ppc drains ur money. Also why are folks telling him to get high pagerank links? Repeat after me, PAGERANK MEANS VERY LITTLE!!!!!!! You can get a tough keyword ranked in the first page of google with very strong pr zero to pr 2 sites. It all depends on your link analysis of those sites.
PPC can be used efficiently it it's definitely not always a waste of money. But that doesn't mean that it is mostly used in an efficient way ...
What are his short term goals? If to make money quickly from converting customers, then PPC; if to get consistent, organic, free traffic from the SEs, then backlinks, content, etc.