We are living through the largest wealth transfer in human history. But most people, they'll miss it. Not because they're incapable, but because they're distracted.
I've seen this firsthand. I've co-founded a company that does over a quarter of a billion dollars in revenue. And I didn't learn wealth in a classroom.
I learned it with small business owners in boardrooms, in negotiations, and by watching where money moves when everyone else is panicking. So, in this video, I'm going to show six rules to understand this economic shift so that you can be one of the very few people who pays attention and gets rewarded for it. And rule number four and six, that's where execution actually happens.
Rule number one, wealth doesn't just disappear. You will never read a recession headline the same way after hearing what it implies. See, I was in high school in 2008.
Didn't have the vocabulary for what I was watching, but I understood it subconsciously. The American reality was changing. And it did.
Friends of mine who had big nice houses and sent their kids to private school were gone within a year. Different school, foreclosed home, and right next to them were other families who came through it almost without a single scratch. All because they had capital when everyone else was in fire mode.
I watched the income gap open up in real time. Then 2020 happened. It was the same economy, same headlines, same data available to every single person.
And yet an identical response happened in 2020 as it did in 2008. Some froze in shock while others figured it out. The economy didn't separate them.
Their response to the economy did. And it's all recorded historically, too. Uber, Airbnb, WhatsApp, Slack, Square, Instagram, and Stripe were all founded during or immediately after the 2008 financial crisis.
Sequoia Capital bought Airbnb shares for about a penny each in 2009 and by 2020 they were worth $145. A 2009 study using SEC filings, Fortune magazine data, and the National Bureau of Economic Research recession data found that over half of Fortune 500 companies, think Disney, General Motors, AT&T, were started during a recession or a bare market. This pattern has held across every economic era.
So, why has this pattern stuck? It's actually quite simple. Downturns drive out competition in masses.
Right now, talent becomes available because companies are cutting due to AI. The new economic landscape equals new demands from the general public. And this talent can then supply for that demand with virtually zero competition.
Additionally, the cost of starting like office space, marketing, hiring, all of it drops along with the economy. So, all that's left is a waiting game. The one who moves first captures the market share.
They capture the talent and they get the positioning that wouldn't have been possible without the economic crisis. One thing to understand here is this. Quietly sitting on the sidelines when the economy feels uncertain is not playing it safe.
It's actively giving somebody else the most perfect opportunity. And you can use this to your advantage because why not be the winner that takes it all. All of it comes down to one change.
Stop consuming news as entertainment and start treating it like intelligence. Every time you hear about market volatility, AI disruption, or an industry shift, train yourself to ask one question. Who is this creating opportunity for?
And how do I become that person? Rule number two, know the numbers. The biggest wealth transfer in history is happening, and most women just weren't trained for it.
True story, when I first started in business, I couldn't read a P&L, aka a profit and loss statement. There were numbers in front of me, columns, line items, calculations, and it might as well have been a foreign language because I genuinely did not even understand what a P and L stood for. And I had dropped out of college, so there was nobody that was there that was just willing to teach me.
But you see, I realized that I had to learn this because if I couldn't understand what those numbers were saying, I couldn't make an effective decision. That forced fluency was one of the most important things that ever happened to me professionally. But most people never get that.
And here's what's coming for those people. A parent passes away, a spouse passes away, and someone who has never looked at a financial statement, a 401k structure, or a business valuation is responsible for all of it. Women live an average of 5 to6 years longer than men in the United States, and 95% of surviving spouses are women.
Kuruli Associates project that 84. 4 trillion in wealth will transfer between now and 2045. and of the broader $124 trillion picture.
CNBC reported in March of 2025 that close to a hundred trillion will ultimately flow through women's hands. McKenzie projects that women will control approximately $34 trillion of investable assets in the United States by 2030, which is nearly double the current figure. But you know what's actually scary about this statistic?
According to a 2025 UBS study, 80% of these women who inherited from their parents and 83% of widows were uncertain when inheriting this wealth. UBS called it a wealth transfer challenge. They either didn't know how much they'd receive, they didn't understand the assets, they didn't know how to manage them, or some combination of all three.
You see, four out of five women receiving significant wealth are unprepared to manage it. And the financial industry has known that this was coming for decades and responded with pink brochures and doubled down on the wine and wealth events. Meanwhile, women currently control nearly a third of all household financial assets and are on track to control 40% of everything within 4 years.
It's more clear than ever that the infrastructure was built for men and that this wealth transfer will break it. This mismatch is both a crisis and an opening. And which one it is for you depends on whether or not you're prepared for it when it arrives.
And waiting until the money lands in your hands to figure out what to do with it means that you're already behind. And the last thing that you want to do is have an emotional loss or trauma in your family to then start learning how to manage your money. So, it's time to change the infrastructure.
Close one financial fluency gap this week. And not with a budgeting app. I mean, one concept that makes you literate in a room full of people talking about money.
What does a P&L actually tell you? What is the difference between revenue, profit, and cash flow? And why does it matter which one you're tracking?
What does it mean when someone says that a company is valued at 10 times EBIDA? You don't need an MBA. You just need a vocabulary.
And one concept per week in 12 weeks means that you'll understand how money actually works at scale better than 90% of people around you. Rule number three, AI is the great equalizer. I took 22 of our leaders at Cardo Ventures to watch an AI documentary.
There was popcorn, milk duds, the whole thing. And I want to be clear about why I did this. Because it wasn't about the movie.
That was a leadership decision. You see, AI adoption doesn't spread through corporate memos or OKRs or Slack messages. It comes from leaders actually demonstrating that AI is important and showing that it matters beyond just saying AI is important.
Go figure it out. And it worked. We're actively engaging with AI publicly, building with it, talking about it, and different AI companies have started to reach out and want to collaborate.
I myself use AI every single day in my business as a core infrastructure, not as a side experiment. It covers in 2 hours what used to take me an entire day with the team behind me. My team and I are so bought into this implementation that we've actually rolled out an AI essentials workshop for our clients.
And if you're wanting to take the first step in implementing AI into your business, you can go to my Instagram at Natalie Dawson, DM me AI, and I'll get you the information. This is important because research from IBM, McKenzie, and Forbes all project that AI is going to be the tool that breaks the economic ceiling. One company, Base 44, built by essentially one person using AI development tools, was acquired by Wix for $80 million.
And this is just the preview. If I want you to remove one misunderstanding, it's this. AI doesn't replace you.
It replaces tasks. It's quite literally just a magnifying glass that's either going to magnify competence or expose the absence of it. That's it.
If you're good at selling, AI makes you a full sales operation. If you're good at operations, AI makes you a one-man architecture firm. The human who holds the vision and the judgment doesn't get replaced.
The person who refuses to engage with it gets outrun by somebody with a laptop and a $30 a month subscription. And it worked. We are now spending over $10,000 a day across our team on Claude.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not excited about wasting money on AI, but I am excited that our team is actually using it. This is an early adoption window and it's closing up fast. Every month that passes is another month's worth of market value that someone else has accumulated.
So, pick one thing in your business that consumes the most time and delivers the least strategic value. Writing emails, summarizing meetings, building follow-up sequences, creating content. Automate components of it this week using AI and actually do it.
Don't just think about it. Download a tool, spend an hour, set it up. The goal is to reclaim 5 to 10 hours a week of your work to redirect those hours towards something that actually builds wealth, strategy, relationship decisions.
So start with one task and in 90 days you'll be operating at a level that won't look like the same person who started. Rule number four, kill the scarcity mindset before it kills your wealth. The biggest cause of downfall during an economic opportunity window is psychological and if you don't actively control that response, it will control you.
I will say this plainly. I was a genuinely pessimistic person for most of my early life. It was this weird thing because I genuinely used to think pessimism was intelligence.
I was raised by two phenomenal parents and both of them were doctors, very intelligent, smart, hardworking people. But the environment that they created was when you come out of a movie, you're supposed to articulate what you didn't like, what you did like, and start to pick it apart as if those criticisms equaled me being intelligent. I was supposed to come up with what was wrong with it and what I would have done differently where the story broke down.
I was trained to be a critic and for years I ran that same filter over everything and it ended up costing me a lot. I would so easily be able to define the ceiling of a business before it had touched the floor and I lost countless opportunities because of this mindset. A 2026 paper on behavioral economics and social psychology research found that scarcitydriven behavior actually negatively affects entrepreneurships in particular.
In simple terms, the scarcity mindset you think is protecting you is actually suppressing the exact behaviors that build wealth during a reset. Warren Buffett's line, "Be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful," gets quoted constantly. But almost nobody follows it because following it requires overriding the survival instincts your brain is screaming at you.
The people who build wealth during downturns don't feel less fear than everyone else. They just act despite being afraid. And in 2020, the people who froze and the people who pivoted had access to the identical information.
It was the same economy. It was the same headlines. It was the same data.
Everybody was trapped in their homes, so the circumstances were the same, but their outcomes were entirely different based on what they decided to do with them. Rule number five, financial fluency is the new literacy. There is a big gap between knowing how to save money and actually understanding how wealth works.
And most financial advice for women lives on the wrong side of that gap. At Cardo Ventures, we've worked with thousands of business owners. And the one pattern I consistently see is that people don't understand their own numbers.
An owner proudly will tell me that the revenue is $5 million annually. And if I ask, "What's your profit margin? What's your cash conversion cycle?
" Nothing. They don't know. Revenue is a feel-good metric, but not always a substantial one.
I was actually just talking to a business owner earlier this week who said that they did $45 million in revenue last year. And when asked what his profit was on $45 million, it was $1 million. all of that work to generate 45 million just to have a business model that only actually profits a million.
It would be easier to have a business that did $2 million in revenue, less employees, less headaches, less randomity that profits a million than 45 million of revenue only profiting a million. You see, profit is a sanity metric. It tells you how much you actually keep out of the revenue that you generate.
Cash flow is a survival metric. It will literally tell you if you can make payroll next month or if you're able to invest in additional marketing or sales channels. All three of these numbers in a business are vital.
The business owners I've worked with who scale the fastest and the most sustainably are the ones who know how to read the scoreboard. The Federal Reserve's 2024 research confirmed that the gender gap in financial literacy comes down to one thing, confidence. Women are significantly more likely to select don't know on financial literacy questions.
But when men and women both attempted to answer the same questions, they selected incorrect answers at nearly identical rates. This hesitancy is what's costing real money. Less confidence equals virtually no investment.
More likeness of deferring to advisers blindly and leaving capital sitting in low return accounts out of caution. Understand this. Budgeting isn't building wealth.
Budgeting is survival. Real financial fluency is understanding how capital actually moves and knowing if the math works, not just if the pitch sounds good. The largest wealth transfer in history is already underway.
Trillions of dollars will land in women's hands through inheritance, business, or career advancement. But if your financial education stops at saving 20% of your paycheck, you're going to do one of three things. Pay someone else a premium to manage it, freeze it in accounts that lose to inflation, or lose it on bad deals that you couldn't evaluate.
Unbelievably smart women make these mistakes every single day. Don't be one of them. The framework to avoid this is to build out your financial fluency stack over the next 30 days so you become dangerous enough that nobody can ever take advantage of your ignorance.
First, you have to spend time decoding the income statement of a public company you actually use. Next, skip the market predictions and listen to a podcast. Rule six, build your three-year wealth capture plan.
This determines whether any of the other five matter. Everything in this video is completely useless if it stays as information you watched and filed away. The rule that separates every group I've ever worked with is whether they actually create a plan.
Almost a decade ago, I took a trip to Rome with my boyfriend, now husband, and I was unbelievably insecure because every person that I was introduced to, I was just introduced to them as his girlfriend. I had nothing of my own to point to. And when they asked me what I did, I literally didn't know what to say.
And the reason for this was I wasn't proud of the accomplishments that I made. I hadn't done anything yet. And this was a shocking realization in my early 20s that I wanted to be able to show up in rooms where I was proud of myself, where I could point to something and say, "I did this.
I created that. This is what I'm about. " And so, you know what I did?
I picked a specific date. The same event the following year was going to be hosted in Florence. And I asked myself one question.
Who do I need to be by then? What would I have to build, develop, and show up with to be a completely different version of myself standing in that room one year later? And then for every single day for an entire year, I wrote a blog post Monday through Friday from scratch.
No templates. AI wasn't around back then. And by Florence, the following September, I had a platform, a podcast, and an actual track record.
That forcing event framework of picking the date, defining the specific person I needed to be by then, and working backwards from it still drives every significant decision I make. Dr Gail Matthews at Dominican University proved that writing down goals, committing to action steps, and actually using an accountability partner, nearly doubles your success rate, jumping from 43% to 76%. But the catch is specificity.
Build wealth is a wish. generate $10,000 a month from an AI service business by December 2027 is a goal that actually changes behavior. Every serious investor and operator I know has some version of a written thesis, a specific clear document about what they believe is happening in the market, where the opportunity sits and what their exact moves are over a defined timeline.
And I believe 3 years is the right timeline. 1 year is too short to compound anything meaningful. But 3 years is close enough to feel real, yet long enough to build something substantial.
This time is important because the AI and wealth transfer opportunity window is closing. If this made you rethink where you're currently positioned financially, watch this video next to see how the top 1% really thinks about wealth.
