10 Ways To Make $1 Million

Our smart strategies will help you reach (or surpass) the seven-figure milestone.

- Sandra Block

1. START A BUSINESS

Maggie Cook, 37, had no business experience when she founded Maggie’s Salsa in 2004. Born in Mexico to American parents who ran an orphanage, she had developed a knack for making salsa. “The only thing I knew how to do was chop salsa ingredients into a bowl,” says Cook. But friends at the University of Charleston, in Charleston, W.Va., raved about her recipe, so she decided to enter it in a contest at Charleston’s Capitol Market, a year-round farmer’s market. She won.

At the time, Cook was working full-time at an interior-design firm. With an $800 investment, she started making salsa in her kitchen. Her first two customers were stores in the Capitol Market; as her business grew, she rented commercial kitchens in Charleston and nearby Huntington, W.Va. Her big break came in 2007, when she cold-called Whole Foods. After a store representative expressed interest in her product, she loaded up her Honda Civic with salsa and drove 360 miles to Hyattsville, Md. The meeting led to a contract for 10,000 pounds of salsa a week, which enabled Cook to quit her interior-design job and focus on her business. She expanded her product line to include several kinds of dips and salsas and landed contracts with Kroger and Walmart. In 2014, Cook sold her business to Garden Fresh Gourmet, a national salsa manufacturer. (Cook declined to disclose the terms of the deal, but at the time, she was bringing in revenues of more than $1 million a year.) In 2015, Campbell Soup bought Garden Fresh for $231 million.