3 words: Other People's Money - OPM for short. If you took a cross-section of the most affluent business people, you'll find that the majority of them launched their fortunes using OPM. In the next few minutes, I will show you how you can obtain other people's money for your business. What you do with the money, however, is up to you - but if I were you, I'd take P.T. Barnum's advice, and make money your servant so that you, too, you can make your own fortune.

The use of other people's money has become such an ethical and acceptable mainstay in business because one can leverage other people's money to your benefit.

For example, you can leverage borrowed money into high-yield investment programs that could generate a return that would then pay back your lender and line your pockets as well. Or you can leverage borrowed money into asset-producing or income-generating real property. Or you can simply borrow money to start or grow your business.

The benefits to using OPM are obvious: 1) When you use other people's money, especially within the parameters of a corporation, your debt is assigned to your business, and your debtors can make no claims against your personal finances; and 2) the infusion of cash allows you to have money to make money for your business.

Of course, even with the proliferation of lending institutions and venture capitalists, it is often difficult to obtain other people's money.

Well, since Wall Street Journal has kindly called me a man who "finds answers in unlikely places," I'm going to reveal an unlikely place where you can obtain other people's money. This one is available to all, and yet very few ever take advantage of it. It's the federal government.

I've coined a phrase for this source of money: I call it "other taxpayers' money" - OTM for short. The federal government has millions of dollars of taxpayers' money allocated to funding businesses like yours.