This post continues the four-step plan of how to make a million dollars. If you didn't get steps 1 - 3, please check out the blog I posted three weeks ago. You can start from zero, honest. The first three steps should take roughly six to ten years, so really go back and read it if you haven't already.

This final fourth step should take about five years. The idea is that the whole cycle only takes 10 to 15 years.

Step 4. So, by this point you have $100,000 in assets already. Keep in mind, this must be in addition to whatever retirement planning and emergency savings you keep on hand. The money amassed in each of these steps must be extra cash. That's the tricky part. To recap, again, the principle here is taking high, calculated risks quickly, early in adulthood without threatening one's financial stability.

In case you think this is totally loony, let me just point out that none other than Oprah has been pushing a similar message. As her website states, "Women take emotional risks all the time, but rarely do we take financial ones. We rent when we should buy. We buy when we should have rented and invested our extra capital in better ways. We think jobs when we should think careers. And we lose 10 good years of saving or investing in our 20s while we're waiting to find Mr. Right."

I have a hunch you haven't wasted too many years waiting for Mr. Right, so let's get to it.

As I mentioned in the last blog, making $1 million from $100,000 involves its own special processes. Milking $100,000 from $10,000 could involve a well-thought-out investment with friends starting a bar or could be about buying a fixer upper at just the right time in the right neighborhood. But turning $100,000 into $1 Million takes another level of operation. If you're a math geek and you want to try your hand at predicting oil future spots, go for it. For the rest of us, the level of operation required for this kind of money means starting a small business.

I say "small business" because the whole idea behind this four-step plan is that each step can be accomplished fairly independently.

Here's an example I like to study: Jeff Bezos. Yeah, yeah. He's not a woman — and I don't care. Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com in 1994 with $30,000. Here's how:

The genesis for the creation of Amazon.com began in the spring of 1994 when Bezos was struck by the amazing annual growth of Internet usage. Nothing was growing as quickly, and Bezos began to explore the idea of creating a business that would tap into that growth. He decided on Internet retailing and methodically prepared a ranked list of the leading products that could best be sold over the Internet. Books led the list because there are so many items and no existing traditional bookstore could possibly offer 2.5 million titles as Amazon.com does.

Now, from that initial $30,000, by the height of the tech boom, Bezos was worth $9 billion. That's $30,000 to $9 Billion in five years. The initial investment is multiplied by a factor of 300,000. We're just shooting for a factor of 10 in the same amount of time. If you do even 1/100th of a percent of what Bezos did, you've shot beyond that $1 million already.

Yeah, yeah. How many Bezos can there be? I know. And the 1990s were crazy. But check out how well this 17-year-old girl did in 2007. A website called Whateverlife zoomed from pretty much zero investment capital to $1.5 million in annual revenues in two years. In the less than two years since Whateverlife took off, the founder (Ashley) dropped out of high school, bought a house and rejected offers to buy her young company. Her business model's all advertising. She gets eyeballs on the screen by giving away free graphic designs to teenagers, who must be downloading these things at school all day long.

If you're into a more vanilla story, check out Oprah's millionaire women profiles. You'll find multi-million dollar companies founded with capital as low as $5,000 — and even one company that made $1 million in revenue its first year out of the woman's house.

What's even better than these media examples is the stories of women that you know personally. If you know someone with a million dollar business, don't be shy. Ask her how she did it. And then tell me, too!