The Money Making Expert: The Exact Formula For Turning $100 Into $100k Per Month! 10x Your Income Without Working Harder! The Waiting List Hack That Will Make You Millions!

0:00:03 I’ve started seven businesses that have gone zero to a million in their first 12 months,
0:00:07 three businesses that went north of 10 million, but here’s a crazy thing, anyone can do this.
0:00:11 And I’m going to take you step by step through the best ways to start making life changing
0:00:15 amount of money. Daniel Priestley, Money and Business Expert. That’s helped thousands of
0:00:21 people start scaling, grow your own multi-million pounds businesses from scratch. These are the
0:00:25 best ways to start the business. We start with an idea, but we need to sharpen our ideas in the
0:00:29 market, not in our minds. I see so many people, they raise money, book an office, buy computers,
0:00:33 but after all of that, no one’s interested in their idea. So we have to conduct tests where we
0:00:39 fail fast and fail cheap. For example, waiting lists is one of the fastest ways to test an idea.
0:00:42 And this is what really smart entrepreneurs do, like Elon Musk launched a waiting list for the
0:00:47 Model 3, he launched a waiting list for the Cybertruck, validating the idea. In fact, Rolex
0:00:51 had a massive breakthrough when they stopped selling Rolexes and they started selling the
0:00:56 waiting list. But if it’s crickets, okay, fair enough, let’s have another idea. But what if someone
0:01:00 steals my idea? Ideas aren’t worth anything. The value is for the person who does it.
0:01:04 What are the fundamentals of being an exceptional salesperson picture? First,
0:01:08 you will have to use the business as a team sport. Is there anything you found that is consistent
0:01:13 across all of the best people you’ve partnered with? So here’s what I’m looking for. And there’s a
0:01:17 lot more to go through. But one of the other strategies for building a business is and that
0:01:21 should get you into the six figures of revenue just by doing that. It’s shocking because it’s so simple.
0:01:26 Let’s talk about money. Let’s talk about it. If someone’s out there and they’ve got a hundred
0:01:30 pounds or a thousand pounds worth of disposable income, what should I be thinking about to making
0:01:35 myself financially free? The truth is that there’s an incredible wealth to be created and one of the
0:01:42 biggest opportunities in the world at the moment is… Quick one, quick favour to ask from you.
0:01:46 There is one simple way that you can support our show. And that is by hitting that follow button
0:01:51 on this app that you’re listening to the show on right now. This year in 2024,
0:01:57 we’re trying really, really hard to level up everything we’re doing. And the only free thing
0:02:00 I’ll ever ask from you is to hit that follow button on this app. It helps the show more than
0:02:04 I could probably articulate. And it allows us, enables us to keep doing what we’re doing here.
0:02:19 I appreciate it, Dealey. On to the show. Daniel, if someone has just clicked on this podcast,
0:02:26 can you tell me the reason why they should stay around and listen and what you think they’re
0:02:30 going to get from this conversation? I think we’re living through the most incredible time in history.
0:02:37 Never before have people had the opportunity to build something that is a global business,
0:02:40 full of fun, freedom and flexibility, full of passion and purpose.
0:02:46 And today that is accessible to almost anyone who’d be listening to this podcast.
0:02:52 The baby boomers, they got access to affordable housing. We get access to affordable global
0:02:57 small businesses. Now, the entrepreneurial journey is scary to a lot of people,
0:03:02 but if you conduct the right experiments, have the right mindset, follow the right process,
0:03:05 it’s really predictable and safe for people to get involved in entrepreneurship.
0:03:10 And I think anyone who’s listening to this is going to see that it’s a lot more process driven
0:03:14 than they think that we can go step by step to build a business that you absolutely love.
0:03:20 On the other end of this conversation, in an hour’s time or two hours time or
0:03:23 whenever this podcast finishes, what are they going to have that they didn’t have before this
0:03:27 conversation? We’re going to talk about the entrepreneurial journey as a set of steps,
0:03:32 predictable steps, and they’re going to be able to have a map of how do you move through that
0:03:36 entrepreneurial journey? What do you do first? What do you do next? How do you go to the next
0:03:42 level and scale up and who do you contact? And it’s based upon literally coming across
0:03:46 thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs at each stage of the journey. So ideally,
0:03:50 what I want people to walk away with is just that clarity around how this entrepreneur thing works.
0:03:55 And who are you? What’s your experience? So my background is over 20 years of entrepreneurship.
0:04:00 I started my first company when I was 21 years old. I did two years working for a mentor from 19
0:04:06 to 21. We built a business from scratch to millions of revenue. I then left that mentor.
0:04:11 I went out on my own, started my own first small business. It grew very rapidly. We went from zero
0:04:16 to a million in the first year and then 10 million in year three. I started seven businesses since
0:04:20 that have gone zero to a million in their first 12 months. I’ve done three businesses that went
0:04:24 north of 10 million. And what about this accelerator? I read that you have an accelerator
0:04:28 where you have thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs who come to your accelerator
0:04:34 for business advice coaching from getting from zero to up on that, up to their trajectory.
0:04:39 Yeah. So 12 years ago, I noticed this trend around this idea of global small businesses.
0:04:42 And I basically saw that technology was making it possible for anyone to do the
0:04:47 things that multinational corporations were doing. And I started an entrepreneur accelerator
0:04:51 designed for people to position themselves as a key person of influence, to build their
0:04:55 personal brand, to build a core team of people around them, to digitize the value that they offer
0:04:59 and to take the most or make the most of the times that we’re living in.
0:05:04 And since then, about four and a half thousand companies have gone through this whole process.
0:05:09 We’ve seen people go from zero to multi-multi-million pound exits. We’ve seen people build the business
0:05:13 of their dreams where they get to live and work from anywhere. And we’ve also seen what
0:05:16 people struggle with and what they’ve found difficult. We’ve gone through pandemics and
0:05:21 global financial crises and all of this sort of stuff with our clients. It’s dancing classes
0:05:26 for entrepreneurs. It’s a high performance environment where you get to be around people
0:05:30 who want the same sort of things that you want. You get to have some accountability,
0:05:35 some best practices. You get a community or a network around you and you go through that
0:05:39 entrepreneurial journey with other people who are going through it as well.
0:05:43 Do you think anyone can be an entrepreneur? I think entrepreneurial spirit is something
0:05:48 that we’re all born with. Entrepreneurship is this idea that we want to create value for others,
0:05:51 that we want to take a little bit of a creative risk, that we want to do something that represents
0:05:57 self-expression. There are different stages to the entrepreneurial journey. Everyone can go through
0:06:02 those stages. There’s also not one type of entrepreneur. There are people who are very
0:06:05 good at finance. There are people who are good at operations. There are people who have visionaries.
0:06:09 There are people who are doers and get the stuff done. And there are businesses that suit those
0:06:14 types of people. So it’s about finding out who you are, finding out what kind of business would
0:06:19 actually be well suited to that person, and then making sure that you’re doing the thing that you’re
0:06:25 well suited to. How does one know that a business would be suited to them? Because if you gauged
0:06:29 on the people that come up to me in the street, or the taxi drivers I speak to, or my friends,
0:06:35 or the DMs that I get, everyone’s got an idea. Nobody seems to be short of ideas. But so many
0:06:40 people seem to be stuck at that moment of making a decision to pursue a particular idea, that they
0:06:46 almost get paralysis, like sofa printers. All of their ideas stay on the sofa that they were
0:06:51 conceived on. But they never seem to get out of the sofa because of that paralysis. I don’t know
0:06:58 if this is the one. I get that all the time. Is this the idea? The thing is we need to sharpen
0:07:03 our ideas in the market, not in our minds. So what we have to do is go make contact with other
0:07:08 people and see what they say and see what they think. So we have to conduct tests where we fail
0:07:14 fast and fail cheap if we fail at all. So here’s an example of what I like to do when someone has
0:07:20 an idea. I say set up a very simple waiting list landing page and essentially let people know,
0:07:23 I’m thinking of starting something in this particular space or we’re launching something
0:07:27 in this space later in the year, if you’re interested, join the waiting list. Now that
0:07:31 waiting list concept, essentially, if people will join the waiting list and if you get hundreds of
0:07:36 people joining a waiting list, it’s a pretty good indication that it is a good idea. If you
0:07:40 launch a waiting list and you message 3,000 people and say, I’m launching this thing,
0:07:44 do you want to join the waiting list? And no one joins, then it’s a good indication that’s not
0:07:48 the idea, right? Because we have to have a good marriage between what we’re passionate about,
0:07:53 what we want to do and what the market wants. There’s 6 million businesses in the UK, 30 million
0:07:58 businesses in the USA. And that basically means there’s a lot of businesses doing a lot of things
0:08:03 that already exist. So the market might not have an unmet need. The market might say, hey,
0:08:07 I already have a great cupcake supply. There’s already someone who makes great coffee in my
0:08:11 neighbourhood. We don’t need another one. Okay, fair enough. Let’s have another idea, right? You
0:08:15 can always have plenty more ideas. So you’ve got a test. The faster you can get on with conducting
0:08:20 a fast and cheap test, the better you’re going to go with your entrepreneurial idea.
0:08:23 Because that’s one of the big sort of mental barriers that people have, is they see that
0:08:27 committing to any of these ideas is going to cost them three years, their reputation,
0:08:31 and potentially hundreds of thousands of their money or an investor’s money. So that,
0:08:35 again, creates paralysis because the discomfort associated with being wrong when you think there’s
0:08:40 so much on the line will hold you in place. But your idea there of just throwing up a landing page
0:08:44 immediately kills the paralysis. And also just a landing page of a waiting list. So you’re not
0:08:48 even saying that these things are dead certain. You’re just saying, we’re going to be launching
0:08:53 something if we get enough interest. And here’s the waiting list. And by the way,
0:08:56 this is what really smart entrepreneurs do. Like Elon Musk launched a waiting list
0:09:00 for the Model 3. He launched a waiting list for the Cybertruck. I think he launched a waiting
0:09:08 list for a flamethrower. I joined all waiting lists. Yeah. And he’s essentially what he’s doing
0:09:13 is a very smart process of validating the idea. One of the best mindsets that we have as an early
0:09:18 stage entrepreneur is the mindset of a scientist conducting a little experiment. And what we’re
0:09:23 trying to do is not be emotionally attached to what happens one way or another. What we want to do
0:09:27 is we want to say, you know what, if people don’t like this, okay, I’ll have another idea. If people
0:09:32 do like this, I’ll go to the next step. So a scientist is just kind of like conducting an
0:09:37 experiment. And the best experiments are cheap and fast. A waiting list is probably the most
0:09:43 powerful early stage experiment you could you could go with. Elon Musk, when he launched the
0:09:47 waiting list for Cybertruck, I don’t think there would have been an investment bank on the planet
0:09:51 that would have backed a factory for something that looked like Cybertruck. But when he walked in
0:09:58 and said, I’ve got a million people who have put down $100 deposit, if only 5% of them go ahead,
0:10:02 they can crunch the numbers on that and say, yeah, okay, we’ll fund that fair enough. Let’s build it.
0:10:08 So it’s very powerful. I did this recently. I had my team come up to me and say, hey, we could do
0:10:15 a startup around an AI that helps people write a book. And I said, well, I’m not sure if anyone
0:10:21 would like that, but let’s launch a waiting list. So I launched a waiting list, put one post on LinkedIn,
0:10:28 750 people joined the waiting list. I was expecting 150. And in the waiting list, we actually asked
0:10:32 questions like how much would you pay for it per month and how many months do you think it would
0:10:36 take you? And what would success look like? And what would failure look like? And what else would
0:10:40 you try instead of this? If this didn’t exist, what would you use? So we asked all these questions,
0:10:47 we collected a ton of data. And then off the back of that, we specced out the product. I also went
0:10:52 to Angel Investors and said, do you guys want to co-invest in this one? We raised £300,000 on the
0:11:00 SEIS scheme at a £3 million valuation for an idea, no lines of code, nothing built, nothing designed.
0:11:04 And essentially, we got ourselves ready to launch in a couple of months,
0:11:08 just simply off the back of that waiting list and all the data that we collected.
0:11:12 So interesting. The other point you said within there was about, you said there’s
0:11:17 kind of two things, what you’re passionate about and what the market wants. Now, on the point of
0:11:20 passion, it’s so cliche, people say, follow your passions, do things you’re passionate about,
0:11:27 et cetera. How important do you think the role of passion is in actually succeeding at any of
0:11:32 these ideas? So if I’ve got four ideas, cupcake business, floristry business, soccer business,
0:11:38 and I don’t know, AI business, what role does my own intrinsic passion of any of these areas
0:11:44 matter in the chances of success? Passion matters a lot because business is hard
0:11:49 and you have to stick with it through the downs. So the reason passion is valuable is because you
0:11:53 are going to go through valleys and they’re going to be painful and they’re going to be,
0:11:58 the gratification is going to be very much delayed in any business journey.
0:12:03 So passion is the thing that gets you through. It’s not the thing that you ride high on. It’s
0:12:09 the thing that you get through the hard times with. I have a very weird definition of passion. I kind
0:12:14 of like tried to strip it back to its bones and I look for an alignment between origin, mission,
0:12:18 and vision. So I essentially say, what is your origin story? What’s your background? I want to see
0:12:22 that you’re doing something that aligns to what you’ve always been doing. I want to see that this
0:12:28 goes back to age 10. For me, when I ask people about why you’re doing this thing, I want them to
0:12:33 start the story a long time ago and I want them to tell me about little wins that they’ve had along
0:12:37 the way that have led to this moment, which is why they’re starting this business to me. That’s
0:12:43 great because anything that we keep coming back to as a recurring theme is what we’re meant to be
0:12:49 doing. So for me, I’ve, going right back to age 10, I have experiences throughout my teenage years
0:12:54 and going back to age 10 that were about business as a force for good. And it goes right back to a
0:12:58 garage sale that I did when I was 10 years old. We had a house fire. It was a horrible experience,
0:13:03 but it turned into a positive experience because I set up this garage sale and made some money
0:13:06 and something bad happened and I turned it into something good through business.
0:13:13 And for me, there’s this recurring theme that all of my little wins line up to these themes.
0:13:19 So the origin story is really powerful. The vision for the future is what do I want to see
0:13:23 happen in the future? If all of this goes well and other people are doing it too, what would this
0:13:27 look like in the future? What would 10 years from now, 20 years from now be if we are celebrating?
0:13:32 What would we love to be celebrating? And then the mission is what is the most high value thing
0:13:38 that I could possibly do that’s in alignment with that vision? So essentially, if there is a
0:13:44 strong alignment between origin, mission and vision, something happens where you carry yourself
0:13:48 in a different way. You sit differently. You speak differently. You’re in this alignment.
0:13:52 Other people pick up on it. They want to quit their job and go and work on your team.
0:13:56 They hear about the vision. They hear about your origin story. They hear about the mission
0:14:02 and they go, “Oh, I’m going to leave what I’m doing and come and join that.” And that’s the
0:14:07 magic of entrepreneurship. So for me, that’s passion. It’s not about like superficially,
0:14:15 I like snowboarding or, “Oh, I’ve always enjoyed baking a cake.” It’s the alignment of origin,
0:14:23 mission and vision. Interestingly there, I was trying to think about what the opposite of everything
0:14:28 you’ve said just looks like. What’s the opposite of passion in your definition? What’s the misalignment
0:14:35 look like? So can you give me an example of what the opposite of that definition looks like?
0:14:41 The opposite is I heard about some guy who pumped a crypto coin and made millions of dollars,
0:14:46 so I want to go and find out how to pump crypto coins or I heard someone who made money flipping
0:14:51 property. So I need to flip property and I’m going to do a course on flipping property. I’ve got no
0:14:57 interest in property. I’ve never been interested in property. I’ve never shown any interest in
0:15:00 any of these things. I just want to make money and it’s got nothing to do with my background.
0:15:04 I’ve got no little wins in this. I have no real vision for the future other than being rich.
0:15:11 So essentially, this is of no value to anyone listening. No one cares. In fact, when people
0:15:17 hear that, they’re repulsed by it. In most cases, just hearing someone talk about that makes you feel
0:15:20 I definitely don’t want to see you for the next two years. Why are they destined to fail?
0:15:27 Because they can’t attract a team. Essentially, all of business and life is a team sport and it’s
0:15:31 your ability to attract great talented people around you who want to work with you that is
0:15:36 ultimately the reason we succeed and it’s ultimately the reason we feel good. So if you’re
0:15:41 saying things that repulse people, then talented people leave and talented people don’t want to
0:15:46 be involved. If you’re saying something that feels resonant, that it feels aligned and it feels like
0:15:52 something’s happening, it feels like this guy’s up to something or this woman is up to something.
0:15:56 She’s enrolling people in this vision that she’s got and people love her story.
0:16:00 It’s destined to succeed because good people are getting involved and more and more good people
0:16:06 are getting involved. Do you know what’s a good opportunity and what’s not a good opportunity?
0:16:11 Do you think that when you’re younger, you should be saying yes to more stuff? Because like in the
0:16:15 position you’re in now, you’re bombarded with opportunity. So you have to use a kind of a
0:16:19 different mental framework. Do you think when people are younger, they should have a different
0:16:24 bias towards accepting opportunities or fucking around and finding out? Yeah,
0:16:28 definitely. We should definitely go through that phase and also be willing to say, “Oh,
0:16:32 that wasn’t it. I’m going to stop and go try something else.” So you dropped out of university,
0:16:37 I dropped out of university. I was so excited to go to university and then as soon as I realised
0:16:41 this is not going where I want to go, I had to make the decision to leave all my friends
0:16:48 and walk away from university. That sort of dark valley you have to walk through of uncertainty,
0:16:53 when you make the decision to leave the well-worn track of university or a corporate job or the
0:16:59 nine to five. How does one prepare mentally? Like what’s the mindset of someone that goes,
0:17:03 “Do you know what? I’m going to go through the stinging metals, through the bushes and be lost
0:17:10 and find my own way.” I always enjoyed all of this, by the way. So my mindset was that I was
0:17:15 always quite excited that being lost, I felt was probably going to be part of the process.
0:17:20 I have a simple view around mindset, which is you’re either being a reptile, an autopilot,
0:17:23 or a visionary. What’s that reptile then you mentioned? What’s the definition of that?
0:17:32 Well, reptile mode is fight, flight, freeze, freak out, throw tantrums, be angry at the people
0:17:37 you should not be angry at. It feels unfair that the world’s against you, all of that.
0:17:41 And the visionary? What’s the definition of that? So the visionary, I don’t know if you’ve had these
0:17:48 moments where you feel anything is possible and you feel very expansive. You think in long time
0:17:54 frames, so you think in maybe 10, 20 years out, you also might see the world as one small place.
0:17:59 So you might mentally, your mental model might be that the world is just one little ball that
0:18:03 flies around the sun and there’s markets everywhere and that there are opportunities
0:18:07 everywhere and that there are people trying to get stuff done and I could have a business that’s
0:18:16 anywhere and you feel a sense of love and compassion and optimism and you typically
0:18:21 become more influential in your circles. The other strange thing about the visionary mindset is that
0:18:27 they did some research with Indian farmers and they found that these particular people,
0:18:32 they got paid their yearly salary in one lump sum and then they had to make that last for the whole
0:18:39 year and as they were getting close to the end of that cycle, they had an IQ test which showed
0:18:45 that they were 15 points of IQ lower than when they had just been paid the lump sum. So the lump
0:18:50 sum allowed them to think long term and allowed them to feel affluent and abundant and their IQ,
0:18:57 the scores on the IQ test went up as a result of feeling good and feeling amazing and feeling
0:19:01 affluent and then by the time the money had run out and they’re not sure whether they’re even going
0:19:06 to make it to the next one, their emotional intelligence, their actual IQ intelligence
0:19:12 had dropped significantly. So one of the things that is a real challenge if you’re doing it tough
0:19:17 is that you’re essentially regularly putting yourself into these situations where your IQ
0:19:22 is right down. Your emotional intelligence and your IQ suffers as a result of being in
0:19:29 reptile mode. I remember a time where I got a parking ticket for $40 and I freaked out,
0:19:37 like I flipped out. I had a massive fight with my friend and I was in a place where $40 was
0:19:45 seriously an issue and I remember thinking I’m just going to eat cereal for weeks to try and get
0:19:51 through this. So full reptile meltdown mode. What would the visionary have responded to the
0:19:56 parking ticket? Well, the visionary has a different view of life and the first thing is that if a
0:20:01 resource exists on the planet anywhere, that resource is really just a couple of conversations
0:20:07 away. So essentially a visionary would say, well, someone’s got $40. I just have a talk with them
0:20:10 and see what they need and I’ll help them with whatever they need and they can help me with
0:20:16 the $40 that I need. Maybe I need to wash their car. Maybe I need to help them with their video
0:20:21 editing or something. So the visionary is all about the idea that there’s really not a lot of
0:20:26 boundaries between the resources on the planet, that it’s just a gray zone around who owns what
0:20:30 and who’s got what and we can just have conversations about that. So visionaries can easily raise money
0:20:34 and raise funds because they just think, well, someone’s got the money and they want to put it
0:20:38 to use. So I’ll just give them a plan as to how we’re going to put it to use. There’s a great
0:20:43 story that I love, which is I think it was the producers of Top Gun were creating these little
0:20:48 models of aeroplanes and boats and they were trying to figure out how they would do like a
0:20:53 Star Wars style Top Gun movie. And someone said, have we actually called the Navy and asked whether
0:20:58 we can use their planes and their boats? And everyone’s like, no. And so they’ve got planes
0:21:03 and boats. Let’s see if they want to do it. So they ring up the Navy as you do and they speak
0:21:07 to the general and the general says, oh yeah, we want to enroll more people in the Navy. So we
0:21:11 would love for you to make a Hollywood blockbuster film. What do you need? And they basically say,
0:21:15 well, here have the jets, have the boats, have the aircraft carriers, whatever you want to do.
0:21:20 So it’s kind of weird to think that someone woke up this morning with the resource that you want
0:21:26 and if you have a conversation about how that resource gets used, right, essentially you are
0:21:31 now as it’s as good as you having the resource. Someone woke up with an aircraft carrier. If
0:21:35 you’ve got a good use for that aircraft carrier, why not have a conversation about how that aircraft
0:21:41 carrier gets used today? It’s shocking because it’s so simple. And but it’s so resonant with me.
0:21:46 There’s two examples I’ll give. The first I’ve talked about many times was when I was 16, 17,
0:21:50 in sixth form, saw Carly Stokes sat in front of me, who was a girl in my school. I think she was
0:21:54 head girl, but she was picking the vending machines we were going to get in the school. And in my brain,
0:21:58 I thought, we have 2000 paying customers here. Surely there’s a vending machine company that would
0:22:03 love to put these machines for free and give us a cut. Went to the computer room, sent five emails
0:22:08 based on Google search rankings. By the same day, and Mr. Sprinkle, who was our head of key
0:22:12 stage five has confirmed this on live TV, someone showed up with a tape measure to fit the machines
0:22:16 because one of my emails had gone to a former student who was now the CEO of a vending machine
0:22:22 company. And he had been looking to give back to the school. Example B comes in that one.
0:22:26 Did you feel what it felt like to be a visionary where it’s like anything is possible? Like,
0:22:30 why are we not just, of course, we’ve got 2000 clients. Like, like, did you feel,
0:22:34 because you must have felt reptile versus visionary in your life. You’ve had reptile
0:22:39 moments where you’re like, I hate everyone. I want to kill everyone. You know, and then
0:22:44 you’ve had moments where it’s like, oh, you know, we can bend the world. Yeah, we can bend reality.
0:22:48 Exactly. We have conversation about how reality works and we’ll just, you know, bend it.
0:22:54 Yeah. And so my question has always been like, where does that come from? Because I view our
0:22:59 beliefs, all of our beliefs as a stack of evidence we either have or don’t really have. And for me,
0:23:03 the youngster for siblings, I had so much space compared to my siblings when I was young that I
0:23:07 got to, like we said earlier, like fuck around and find out, I got to conduct experiments.
0:23:11 And that led me to believe that the world is bendable. I used to say when I was 14 that
0:23:16 if someone said to me that we need to go to the moon next week, I believe there’s a way.
0:23:20 Because I think there’s probably a rocket rocket going and all I need to do is contact the person
0:23:23 and make a compelling pitch. That’s how I get to the moon next week. You thought that at 14.
0:23:28 Yes. I used to say this all the time, like my, my difference between myself and my peers, they
0:23:32 were academically better. But in my head, there was the only thing that stood in the way of where
0:23:36 I am now and where I want to be is a bunch of people. Bunch of conversations. Yeah. Pitching.
0:23:42 Essentially pitching is enrolling people into new ideas. So what entrepreneurs do
0:23:45 to advance their ideas is we pitch them into existence. We start with an idea and we pitch it
0:23:51 and we pitch it and we pitch it. We sharpen our pitch by talking to people. But what we’re doing
0:23:56 that’s different is we’re not just explaining the idea to people. We’re trying to enroll them
0:24:00 into that vision. We’re enrolling people into this vision that we’ve got for the business.
0:24:06 And that process of getting people to do something that they didn’t wake up thinking
0:24:10 they would do that day is pitching, right? And that’s one of the first tools that you learn
0:24:15 as an entrepreneur. And actually on Dragon’s Den, that is the main tool that people are given
0:24:21 in order to enroll the dragons into investing or getting involved or not. So where does it come
0:24:26 from? I think it was your question. I believe it’s built into every single individual that it’s
0:24:30 an evolutionary function that essentially at the very base of our brain is this reptile mode,
0:24:35 which is fight, flight, freeze, which is rarely appropriate, but in a survival situation, probably
0:24:40 is appropriate. And then there’s autopilot mode, which is essentially just do what you’ve always
0:24:46 done, repeat the past, you know, just get into a loop. If it worked last week and I didn’t die
0:24:51 last week, well, then I might as well do the same week again. And then there’s visionary mode, which
0:24:55 is what could I do differently? What, you know, what might, what would be a creative way to solve
0:25:00 this problem? So I feel that a lot of people think they’re missing something. And actually,
0:25:04 it’s all built in. And if you can get yourself into that visionary mode, often it’s the people you
0:25:09 hang out with. It’s the books that you read, the podcast that you listen to. If you can get into
0:25:15 that mode, then a lot more becomes possible. You get more IQ points, you get more EQ points.
0:25:18 And you see the world in a very different way.
0:25:25 The key question there is like, how do you get into that mode? I have a very one dimensional,
0:25:31 biased journey. So I’m not sure if my journey is the best one to take notes from. But from what
0:25:37 I’ve seen personally, people are either in some kind of upward spiral towards being more visionary,
0:25:42 because it’s compounding in their favor, that they’re sending the email. And then it’s working,
0:25:46 which means they have the evidence to send more, they’re more likely to send emails
0:25:50 with more conviction and more frequency because it worked last time. And then more work,
0:25:55 they get more responses. So they send more emails, it’s this upward, wonderful, reinforcing spiral
0:25:59 upwards. And they become more and more visionary, like Elon Musk is at the very top now, he’s like
0:26:06 space ships to Mars. He’s like chips in your brain that monkeys can control computers with.
0:26:10 That’s someone at the very top of that visionary cycle. And at the bottom of the reptile cycle is
0:26:16 someone who, you know, at work, the CEO says, does anyone want to stand up and share their ideas?
0:26:22 And they just slouch back in the chair, because they’ve had their confidence negatively reinforced.
0:26:26 Maybe last time they tried, it didn’t go bad. Maybe their father or their mother gave them
0:26:31 bad feedback one day. And they’re in this downward spiral. Well, when they do show up,
0:26:35 they show up with low confidence. They put in a bad performance. It goes bad.
0:26:39 I would actually call that autopilot mode, which is I’ve never done this before,
0:26:46 so I won’t do it next time. Reptile mode is very destructive. You’re actively breaking your world.
0:26:55 So it’s where you do the worst possible thing. So you are throwing tantrums and
0:27:00 you’re lashing out against the people who you should, you’re actually lashing out against
0:27:04 the people who are trying to help you probably. So that’s where you’re really at the bottom of
0:27:09 reptile mode, very destructive. Autopilot, in your situation, where you said about the person who,
0:27:13 you know, is given an opportunity to speak and they say, oh, it’s not what I do,
0:27:18 is the autopilot response. The visionary is like, oh, this is a chance to mobilize resources.
0:27:24 I’ve got an opportunity here to expand my sphere of influence and become a key person of influence
0:27:28 in this room. So the visionary is like, oh, great, this is a good opportunity. I can do more with
0:27:35 this. If the pitch is the keys to everything you want to be, because if we were saying that it’s
0:27:40 really conversations that stand in the way of where you want to go, and it’s the pitch that is
0:27:47 essentially the key to wherever you want to go, what are the attributes of a perfect pitch?
0:27:50 What are the fundamentals of being an exceptional salesperson pitcher?
0:27:55 Well, you’ve seen some great pitches on the den. Not a bad ones too.
0:28:00 Yeah. So here’s what I look for. Clarity is the base level. You just don’t want to confuse people.
0:28:08 Authority is the ability to communicate that you are worth listening to, that there’s something
0:28:12 about your background, or what you’ve done, or the data that you’re possessing, or the mentor that
0:28:17 you’ve got that gives you some sort of authority to be talking about this. So clarity and authority,
0:28:23 defining some sort of a problem that the customer has, or some sort of problem that exists in the
0:28:27 world that needs solving, and that you’ve identified an insight or a solution for that problem.
0:28:35 Then the why, which I would say is about communicating why you care enough about this,
0:28:40 that people would buy into you as the person to drive this forward. You then want to define the
0:28:46 opportunity. What is the bigger opportunity for anyone who gets involved? The next steps,
0:28:51 what should someone do next? And then the emotion or the essence that you want to leave people with
0:28:55 so that they remember you based on that essence or that emotion that you made them feel. So that’s
0:29:00 the great arc of an inspiring pitch. What was the last one there? Was it the emotion? So clarity,
0:29:07 authority, problem solution, the why, opportunity, next steps, and the essence. And it spells out
0:29:12 capstone. So that’s how I remember a great pitch. I had to come up with a way of remembering this
0:29:16 because I was pitching so often. I had to be able to come back to, okay, how do I pitch this?
0:29:19 So the essence, that’s the one I wanted some more definition.
0:29:23 People remember you based on how you made them feel. So you want to think,
0:29:27 how do I want to leave people feeling? What’s the emotion that I want people to remember?
0:29:28 Well, I’m pitching.
0:29:32 Yeah. So you want to finish the pitch on an emotion. You want to finish the pitch by
0:29:39 expressing what it is that you essentially, what is the emotion or the feeling that you want
0:29:42 you want this business to be about?
0:29:46 And what’s the opposite of that then? The emotional piece. So what’s a pitch that is lacking?
0:29:49 Well, a lot of pitches finish on next steps and it’s very logistical.
0:29:54 So I’ve seen a lot of pitches that are going great. And then they go, and then here’s what
0:29:58 we need to do next, blah, blah, blah. And then it becomes a little to-do list. And everyone goes,
0:30:03 oh, that kind of landed flat. And if you finish on the essence, then you actually just bring people
0:30:06 back to this is what it’s really about. So that we, even though we’ve talked about opportunities
0:30:10 in next steps and the finances and all that sort of stuff, you want to finish on this is what we’re
0:30:12 really about. This is what we’re up to in the world.
0:30:16 I’ve been thinking a lot about, you know, some adjacent subjects to what we’re talking about
0:30:22 here, but this idea that if you just asked five times more than you’re currently asking,
0:30:28 your life would change. The secondary example I was going to give after my coffee machine
0:30:32 example from when I was 16 was when I was 18 and I was completely broke. And that’s when I was
0:30:36 shoplifting the Chicago town pizza to feed myself. And I need, I started, I was starting this business
0:30:41 called wallpark and I needed camera equipment. I sent 20 emails to camera company saying,
0:30:45 hey, I’ve got this website I’m going to launch. We’re going to record videos on campus. I need
0:30:50 some cameras. If you lend us the cameras, we’ll put your logo on all the videos we make on campus.
0:30:56 Within 72 hours, Samsung had sent 10,000 pounds worth of camera equipment to my front door and
0:31:01 my side. I got an email the day after the cameras arrived and it said, these are returns. Send
0:31:05 them back when you don’t need them anymore. And I’d solved someone’s problem for him because he
0:31:09 had returned cameras in a warehouse that he didn’t know what to do with. He sent me 10,000
0:31:15 pounds worth of camera equipment for free within 72 hours. And I go, oh my God, like when you’re at
0:31:20 the bottom and you have nothing to lose and you have an internet connection and a Gmail account,
0:31:28 why aren’t you sending out 20, 30, 50 emails a day asking? You think in emails, I think in calls
0:31:33 because when I was 18, you pick up the phone and make a call. I always had this rule called
0:31:40 make three calls. And I remember a nightclub party that I saw these 15 year olds sitting in the street.
0:31:45 I’d just turned 18 and I was loving going to nightclubs. And I saw these 15 year olds and
0:31:49 they’re skateboarding and they’re hanging out in this little area. And they were asking me
0:31:53 what it’s like to go to a nightclub. And I said, oh, someone should put on an under 18s nightclub
0:31:56 party so that you can experience it and see what it’s like. And they’re like, oh, that would be
0:32:02 amazing. And I thought, oh, I’m going to do it. So I called the nightclub I’d been going to and said,
0:32:07 oh, I have a promotions company and we run nightclub parties for under 18s during the school
0:32:12 holidays. We’ve selected your venue to be one of our venues for the next holidays. Would you be
0:32:16 interested in discussing that? So like, yeah, send through a proposal. And then I’m like, oh,
0:32:21 okay, yeah, we’ll send us through a proposal. And anyway, we ran, we ran a series of nightclubs at
0:32:26 that thing. And we, it was the first time I’d ever made 10 grand in a night because we had 1000
0:32:31 people pay 10 bucks a head. And there was a lot of money and it was all cash and it was wild. And
0:32:37 it was just literally just asking. I have to say a lot of people send me messages. I get many
0:32:43 thousands of messages a week across my inboxes linked in Instagram, the podcast, etc. And because
0:32:48 I’m exposed to so many thousands of messages, as I’m sure you are, you get to see the variance
0:32:55 in a good ask versus a bad ask. Yeah. Now I want to drill down on that. What are the core components
0:33:01 of a great ask? The best ask has with or without you energy. With or without you energy is the
0:33:07 energy that you have when this is going to happen with or without you. So essentially, when you say
0:33:10 we’re going to be doing this filming and do you want to send some cameras and we’ll put your logo
0:33:15 at the bottom, it’s happening with or without you. You can be the company that gets the logo or not,
0:33:20 but it is happening with or without you. The worst asks are, I desperately need this to happen. And
0:33:26 if you don’t say yes, no one will ever say yes. And therefore I’ll give up. So if I think about the
0:33:32 best asks that come through, something is going to happen and it’s going to happen whether I’m
0:33:38 involved or not. And I get to choose whether I want to jump on to that or not. And those are the
0:33:44 most compelling, most exciting opportunities that get pitched. So I’ll give you an example. When I
0:33:48 first arrived in the UK, I had a suitcase and a credit card and I’d never been above the equator.
0:33:54 I arrive in London and I’m going to launch a business in London. And within the first two weeks,
0:33:59 I message all the people who are influential in my industry. And I basically say, I’m hosting a
0:34:04 dinner party. There’s going to be about 30 amazing people there who are the who’s who of the industry.
0:34:08 I’ve just arrived from Australia. If you’d like to come along to the dinner party, let me know an
0:34:15 old allocated spot here. And within two weeks, I’d filled 30 spots at my dinner party. And there
0:34:21 were all people who had massive databases. The biggest database was like 600,000 people. So
0:34:25 I’ve got this dinner party. And I stand up and I say, I’m Daniel Priestley. And I’ve just arrived
0:34:30 from Australia. And I’m going to be launching a business here. I thought I’d put together a
0:34:35 dinner party just to kind of get to know everyone. I’ve got my diary with me. I’d love to make a time
0:34:39 in the next couple of weeks to sit down and have a chat with you about how we could do a commercial
0:34:44 partnership or a joint venture as part of our launch. I’ll just come around and I’ll make a time
0:34:51 and then other than that, enjoy the evening. So I walk around and I book 28 one to one meetings
0:34:56 for the following two weeks. And everyone who I had a one to one meeting with knew that I had 28
0:35:01 other one to one meetings. And they could see that I’d hosted this party. Mind you, the party,
0:35:06 this dinner party cost like 1500 quid. It wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t a lot. So I then end up
0:35:12 having these meetings and everyone starts agreeing to support my launch. So I’m pitching into existence
0:35:17 that we’re launching this thing. And then the biggest database with 600,000 people, they say,
0:35:22 yeah, we’ll support your launch. So when we did the launch email campaign to everyone’s database,
0:35:27 we booked hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people. We did two nights in Manchester, two
0:35:33 nights in Birmingham, Milton Keynes. And then we did like three or four events in a row in London.
0:35:37 We did four million pounds worth of sales off the back of it in the first few months. It was
0:35:43 interesting, that whole experience of just putting together a dinner party and getting everyone
0:35:48 involved. But it had with or without you energy. What’s the sort of psychology underpinning that?
0:35:52 Is it like scarcity? What is it that’s causing with or without you energy to make people
0:35:58 choose to buy from you or go with you? I think people like to get involved in something that they
0:36:04 feel is happening. And it also demonstrates that you’re a key person of influence, that you’re
0:36:09 actually an influential person in your industry, that you have the confidence to say, I’m putting
0:36:12 this on and it’s going to happen. We’re going to make the movie. We’re going to launch the business.
0:36:16 We’re going to do the thing. We’re going to raise the fund. You’re free to join or not.
0:36:23 Totally fine. There’s no neediness. And humans respond to the idea that they don’t want to
0:36:28 miss out on something that’s going to happen. Very rarely exciting things happen. Most of the
0:36:33 time for most people, everything’s humdrum. And then occasionally something exciting is happening
0:36:39 and you don’t want to miss out on something that’s happening. So no one likes neediness.
0:36:44 People like things that are happening and people like to flock around, keep people of influence.
0:36:47 So by demonstrating that you’re a key person of influence who’s putting something together,
0:36:51 people just naturally gravitate around that. It’s interesting because it reminded me of an
0:36:58 example from a company that I invested in five or six years ago. And in one of my first meetings
0:37:04 with them, I looked at their website and they had this button on there that said, become a member
0:37:09 now. And I said, we should try changing that to join the waiting list. And when I had my first
0:37:12 board meeting with this company, they said, Stephen, of all the things you’ve done for us,
0:37:18 the most valuable thing you did was getting us to change that button from become member now
0:37:22 to join the waiting list. And I said, why? They said, two things happened. The first is the amount
0:37:29 of inquiries we got, the amount of people clicking that number rose by 500%. The second thing is
0:37:35 conversion went up by about 300%. Because previously, just by changing a couple of words on that
0:37:40 button, people would click the button, they would then get scheduled an appointment to have a tour
0:37:45 of this facility. They would then not even show up for their tour. They would because they didn’t
0:37:49 value it. The minute we changed it to join the waiting list, and then they got an email saying,
0:37:56 hey, you’ve been selected for a QJump or whatever, they would never ever miss the tour. And if they
0:38:03 were late for their scheduled tour by one hour, they would profusely apologize and try and reschedule
0:38:09 tiny shift, tiny shift in just a couple words. Well, it’s not a tiny shift because if you look at
0:38:14 how human psychology works, in order for someone to want to buy something, they have to be about
0:38:18 100% certain. In order to join a waiting list, you only have to be 5%, 10% certain that you
0:38:23 want to do something. And people like to warm up to things a little bit slowly. So join the waiting
0:38:29 list means that, hey, you only have to be slightly sure that you want to do this. Then the uncertainty
0:38:34 of, do I get through or not? I’ve joined the waiting list, I’ve made a micro commitment,
0:38:39 now there’s an uncertainty gap. And it’s like, oh, I need the certainty. I need to know whether
0:38:44 I’m off the waiting list or I’m through to the next phase. So now we enter a different, like,
0:38:49 oh, will I or won’t I get through? But it also gives the business a great opportunity to warm
0:38:54 people up. So you talked about doing a tour of the club. Let me give you some other examples.
0:38:59 Glastonbury Music Festival, they tell people that they can’t book a ticket, they can only register
0:39:04 for a ticket that they’re interested in a ticket. So a registration of interest, but not a ticket
0:39:10 sale. So what they do is they get 700,000 people to register interest. And then they tell you slowly
0:39:14 who are some of the bands, and they warm you up to, will you get it or not? And they tell you,
0:39:19 500,000 people are now registered, 600,000 are registered, 700,000 are registered.
0:39:25 And they say, but there’s only 140,000 tickets. So then they say, we’re going to make the tickets
0:39:31 available at 5am. So only the true believers are going to be there. Only the true music fans
0:39:35 who are willing to get up early. And then there’s this whole, like, suspense and excitement of,
0:39:39 like, will I get a ticket or not? People set their alarm in the morning. They know that
0:39:44 700,000 have registered, 140,000 will get through. So they just fight for those tickets.
0:39:51 Rolex had a massive breakthrough in the way that they, in becoming a big brand, when they stopped
0:39:56 selling Rolexes and they started selling the waiting list. So you can’t buy a Rolex. The way
0:40:01 it works with the Rolex is you go into a Rolex retail store. And the only thing they will sell
0:40:07 you is getting onto the waiting list. So they won’t actually sell you a watch. So first you will
0:40:12 have to get on the waiting list and register. And then about six months later, they’ll say,
0:40:17 good news. We have the watch that you want available, but it’s only available for three days.
0:40:21 Other than that, we can hold it for you for three days. But after that, we’ll have to sell it to
0:40:27 somebody else. And essentially, everyone goes, rushes down and gets the Rolex. So that
0:40:34 cycle of join the waiting list and then make the sale is brilliant. And this translates perfectly
0:40:38 for people at the early stage of the entrepreneurial journey, because it doesn’t matter whether you
0:40:42 want to do a rocket to Mars, or whether you want to launch a cupcake business, or you want to do a
0:40:47 fashion brand, or you want to do a service of bookkeeping and accounting. All of those,
0:40:52 you can launch a waiting list with minimal costs. You set it up very simply and basically.
0:40:58 You use a template, boom, you’ve got a waiting list. And you can also collect the data. So you
0:41:02 can’t just join the waiting list. Name, email, answer five questions to get on the waiting list.
0:41:06 How much are you willing to pay? What are you trying to achieve? What’s your biggest fear of
0:41:11 that could go wrong? What would you try if this didn’t exist? So you ask a few of these questions,
0:41:14 and then people get on the waiting list. You’ve got all that data.
0:41:19 When people hear that, they’ll think that putting someone through a set of sort of
0:41:25 rigorous questions to give them access to the product on the other side would deter most people.
0:41:29 But it reminds me of a psychology study that I read about, then wrote about in my last book,
0:41:36 where they got two groups of people and they had a boring community forum online as the sort of
0:41:41 the product. They let one group of people straight into the boring community forum,
0:41:47 and then they asked them how much they appreciated and found value in the boring community forum.
0:41:52 That group of people said it was boring, right? Then they had this other group of people in this
0:41:57 study and they didn’t let them into the boring community forum. They made them go through a
0:42:03 rigorous selection process. The people that got into the same boring community forum,
0:42:06 when asked in surveys after how much do you value the boring community forum,
0:42:10 they said it’s great. It’s the psychological bias because you’ve had to fight for something.
0:42:16 What you’re describing is Harvard. It’s Harvard University. It’s exactly that. It’s the same
0:42:22 university subjects that everyone teaches, but it’s hard to get in. I use one of the other
0:42:26 strategies for building a business is waiting lists, but also discussion groups.
0:42:30 One of the things we do when we launch a business is we don’t launch the product or service. We
0:42:38 launch the discussion group. The first thing is, let’s say I was going to launch a gym in Wandsworth.
0:42:42 I might say we’re going to do Weight Loss Wandsworth, an online discussion group on WhatsApp,
0:42:47 and we just promote the hell out of that group. If we had 4,000 people in that group,
0:42:51 we could then launch a gym pretty easily off the back of the discussion group. I’m a big
0:42:57 believer in weightless discussion groups. Anything like that that is super fast, low risk, low cost,
0:43:03 these are the best ways to start businesses. You’re collecting data. You’re getting people
0:43:07 to answer questions to get in. You’re learning about what the product market fit probably is
0:43:10 going to be, the right product for those people in Wandsworth. Exactly. Sometimes you get very
0:43:15 surprised. You find out that, oh, I thought this was going to be for men who want to build big muscles,
0:43:22 but it’s actually for women who are excited about CrossFit. It’s like, oh, okay, didn’t know that.
0:43:25 Now I’ve asked the questions. I’m finding out that it’s slightly different to what I thought.
0:43:31 I thought everyone would love red, but everyone loves blue. We can do that. In those early stages
0:43:36 of business, when I said before about conducting fast, cheap experiments,
0:43:40 weighting lists, discussion groups, online assessments are amazing.
0:43:44 So an online scorecard or an online assessment, a great way to think of them is a readiness
0:43:49 assessment. So readiness assessment, like are you ready to launch a podcast? Answer 10 questions to
0:43:54 find out. Are you ready to build your brand? Answer 10 questions to find out. Are you ready to be
0:43:59 an investor in this type of investment? Answer 10 questions to find out. So it’s an online assessment
0:44:04 where you answer a series of questions to get a readiness score, and then based on the readiness
0:44:12 score, people will then find out if they’re 30% ready, 40% ready, and people love these readiness
0:44:16 scores. This is one of the fastest ways to test an idea and getting signals of interest.
0:44:19 Everything is downstream from lead generation in business, so you essentially have to,
0:44:26 you have to generate leads and then you figure out if you’ve got a business or not. So the
0:44:31 fastest you can get into the lead generation, the better. One of the worst things that people do
0:44:37 when they’re starting a business is that they think that having a business is about the supply
0:44:41 side of what they’re doing. Supply side means your ability to look after a customer and keep
0:44:46 a customer happy. But actually, a business has to start with the demand side. You’ve got to test
0:44:50 the demand side before you test the supply side. If you can’t manufacture demand, there’s no point
0:44:56 manufacturing supply. It doesn’t matter. If you say, “Oh, I’ve come up with this Chilean basil
0:45:01 flavoured ice cream.” Great, you can make that, but does anyone want that? You’ve got to check out
0:45:09 whether you have the ability to get that product into a market. So I see so many people, they take
0:45:14 qualifications, they get certifications, they might raise money, they might set up a venue,
0:45:20 they might book an office, they might buy laptop computers, all of this stuff and they might spend
0:45:25 three to six months doing that. And then finally, after all of that, they then experience, “Oh,
0:45:30 no one’s interested in this. Now, what do I do with all that stuff?” So in the Chilean ice cream
0:45:34 example, what should they have done? Join the waiting list. We’re launching Chilean basil ice cream.
0:45:38 If you’d like to try it and taste it, join the waiting list. People don’t know what they want,
0:45:42 though, because in the ice cream example, it’s a taste thing, right? So it sounds good,
0:45:47 but in reality, it could be like… So I mean, this is a crazy idea. It’s a terrible idea that
0:45:53 we’re… But anyway, let’s go with it. So you create a waiting list where we’re doing really
0:45:58 wild flavoured ice creams and it’s crazy flavours like Chilean basil ice cream and salt and pepper
0:46:04 ice cream and blah, blah, blah. If you’re interested in really different, exciting new flavours
0:46:10 of ice cream, join the waiting list and we will invite you to a taste tester when it’s ready.
0:46:15 You’ll get to come to an exclusive event where you get to try and test our latest recipes
0:46:20 in Central London. So now you promote the waiting list and you see, can I get lots of people? And
0:46:24 some of the questions might be, which flavour are you most looking forward to? Are you looking
0:46:29 forward to octopus ice cream? Are you looking forward to which one? All right. So you go through
0:46:33 and they answer all the questions and then they join the waiting list. Then you say,
0:46:37 join the ice cream discovery discussion group. So now they’re in there talking about their
0:46:42 favourite ice creams and what crazy flavours they like and you can actually have a daily poll
0:46:46 and you’re doing that all in WhatsApp. And then you say, now come to the event that we’ve got,
0:46:52 the taste testing event. You could launch the ice cream assessment. What kind of… Which type are
0:46:57 you? Are you the savoury ice cream person or the sweet ice cream? Are you the… So you could have
0:47:01 four ice cream personalities and they take the test and find out which ice cream personality they
0:47:05 have. So you can do all of this stuff for free or almost for free without making a scoop of ice
0:47:11 cream. None of this stuff involves actually any commercial kitchens. None of it involves packaging
0:47:16 or branding or any of the expensive stuff. You’re just doing the things that’s testing whether
0:47:20 people are actually interested in this. And if it’s crickets, if you put a lot of effort into
0:47:25 trying to get people interested in this and you’ve got 12 people in your little group and they’re
0:47:30 all, you know, sadly looking at each other going, where’s the basil ice cream? You know, this is
0:47:35 never going to fly. If it, you know… I was thinking there, some people might come to the
0:47:38 discussion group, you know, your friends, whatever your mum comes down. She goes, yeah, your ice
0:47:44 cream’s great, Daniel. Well, you want to do cold outreach. Cold outreach. I don’t know how long we’re
0:47:50 going to talk about ice cream, but cold outreach is where you essentially make a list of all the
0:47:56 communities and groups that exist online. All the accounts that already have followers. And you just
0:48:01 cold outreach a thousand people and get them involved. But Daniel, what if someone steals my
0:48:09 idea? Well, my experience tells me until you’ve got a Ferrari, no one steals your idea. Yeah.
0:48:13 People steal ideas from people who have Ferraris, right? So it’s that bias towards if you’ve
0:48:18 been successful in the past, then your ideas are worth stealing. The beauty of having nothing
0:48:22 is no one’s going to steal your ideas ever. They’re going to look at your account on Instagram and go,
0:48:26 “Oh, you got no followers and, you know, you haven’t got a Ferrari, so I’m not going to steal your idea.”
0:48:31 So you’ve got this great advantage when you’re starting from zero that no one will steal the
0:48:37 idea. And here’s the other thing. Ideas aren’t worth anything. Here’s a great idea. Let’s rip
0:48:41 down all the old buildings in London and build brand new buildings. What’s that idea worth?
0:48:46 Trillions. Well, it would be worth trillions if we did that. Well, actually, no, the value is for
0:48:51 the person who does it. So if someone else steals your idea but does it, they deserve the money,
0:48:54 right? Let them have it. They’re better at executing. Get on with the next idea and be
0:48:59 better at executing next time. So if someone’s able to execute better and faster than you,
0:49:02 they deserve that money. That’s fine. Let them have it. Get on to the next idea.
0:49:06 Just thinking about it like this podcast, there’s like 3 million podcasts.
0:49:07 There’s a lot of podcasts.
0:49:11 The idea itself to start a podcast isn’t where the value is derived from.
0:49:17 No, so much of it is pitching and also the commercials behind the scenes, you know,
0:49:20 creating the right offers, making sales. So this is the other thing that
0:49:24 early stage businesses need to do. You’ve got to stop calling yourself an entrepreneur and start
0:49:28 calling yourself a salesperson. You’re going to get out there and make sales in the early days.
0:49:33 So a lot of people are really uncomfortable with the idea of making sales, but that’s what
0:49:37 an entrepreneur does. An entrepreneur is a salesperson, especially in those first couple of
0:49:41 years. You are the chief salesperson. If you can’t sell it, nobody’s going to sell it.
0:49:48 At the heart of a lot of these topics is this idea of failure because you’re talking about
0:49:52 experimentation. We’re talking about asking with all these things and people’s relationship with
0:49:57 failure seems to correlate to their eventual success over the last couple of years in particular,
0:50:00 especially from doing this podcast and a lot of other more recent businesses that I run.
0:50:07 I’ve realized that that experimental mindset, the type of person that quickly runs the test
0:50:13 versus sits and procrastinates for years is really the winner in most pursuits. And then I studied
0:50:17 Amazon and Jeff Bezos’ shareholder letter says this has to be the best place in the world to
0:50:21 fail. I looked at booking.com and they have that moment where they launch their experimentation
0:50:25 platform because they were sick of arguing about what the best feature was in the boardroom.
0:50:32 I look at Thomas Watson back in I think 1950 or 60 where he says one of his employees had just
0:50:37 made a huge mistake which cost the company $600,000 and he’s asked in an interview,
0:50:41 are you going to fire them? And he goes, fire them. I just spent $600,000 training them.
0:50:46 These people seem to have a different attitude towards the value of failure.
0:50:49 Yeah, this goes back to the school system. The school system is designed for component
0:50:54 labor and you don’t want components to fail. What we’re doing now is different.
0:51:01 So especially now we’re entering the age of AI. So in a post-AI world, most of the things that we
0:51:05 think of as valuable that the school system could possibly teach us are not going to be very valuable
0:51:12 very long. So functionality versus vitality. When something is functional, it performs a task
0:51:18 reliably. When something is vital, it’s irreplaceable life force energy. So what we have to do is
0:51:24 recognize that the value has swung from something that is reliably able to perform a task to something
0:51:31 that breathes life force energy into a project. So I know this is kind of woo-woo, but essentially,
0:51:36 this is the difference. When you are breathing life force energy into something, you’re okay with
0:51:41 failure. We’re just conducting experiments. We’re finding the way that works and we just found 900
0:51:45 ways that don’t work and now we’re going to find the next one and you’re bringing something into
0:51:51 existence. It’s just like being a parent. When you see the child fall down, you get the child
0:51:56 back up and you get them onto the next thing. And when we learn riding a bike, we have to go
0:52:01 through falling off the bike. So there’s all of these experiences that you know what it’s like
0:52:08 to bring life force energy to something and that involves a process of failure. And then
0:52:14 functionality, if we’re really putting our value around the idea that something has to be functional
0:52:19 or that I have to be functional, that my value is in my functionality, then failure is such a bad
0:52:24 thing. So this is a big difference in how the pendulum is now swinging. We have to remove the
0:52:29 idea that you are valuable because you’re reliably functional and we have to swing it back to this
0:52:33 idea that you’re valuable because you breathe life force energy into something. For someone that
0:52:38 doesn’t know the definition of life force energy, how would you define that? So this word vitality
0:52:43 has two definitions, irreplaceable and life force. So if something is vital, it’s irreplaceable and
0:52:48 it’s life force. So you need to find something that you are the irreplaceable life force,
0:52:52 you pitch it into existence, you create it, you innovate it, you take ownership of it,
0:52:57 you enroll others into it. That’s the alignment kind of thing you’re talking about. You’re aligned
0:53:02 to that thing. Yeah, you fully expressed your life. You’re enjoying this because it’s your life
0:53:10 journey. And you know, we’re so tuned out from the idea of this that essentially we have to
0:53:14 relearn what the hell does this even mean, this definition. Life force energy is what kids do,
0:53:18 right? Think about, you know, everyone’s talking and everyone’s serious and then a five-year-old
0:53:23 bounces into the room. Look what I’ve found, right? And it’s like, look, there’s mud and there’s this
0:53:26 and there’s, you know, it’s like, whoa, and suddenly everyone’s disrupted and they bring
0:53:31 energy into the house. They bring energy into a room. So they just know what it’s like to fully
0:53:35 express themselves and breathe life force energy into something. Let me give you another example.
0:53:42 There are magicians and they have these like fake thumbs and these things.
0:53:48 Those fake thumbs are functional things, right? There’s a functional thing called a fake thumb
0:53:52 and that’s how you do the magic trick. But it doesn’t mean that everyone who has that fake
0:53:56 thumb can do the magic trick. In fact, some people do the magic trick and people go,
0:54:01 you’re just wearing a fake thumb, right? Then there are magicians who completely make you
0:54:05 believe in the magic and they’re using just the fake thumb as well. They’re just doing the same
0:54:09 functional thing as the other magician, but they’re so good at doing it. They’re so good at
0:54:13 enrolling you in it. They’re so good at getting you your attention and your engagement and your
0:54:19 beliefs aligned to what they want you to believe that suddenly bringing that magic trick to life
0:54:23 is what the magician is doing. When you study magicians, you realize that it’s not about the
0:54:27 gadgets. It’s not about the functionality. It’s about the way they do the trick. It’s the way
0:54:33 they breathe the life force into the trick. So the life force is the magic. It’s the way you,
0:54:38 it’s the way you bring it to life. So the idea that I noticed years ago when I wrote the book
0:54:43 Key Person of Influence was that there are these people who make stuff happen around them and these
0:54:48 people, they build reputation. Their names come up in conversation. They have more fun. They build
0:54:52 reputation. All that sort of stuff happens. And when they’re involved in something, it all comes
0:54:57 to life. And when they’re not involved in it, it almost dissipates. Something magically doesn’t
0:55:02 happen. Your involvement in 40 different companies, people would ask the question,
0:55:06 but how are you involved in 40 different companies? And the thing is that you’re not
0:55:10 functionally involved in 40 different companies, but you’re breathing a life force energy into
0:55:16 40 different companies. There’s something that your energy brings that stuff happens with you
0:55:20 involved that wouldn’t happen if you weren’t involved. You’re the irreplaceable life force.
0:55:27 And if that irreplaceable life force comes, gets, gets removed, the result won’t be the same.
0:55:32 If you’re involved, the result will be different. And that’s what people want from you. And it’s
0:55:36 not functionality. No one’s saying, can you come and work in the office? It’s very, very interesting,
0:55:42 very, very true. And the two sub questions that spiralled off that were, how does one know? And
0:55:48 does one need to know what their vitality, their life force energy is? Do we need to know? And is
0:55:53 there a way for us to find out what it is? We need to get into environments where it becomes normal
0:55:59 to explore this stuff. And we need to be around people who are full of life. So when you are
0:56:04 around vital people, you discover things about your own vitality. You’ve had this experience of
0:56:10 launching a podcast that gives you access to the world’s most interesting people and me. And
0:56:15 you’ve got this, I bet from every single person you’ve raised your energy, you’ve raised your
0:56:22 vitality, something inside you was awoken in each and every interaction that lifted your vibration
0:56:27 up. When you’re in a low vibration environment where everyone’s functional, everyone is suppressing
0:56:32 their life force in order to be functional, you essentially just resonate with that new suppress
0:56:37 your life force in order to be functional. So we need to get into environments where vitality is
0:56:41 the norm, where we raise our energy, where we feel good about thinking about vision, mission,
0:56:46 and values. And we feel good about exploring origin and what value that might add to the world.
0:56:52 It feels normal to be conducting experiments. It feels normal to be making sales. It feels
0:56:57 normal to want to be a key person of influence in your industry. It feels normal to have a
0:57:01 conversation about what resources already exist on the planet and how they could be used differently.
0:57:06 So all of those things happen inside the right environment. So I have a saying that environment
0:57:11 dictates performance. I went into a number of prisons with a charity called Key for Life.
0:57:19 And what we discovered is that a lot of these young men are entrepreneurs, but in their environment,
0:57:24 the product that you would sell is an illegal product. But in that environment, the only
0:57:27 successful entrepreneurs they come across and the only successful entrepreneurs they meet
0:57:32 are selling drugs. So they go, “Oh, that is my pathway. That’s what I do. That’s my mentoring.
0:57:36 That’s the environment.” If you were to take the same entrepreneurial spirit that these young men
0:57:41 have and showed them, “Oh, here’s an IT services company. They’d go start an IT services company.”
0:57:45 Or, “Here’s a book publishing business. Oh, okay. Now I’m going to be a book publisher.”
0:57:50 So their entrepreneurial spirit, the only place they saw in the environment of someone who’s on
0:57:54 the rise was this drug dealer friend. So they got involved in it. So environment dictates
0:57:58 performance. What we need to do is we need to find environments that lift us up.
0:58:02 What if we’re not in an environment that lifts us up? Because there’s going to be
0:58:07 a couple of million people right now that when you’ve described the definition of life force
0:58:11 energy, and you’ve also used the word stagnation as almost the antithesis of that, they’re thinking,
0:58:16 “Oh, my God. I would love some life force energy. I’m in a corporate job in the city.
0:58:22 I’ve been doing it for 10 years. I’m institutionalized in this place because I’ve been here so long
0:58:25 that I don’t even know what the outside world would look like. And I’ve got all these ideas,
0:58:30 but I’ve been… They can feel their soul has been drained to some degree. They’ve got a mortgage.
0:58:35 Change it will change environments for at least an hour or two a week. And what I mean by that
0:58:42 is I’ll give you an example. When I was 21, I was going out to pubs drinking with friends
0:58:46 all the time. We’re getting drunk and that was the normal night. And there was this one night
0:58:51 where these people turned up who did Latin jive dancing. And I looked across the room and I saw
0:58:56 them jive dancing and I went, “Oh, that’s incredible.” And I get talking to the guy and I say, “How did
0:59:03 you do this?” And there’s like six beautiful girls and there’s one or two guys who they’re all waiting
0:59:08 for a spin. And I’m like, “How do you do this?” He goes, “Come to dance classes.” So I’m like,
0:59:12 “Go to dance classes?” I would never go to dance classes. I rock up at dance class. And then when
0:59:17 I was there, I was in this environment where it was completely normal to dance. That was just the
0:59:22 normal thing. In that environment, you grab a partner and the music comes on and they show
0:59:26 you the moves and you do the moves. When they demoed the moves and I can vividly remember this
0:59:31 from 20 years ago, when they demoed the moves, I thought to myself, “There is no way I’ll learn
0:59:36 that in three months.” And then by the end of that first two-hour session, I’m doing the whole
0:59:42 routine and I’m comfortable with it. I’m like, “Wow, I can do this.” You can’t do it outside of the
0:59:48 environment. You can only do it in the environment. Entrepreneurship is an environment thing. You do
0:59:53 it inside an environment and it’s very hard to do that outside of the environment. So you basically
1:00:02 have to find entrepreneur meetups, entrepreneur groups. You find a mentor. In every city around
1:00:05 the world right now, there are entrepreneur meetups every night of the week. Online, there are
1:00:10 entrepreneurial events every day of the week. So you just get in the environment.
1:00:14 There’s this thing called social shedding, which I’ve never actually shared with anybody before,
1:00:18 but it’s this idea that when you take that first step into dance class and you get to see behind
1:00:24 the curtain of another world, you slowly no longer resonate with your other friendship group.
1:00:29 There’s often a friction there where they say, “Oh, Dan’s dark.” They start cracking the jokes,
1:00:34 “Oh, Dan’s a ballet dancer now, lads.” And what they’re doing there is it’s somewhat linked to
1:00:39 this phrase, “Misery loves company.” They don’t want you to leave. No one wants you to change. You’re
1:00:45 Dan priestly. We know you as this. Do not change your identity. If you try to change your identity,
1:00:51 we will mock you. We will disguise as a friendly roast, and we will try and hold you back because
1:00:57 if you change, what does that say about us? That’s holding a mirror up to me. It means that
1:01:02 I’m less than you in some way, and I hear this from entrepreneurs or startup entrepreneurs,
1:01:07 that when that decision to start building a personal brand or starting that cupcake business
1:01:13 typically causes resistance from their existing social circle, and then this decision whether
1:01:16 they want to socially shed, which means letting some of those people go.
1:01:23 If we were born at any other time in history, you would grow up in a town, get a job in that
1:01:29 local town, go to school in that local town, and everything would revolve around just the local
1:01:34 issues of that particular place. You probably would know a thousand people for your entire
1:01:39 lifetime, and you’d have this very tight circle. There’s something in our evolution about being
1:01:44 part of these little local communities. For the first time in history, you can choose to be tapped
1:01:49 into a global community. Anyone in the world who shares values or you want to share their values,
1:01:54 it’s now freely available to us. There’s something that feels very foreign about that because it’s
1:01:58 never happened for the last 5,000 years, and then there’s something very exciting about this where
1:02:02 you go, “Actually, I’m living in a different time now. This is an incredible moment.” I think
1:02:06 that what’s happening is that we’re going through an empire shift, and the current empire shift is
1:02:12 this empire shift away from geography to digital, which means that we connect on values, we connect
1:02:18 on purpose, and we connect on origin, mission, and vision, and those sorts of things. The largest
1:02:23 shift that’s actually happening is this shift of, “Do I want to play by the older rules of the
1:02:29 geographical-based system, or do I want to play by the new rules of being in the cloud?” In the
1:02:33 cloud, anything is possible because I can go anywhere, I can do anything, I can access any
1:02:38 information, I can connect with any person on the planet. As soon as you make this shift into
1:02:44 the new empire, that’s where everything starts to shift. We all have to make that shift. The big
1:02:49 shift is not even just changing your friendship group, it’s the courage to change empire. It’s
1:02:52 the courage to say, “Actually, you know what? The world is a very different place than what I was
1:02:57 born into. It’s now going through a big change. The faster I can actually get into this wave and
1:03:03 surf this wave, the better.” That’s so interesting. One of those shifts from the old empire to the
1:03:10 new empire is seen in building a personal brand, because the old gatekeepers of media and reputation
1:03:14 were just newspapers and the radio. There was like 10 of those, so you’ve got to be lucky
1:03:20 to get one of those. Now, in the new empire, in the clouds, you can build your own media company
1:03:26 around you. Mission-free. You can digitize your value. You can connect with anyone in the world
1:03:31 who resonates with what it is that you do. When we launched the most recent Business Score app,
1:03:36 we launched it in London, but because it was the pandemic, we ended up with employees all
1:03:40 over the world. We’ve never had an office and we still don’t have an office. It’s this incredible
1:03:46 business. What’s happening is that we now have clients signing up every single day over 100
1:03:53 people sign up. We have clients in 152 countries. I checked yesterday. They resonate with a message
1:03:57 and the business doesn’t exist anywhere. There’s no actual place that you can go
1:04:02 to Visit Score app. It’s just a digital business. The employees are everywhere. The customers are
1:04:07 everywhere, but what holds it together are these intangible things such as values and vision and
1:04:14 the value that we offer and the ideas and the stories. All of that intangible stuff now exists
1:04:19 in the cloud and the whole business exists in the cloud. It is an incredible time. Personal brand is
1:04:23 one of these incredible things where you don’t need permission. You can just go straight to the
1:04:31 market. You’ve done that. Anyone who resonates with your story, your ideas, the things that
1:04:37 you want to get done in the world, they can just follow along. I hate the idea of personal brand
1:04:42 being like showing up and doing dances. Actually, it’s about sending out a signal of this is what
1:04:46 I’m up to in the world and do you want to come along for the ride? Do you want to be part of
1:04:52 that? Are you up for this game that I’m playing? Do you want to take part in what I’m interested in?
1:04:59 So it’s a connection. It’s not an image. It’s not like a voice or a message that gets repeated over
1:05:04 and over. I’m up to something in the world and I would love more people to be part of that. Come
1:05:10 with me. I think I might have heard Adam Grant speak in one of his books about the big misconception
1:05:14 with personal branding. Is it that it’s this kind of pursuit for fame? Whereas great personal
1:05:20 branding isn’t self-promotion. It’s idea promotion. This is what I believe. This is my perspective.
1:05:25 Gather round if you think the same. Self-promotion sounds like we just won an award last night at
1:05:29 the marketing awards and you’re all in the table taking the selfie. We are amazing. That doesn’t
1:05:34 cultivate a personal brand. Personal brand is this is my perspective on the world. If you’ve got the
1:05:39 same perspective, which we call idea promotion, come join me. It’s not look at me. It’s look at this.
1:05:45 Yes. It’s not chasing the spotlight. It’s becoming a spotlight and spotlighting the thing that matters
1:05:51 most and it’s shining the light on something else, especially on an idea. So we see people online
1:05:56 who are shameless self-promoters. I went to the gym today, look at my avocado on toast with chili
1:06:01 flakes and they’re saying, “Look at me. Look at me. Look at me.” And the people that we most want to
1:06:05 follow are the ones who say, “Don’t look at me. Look at this. This is what’s going on in the world
1:06:11 and this is what you should be excited about this.” And that’s the difference because on the surface,
1:06:17 we might see you and say, “Oh, you know, Stephen’s all about like, look at Stephen.” It’s like, “No,
1:06:20 no, no. You’re missing the point. If you think it’s about that, you’ve missed the point.” He’s
1:06:24 shining a light on something that’s going on in the world and he’s bringing stuff
1:06:28 into the spotlight. He’s not trying to say, “Check me out.” He’s saying, “Check this out.”
1:06:32 It’s interesting that the podcast was the most accelerating thing for my personal brand and
1:06:37 it’s really bringing people here and then doing my very best to listen as much as I can,
1:06:40 which is interesting, right? Because we’ve kind of cultivated, it’s almost like the campfire. We’ve
1:06:44 cultivated more people sat around the campfire listening to conversations like this.
1:06:48 It is incredible that these times that we’re in, these are the conversations that would have been
1:06:55 behind closed doors 20 years ago and you would have been incredibly privileged to be able to sit
1:07:00 and listen in on those chats and now they’ve been democratized, these type of high-level
1:07:06 conversations, the types of conversations that you share with the world. You’ve democratized
1:07:10 something that was once a very elite activity and you’ve made it freely available.
1:07:16 People, I’ve come to learn especially over the last couple of years about the importance of
1:07:20 people. You talked about people at the very beginning of this conversation, hiring people,
1:07:25 finding the right people to join you in your mission. How central to being successful in both
1:07:31 business but just more broadly in life, is assembling the right group of people? Business
1:07:36 is a team sport. There’s no getting around it. I don’t believe in solopreneurship. I don’t believe
1:07:39 that you can be a one-person entrepreneur. I think entrepreneurs are team players and that they
1:07:45 assemble teams. They put together teams of amazing people. Sometimes they put together teams of ordinary
1:07:50 people at the beginning and then they become amazing people. I’m a believer that two-person
1:07:56 co-founders or a founder plus an assistant is a great place to start. Four-person campaign teams,
1:08:02 eight-person core teams, 30-person performance teams. I love the British military’s approach
1:08:07 to team building. In the British military, they have two-person scout team, four-person fire team,
1:08:15 eight-person section, 30-person platoon. They go two, four, eight, 30. I’ve used that myself in
1:08:21 my own scale-up approach where if there’s a new idea, we put two people on it. Once it’s proven,
1:08:25 four people are on it. Once it’s up and running, eight people are on it. Once it becomes a business
1:08:32 that has its own standalone value, 30 people are on it. It’s two, four, eight, 30. That’s been a
1:08:38 British military learning that I kind of went, “Well, if they’ve done 400 years of HR experiments,
1:08:44 why wouldn’t I just learn from how they organise their teams?” Is there anything you’ve found
1:08:48 that is consistent across all of the best people you’ve hired, worked with,
1:08:51 co-founded a company, where they’re partnered with? Is there any consistent thing?
1:08:56 I’m always looking for complementary energies. Here’s what I’m looking for.
1:09:02 In the deck of cards, there’s four suits. You’ve got clouds, so head in the clouds,
1:09:08 spades, doing the work, hearts, connecting with people, diamonds, money, finance, data.
1:09:15 I always look for a balanced team of someone who’s visionary, with someone who’s a spades person,
1:09:21 doing the work, implementer, someone who’s hearts, connector, with someone who’s money or data.
1:09:26 I’m looking to try and perfectly balance my team with the four suits. I’ve seen visionary people
1:09:30 who get nothing done because they don’t have an implementer around. I’ve seen amazing connectors
1:09:36 who don’t have anyone balancing them out, so they never retain any of the money that’s
1:09:39 flowing around them because they’re an amazing networker. People are doing deals around them,
1:09:46 but they’re not involved in any of it. For me, it’s the connection between those four energies.
1:09:54 When you get all four energies firing and in one team, then you get the value creation and retention.
1:09:56 Let’s talk about money. Let’s talk about it.
1:10:02 We’re in a cost of living crisis in the UK and many countries around the world are either in
1:10:07 or on the brink of recession. One of the most popular questions we’ve had at the Diary of
1:10:12 a CEO in the last three to six months is about money, people’s concern about their own money,
1:10:16 spending, finance, and saving. If I’m someone out there now that has, I don’t know,
1:10:21 a hundred dollars or a hundred pounds worth of disposable income every month, or if I have a
1:10:27 thousand or 10,000 pounds, what should I be thinking about as it relates to creating more money
1:10:32 and making myself financially free? The first thing is you just want to earn more.
1:10:40 People massively settle for how much they could earn. The first place I think to invest is in
1:10:46 yourself, but here’s the first principle. The first principle is income follows assets.
1:10:50 Income follows assets means that the more assets you have, the more income you’ll earn.
1:10:55 If I want rental income first, I need a house. If I want dividend income, I need shares.
1:11:02 If I want to be paid as a brand ambassador first, I need a brand. Essentially, the more we can
1:11:09 accumulate assets, the more easy and effortless the money flows. We have to figure out, well,
1:11:14 what assets could you accumulate? What assets could you formalize and own? I wrote a book called 24
1:11:18 Assets and I listed out all the different digital assets that are new economy assets that people
1:11:23 could have, things like brand and positioning, things like databases, things like company culture
1:11:29 is an asset now. I talk about how do you formalize those things? If someone’s just starting out and
1:11:34 they’ve got 100 a month, to be perfectly honest, trying to invest 100 a month or any of that is
1:11:38 not going to do anything. It’s not going to change your life, but if you put that into your own skills
1:11:43 and your own development, let’s say you don’t have negotiation skills. Well, there are courses
1:11:48 that you can take for $100 that give you negotiation skills. Let’s say you don’t know how to close
1:11:53 sales. You can take a course on how to make sales. Let’s say you don’t feel confident public speaking,
1:11:58 you could do a public speaking course. There are things that allow you to gain your skills.
1:12:03 The other thing too is money is relationships. If you don’t have a lot of money, you typically
1:12:07 don’t have a lot of relationships. You might have a limited number of relationships or a
1:12:12 limited number of relationships with people who have a flow of money. When you have a high degree
1:12:17 of relationships with people who’ve got money flowing, it’s very effortless for that to flow
1:12:22 to and from you as well. You might have to invest in relationships. When I arrived in the UK,
1:12:28 I knew that one of the places that I would meet interesting people would be private banks.
1:12:33 I didn’t qualify for private bank, but I went into a private bank and I said,
1:12:36 “I’m going to be launching a business and of course it’s going to be great and successful.
1:12:40 I want a bank with a private bank. Do you have an entrepreneur’s program?”
1:12:43 Oh, yeah, we did. They start selling me, joining the entrepreneur’s program.
1:12:49 Now, it cost me 600 pounds to open an account with that private bank, but they immediately
1:12:53 invited me to dinners and they invited me to networkings and all these sorts of things in
1:12:59 the private bank. One of the things that I’ve recommended a lot of people do is host dinner
1:13:05 parties and reach out to people who you don’t know. Here’s a silly story. I was just in Dubai
1:13:12 and I know someone who has 100-foot yacht. I said, “Jeremy, can I borrow your yacht for the evening?
1:13:17 I’m going to be putting 15 really influential people for a dinner party. We’re going to have
1:13:22 burgers on the boat.” He said, “Oh, great. Can I come?” I said, “Of course you can come. It’s your
1:13:30 boat.” He said, “Great. That’ll be exciting.” He basically said, “You can host this party on my
1:13:34 100-foot boat.” I reached out to all the people who I didn’t know and I said, “Hey, we’re putting
1:13:38 together burgers on the boat. Would you like to come along and have some burgers with interesting
1:13:43 people?” Then they came along and I made the investment into relationship. Now, the funny
1:13:48 thing is, a lot of people say, “Oh, but you know someone with 100-foot yacht.” Funny thing is,
1:13:52 I think plenty of people who have a boat, especially in Dubai, it sits empty most of the
1:13:56 time. You could reach out to 30 people and say, “We’re going to do it on someone’s boat. Would you
1:14:01 like it to be your boat with or without your energy?” Making investments into relationships
1:14:06 is a really powerful thing. For $100 a month, personally, what would I do with $100 a month?
1:14:10 Take people out to dinner. That would be my number one investment. I’d probably be taking
1:14:17 people out to dinner. Why? The investment into the relationship. I would be inviting the most
1:14:23 interesting people I could possibly invite. If I had the ability for $100 a month, I guess that’s
1:14:28 one dinner. I would reach out to someone interesting and say, “I’ve seen your story. I’ve seen what
1:14:31 you’re interested in. Can I take you out for lunch? Can I take you out for dinner?” It’s my
1:14:34 shout. I’d love to get to know you a little bit better. Obviously, don’t do that with someone
1:14:39 who’s famous. You get 100 of those a day. I get plenty of those a day. Reach out to someone who’s
1:14:44 not famous, but who’s accomplished, who’s successful, who’s a mentor-esque type person,
1:14:49 not necessarily a superstar, but someone who’s a few steps ahead. Take those people out to lunch,
1:14:53 take them out to dinner. Would you say in that message that you talk about calls, I talk about
1:14:59 emails? What would someone have to say to you, considering where you are in your life now with
1:15:10 all the inquiries you get, for you to actually go for a coffee with them? I bear in mind everyone’s
1:15:16 going to email you and say this. Well, it happened today, actually. Someone said, “Daniel, I noticed
1:15:21 in the background of one of your photos that you have an amazing Fender Stratocaster. I teach people
1:15:27 how to play guitar. I would love the opportunity to do a guitar lesson with you and help you to
1:15:33 shred on that guitar.” It was really nice. He had watched my podcasts in the past. He had noticed the
1:15:37 guitar. He reached out with something that was valuable for me, and he said, “I’d love to have
1:15:41 a chat with you and teach you how to play some guitar.” Obviously, I’ll have a chat with him
1:15:50 while we do that, but that was a very sense. It felt like a good connection. I also had a look
1:15:55 at his profile, and he looked like a really lovely person who’s getting on with doing stuff.
1:15:59 There’s a bit of with or without your energy as well in terms of, “I can see this person’s up to
1:16:06 stuff.” I look at that and I go, “He did some research on you. He offered you value in an area
1:16:12 where you were potentially seeking or looking for the value.” That’s definitely true if you’ve
1:16:20 seen me play guitar. I feel the same way that I try and figure out why sometimes I reply to
1:16:26 these cold outreach messages, but 99.9% of the time I don’t. It tends to be the case that the
1:16:30 person will say they’ll show that they’ve done some kind of research on me, which is good for
1:16:35 your ego. Everyone has an ego. You want to feel like someone actually cares, and then they’ll
1:16:40 offer me something in return for a parallel— By the way, do you know I did this to you?
1:16:44 I don’t even know if you remember. You and I were both speakers at a conference,
1:16:51 and we were in the elevator, and I’d prepared for you a really nice leather briefcase,
1:16:58 and it had your— I created the happy sexy millionaire thing. We gave all the speakers
1:17:01 one of those. You weren’t that special. We had something for all of us, but anyway,
1:17:06 it was interesting because I actually have done that with you, and we never ended up following
1:17:10 up with you, and you never followed up with us, but here’s the thing. I want to share that.
1:17:14 No, I want to share that because sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes you have to
1:17:19 send out— When I sent out 3,000 cold DMs to launch a business, I didn’t expect 3,000 people
1:17:24 to respond. I expected 30 or 40 people to come back to me when I gave that to you. Do you remember
1:17:29 it? I remember getting a briefcase, and I do quite a lot of public speaking these days.
1:17:34 We only had a two-minute interaction, and I said, “Hey, this is a little gift for you.
1:17:38 Inside, we’ve created something for you. Have a look.” Was it something I had to scan?
1:17:40 Probably. Was there something scannable in there?
1:17:44 Yeah, we’d built you a little landing page campaign. Yes, I remember. I remember getting in
1:17:47 the car and saying to my team, “Oh, this is cool.” Yeah, and then, of course,
1:17:50 it gets passed to the team, and they’re like, “Yeah, fair enough. Put that on the pile of cool
1:17:58 things.” The point is, I’m saying that to say these things. You don’t want to get hung up on the
1:18:04 idea that one person’s— In that same event, we gave that same thing to another really well-known
1:18:10 person. They’ve gone with it, and they’re millions of followers, and they’re one of our
1:18:15 clients now. We have with or without you energy, which is when my team do this,
1:18:21 we pick 30 or 40 people who’d make amazing connections and contacts in our VIP outreach team,
1:18:24 and then we reach out to them, and we expect maybe two or three of them to get back to us.
1:18:32 If someone messages you and you don’t message back, it’s not the end of the world. There are
1:18:37 other people you can message, and look what happens. It comes around again.
1:18:40 It always comes around again. If it’s meant to happen, it’ll happen.
1:18:46 So what about people? So many members of my teams beat to me and ask me about investing.
1:18:50 They might have tens of thousands to invest or whatever, but I’m curious about your personal
1:18:55 investment thesis with a capital that you have spare. What do you do with it to create more money?
1:19:03 What does your portfolio look like? It’s extremely boring. I just stick any available
1:19:10 capital into S&P 500. What’s the S&P 500 for anyone? Yeah, the top 500 stocks in the US.
1:19:14 So essentially, any government that inflates its currency anywhere in the world,
1:19:19 that money will hit the economy, and it will eventually make its way back to the top 500
1:19:26 companies in the US through spending, or that capital will end up being put into the S&P 500,
1:19:31 which inflates it. So one way or another, it’s going back to the top 500 companies in the US.
1:19:36 So it’s almost impossible to beat the S&P 500. I hate investing. It’s not my thing.
1:19:43 I like expansive business creation. I’m an optimist. Great investors are often pessimists.
1:19:47 They’re very good at thinking what could go wrong and analyzing risk. I hate that shit.
1:19:52 So for me personally, I want to, as much as possible, expand the portfolio of businesses that
1:19:58 I think should exist in the world. And I’ve always made my money by just saying I romantically like
1:20:02 the idea of this business existing, and I’m going to pour my energy into it, and it’s going to become
1:20:06 worth millions. Rather than thinking about where I want to invest money, I want to create something
1:20:10 that’s investable for other people to put money into, because that’s how you really make money.
1:20:16 So the exciting thing is not placing my own chips. The exciting thing is creating something where others
1:20:20 want to place chips into that. So let’s talk about that journey then. Yep. That journey from
1:20:25 got an idea, want to start that ice cream business, that Chilean Basel ice cream business,
1:20:29 whatever. Except for tens of millions. Except for tens of millions. I get off the ground,
1:20:34 people love my Chilean Basel ice cream. What is the journey that an entrepreneur goes on from
1:20:40 zero up until they exit? So there’s key stages. The first four stages where everyone gets caught
1:20:46 is called chaos. Concept, audience, offer sales. So you have to develop your concept. So it’s a
1:20:49 good concept. You’ve validated it. You’ve conducted some experiments. You’re aligned to it. Other
1:20:55 people are excited about it. Audience is that you engage in audience, waiting lists, dinner parties,
1:21:01 scorecards, quizzes, discussion groups. All of those are great audience builders.
1:21:08 Offer is that you construct a packaged up offering so that people can buy something and
1:21:14 that audience can now act on something and buy. And then sales, which is the ability to talk and
1:21:19 discuss with your interested parties to close deals, to actually get sales across the line
1:21:23 and to do that predictably and reliably. So for sales, we established something called
1:21:28 a rhythm of laps, leads, appointments, presentations and sales. And we measure our pipeline every week.
1:21:32 How many leads, how many appointments, how many presentations, how many sales. So those are the
1:21:36 first four things. Concept, audience, offer sales. And that should get you into the six
1:21:41 figures of revenue just by doing that. The next thing is about team building. You’ve got to establish
1:21:45 a key person of influence who’s got a personal brand who’s the leader of the company who’s going
1:21:50 to embody the brand. And you’ve got to build a team of eight people around them. A general manager,
1:21:58 marketing and sales, finance admin, IT media and operations, those kind of roles. And essentially,
1:22:03 you now build this core team of eight. And the key person of influence job is to engage bigger and
1:22:08 bigger audiences. And so they get out there and tell the story of the business, they get on stages,
1:22:13 they pitch, they publish content, they raise their profile, they do joint ventures and partnerships.
1:22:17 So they’re leading from the front, while the general manager or ops director is
1:22:22 making sure things don’t fall apart behind. Once you hit about eight people, you now have to
1:22:26 digitize absolutely everything of value in that business. So now you go through the whole process
1:22:30 of digitization of the value. So you’re getting ready to scale. Which means, for example, moving
1:22:37 physical relationships to a CRM, some kind of database or building a CRM, formalizing your
1:22:43 intellectual property, building a brand, a company brand, formalizing your organizational culture,
1:22:52 getting into really good investor relationship and documentation governance. So all of these are
1:22:57 developing systems, developing assets of the business, having online marketing and sales
1:23:02 systems, having an online way of generating a lot of leads reliably, having an online way of
1:23:08 making customers mostly happy most of the time. So you’re basically trying to build as many assets
1:23:13 as possible. What you’re trying to do at about eight to 10 people is raise revenue per person.
1:23:17 So let’s say you’ve got 10 people with 100,000 per person. So you’ve got a million of revenue,
1:23:25 10 people times 100,000 million of revenue. If you can add assets and get it to go to 1.1, 1.2,
1:23:31 1.3 million, now you’ve got 130,000 per person. So what you’re trying to do is add as many digital
1:23:36 assets as possible to get the revenue per employee or the revenue per person up. Once you see that
1:23:42 the revenue per person is going up, now you can add people because the more digital assets there are,
1:23:49 times by the number of people, now you’re going to be successful. Now the really hard jump is from
1:23:54 12 to 30. From 12 people to 30, you’re too big to be small, too small to be big, very difficult time
1:24:00 in any business’s life. And what you have to do is go through a transformation of a small team of
1:24:06 Rebels and Misfits to a professional team that’s manufacturing value. A lot of people have to go.
1:24:10 Unfortunately, some of the earlier people who were there because they could breathe and had a
1:24:17 pulse and all of that sort of stuff, they unfortunately have to go find a new startup.
1:24:23 And you now have to go and bring on team members who come through recruiters with a proper process
1:24:28 and who they go through an entire process of how they join the team.
1:24:33 They’re onboarded correctly. And now you transform into a more valuable professional organisation.
1:24:39 Once you hit 30, you’ve got a five-person executive team plus a non-executive director and an advisor,
1:24:43 and then you’ve got some teams of teams. And now you’re doing 10 million of revenue,
1:24:45 3 million of profit, and now you’re exitable.
1:24:47 Have you got to make a decision early?
1:24:48 That was a mouthful, sorry.
1:24:50 No, but it’s so true. It’s so funny.
1:24:51 Did you agree with that?
1:24:55 All of it. I agreed with all of it. The interesting thing as well is the part you said about,
1:25:01 of the first 10 people you hire, very few of them are equipped already or able to adjust to the
1:25:04 environment you have at 30, 40, 50, 60, 100. Totally.
1:25:09 And part of what I’ve noticed is that when there’s 10 people, you’re acquiring a different set of
1:25:15 skills and you’re thinking more about multi-disciplinary individuals that can kind of
1:25:17 wear a few hats but not do anything exceptionally well.
1:25:20 Swiss army knives. They can do 25 things badly.
1:25:23 Yeah, exactly. And then when you get to like 50, 60, 70 people, it’s really…
1:25:24 Specialists.
1:25:24 Specialists.
1:25:25 Bread knife.
1:25:25 Bread knife.
1:25:27 Just cuts bread really well. Just that.
1:25:31 So on this, then, when we’re thinking about our own careers, we’ve got to ask ourselves that
1:25:34 question, which is, are we a specialist that should be going into a company where there’s
1:25:39 50, 60, 70 people, or are we that kind of Swiss army knife that should be playing in startups
1:25:42 and then going from zero to one versus like one to two?
1:25:45 Yeah. I’ve had to wrestle with that myself.
1:25:49 I personally absolutely adore the first 2 million of revenue.
1:25:54 That’s where my fun… That for me is fun. It’s where I find it exciting.
1:26:00 I become almost pathologically distracted once we hit 2 million of revenue.
1:26:02 And I have to remind myself, oh, wait a second.
1:26:06 We’ve got a fast growth business here. Stop thinking about other things.
1:26:12 I really enjoy getting businesses past that first couple of hundred thousand a month.
1:26:17 And then for whatever reason, I’m like dreaming of a blank page.
1:26:20 I just want something like, oh, what if we did this? What if we did that?
1:26:24 But here’s the cool thing. There are so many amazing people
1:26:27 who are phenomenal at the 2 to 20 million jump.
1:26:30 So at the moment, the person who’s leading Den Global is Glenn Carlson.
1:26:34 Glenn is… I’ve known him since I was 14 years old.
1:26:38 And actually what he’s phenomenal at at the moment we’ve discovered
1:26:43 is that he’s really, really good at driving that next jump, the 2 to 20 million jump.
1:26:47 So there’s the zero to 200 grand like testing.
1:26:51 There’s the 200 grand to 2 million, which is like, yeah, okay.
1:26:54 This thing’s got some legs. There’s the 2 million to 20 million jump,
1:26:57 which is we’re professionalizing. We become a proper business.
1:27:00 We’re becoming valuable. We’re getting all the right people.
1:27:03 What’s shocked me, because I’ve known Glenn for so many years,
1:27:07 is that we’ve just recently discovered that that’s what he’s suited to.
1:27:10 He’s really good at the 2 to 20 million jump.
1:27:12 He’s so good at recruiting talented people.
1:27:14 He’s so good at pushing them through a process
1:27:18 that weeds out like 15 amazing people down to 2 amazing people down to 1.
1:27:21 How would you make the case to someone that’s just heard what you’ve said about
1:27:24 your companies and that you like that 0 to 2 million phase?
1:27:33 What case would you make to me to admit what I’m not good at for the sake of my business?
1:27:35 Because everyone can relate.
1:27:37 Like, I don’t mean to share this without asking him,
1:27:40 but I’m sure he’s in control of the edit so he can take it out if he doesn’t like it.
1:27:43 But did you think I was going to do it?
1:27:44 Jack turned around to our team the other day,
1:27:48 and I’ve actually spoken to so many people about this moment since he said it.
1:27:52 Jack said, “You know what? Jack’s run this podcast from zero,
1:27:55 so zero subscribers to where it is now. It’s 5 million subscribers.”
1:27:58 Jack turned around at 5 million subscribers and was like,
1:28:00 “I’m not the best in the world at doing lighting.
1:28:04 So what I’ve done is I’ve gone out and I’ve found someone who’s the best at lighting,
1:28:06 and they’re going to teach me. They’re going to redesign my set.
1:28:09 5 million subscribers. He’s getting someone else to redesign his set,
1:28:11 so that the lighting is amazing.”
1:28:16 It takes a certain kind of person to put winning over ego.
1:28:17 Oh, I love that. Yeah.
1:28:17 You know what I mean?
1:28:19 And I think about this so many years.
1:28:23 Jack probably didn’t know the profoundness of that moment to me,
1:28:25 but someone who is applauded from everyone,
1:28:27 “Oh, you’ve built the best podcast,” you know, whatever,
1:28:29 for him to go, “Do you know what? There’s so much I don’t know.”
1:28:37 He role-modeled humility and he role-modeled the idea of winning is better than being right.
1:28:40 And Overlings Not Underlings,
1:28:44 that a great company is great because you bring in Overlings Not Underlings.
1:28:46 So an underling is someone who’s not as good as you are,
1:28:49 and an overling is someone who’s way better than you are.
1:28:51 So it’s that confidence to bring in the overlings.
1:28:55 All of my businesses have been great because overlings run them.
1:29:01 Everyone who is in my organization is way better than me at the thing they’re doing.
1:29:05 And I feel like, like, the conductor in the orchestra can’t play all the instruments,
1:29:07 and probably maybe is okay at one instrument,
1:29:10 but actually their ability to bring in the best in the world
1:29:13 at that instrument is what makes them a great conductor,
1:29:15 the ability to enroll people.
1:29:19 So the first thing I’d say is that there’s value to be made at every level.
1:29:25 If you’re watching this and you know you’re not a founder,
1:29:26 and you’re sitting there going,
1:29:29 “All the people who make the money are the people who start from scratch
1:29:31 and get something off the ground and look at Daniel and look at Stephen.
1:29:34 Those guys are the zero to one guys.
1:29:35 Wouldn’t it be great if I was one of those?”
1:29:36 But I’m not.
1:29:38 Well, actually, that’s not true.
1:29:41 The truth is that there’s incredible wealth to be created
1:29:44 if you can take something from two to 20 million.
1:29:47 There’s amazing wealth if you can take something from 20 to 200 million.
1:29:49 Do you know this is worth mentioning?
1:29:51 One of the biggest opportunities in the world right now,
1:29:53 there’s two major opportunities in the world,
1:29:56 but one of the biggest opportunities in the world at the moment
1:29:57 is baby boomers who want to retire.
1:30:03 And a typical scenario is you get someone who’s late 60s, early 70s.
1:30:06 The business had a high watermark of a couple of million,
1:30:10 and now it’s dropped down to maybe a million or six high six figures
1:30:12 because the person is semi-retiring.
1:30:16 And because the business has been on decline,
1:30:17 it’s almost unsalable.
1:30:20 The person wants to retire and they just want to hand over the keys
1:30:23 and they just want that business to go to someone who’s fresh.
1:30:28 And what they’re willing to do is to do a vendor sale exit.
1:30:31 Cody Sanchez, she talks about this, “I’ve done deals like this.”
1:30:34 And actually Jeremy with the 100-foot yacht.
1:30:36 That’s how he does it.
1:30:40 So you essentially, you buy a business that the person wants to retire
1:30:41 and you take over that business with fresh energy
1:30:43 and you bring it back to its high watermark.
1:30:47 So there are so many people who, what they would be suited for
1:30:50 is not starting with a blank sheet of paper like me,
1:30:54 but they would actually go and find Bill and Sarah who want to retire
1:30:59 and they want to do a deal where they get paid out over five years
1:31:00 to hand over the keys to the business.
1:31:03 Let’s zoom in on this because a lot of people don’t understand
1:31:04 the concept of like a management buyout.
1:31:08 So I see Bill and Sarah, they’re running a laundromat.
1:31:11 Yeah. Well, here’s a real life example.
1:31:14 A real life example from a friend of mine is called Kit King.
1:31:18 And basically he approached someone who had that business.
1:31:20 They built it up to, I think, a few million.
1:31:22 And then the guy was ready to retire.
1:31:27 When he walked in, the orders would get printed out and put onto a spike.
1:31:30 And spike number one was like, this is an order.
1:31:33 And then when it was fulfilled, it goes onto the fulfilled spike piece of paper.
1:31:38 And then this young guy comes in and he digitizes the business
1:31:41 and he gets all the automated order thing flowing.
1:31:45 Cost about 25 grand to get in a specialist who could do all of that.
1:31:48 And then he basically reengaged the team.
1:31:50 The team were totally unengaged.
1:31:51 I think there’s about a dozen people.
1:31:53 And they’d not had a team meeting in ages.
1:31:55 They’d not, there was no vision for the business.
1:31:58 They’d not gone and spoken to customers in forever.
1:32:01 And then he comes in, goes and talks to customers,
1:32:05 starts hosting some online events, starts sending out messages,
1:32:08 starts digitizing, builds a bit of the brand.
1:32:11 And that business has, I think, only like 500% in like two years.
1:32:13 It’s massively successful.
1:32:16 But he started with something that had been going for 30 years.
1:32:19 In that example, you don’t necessarily need any money.
1:32:21 No, no, no. This was no money down.
1:32:25 So you can create a multi-million-pound business, theoretically,
1:32:27 starting with zero money.
1:32:29 Remember that money is just a database.
1:32:32 So it’s a database of the value.
1:32:35 So what you do is, like, if I want to buy a house,
1:32:38 I go to the bank and they lend me the money to buy the house.
1:32:39 If I want to buy a business,
1:32:41 the person who already owns the business
1:32:43 is probably the most likely person
1:32:45 to see the value in funding the business.
1:32:47 A bank probably won’t.
1:32:49 But the person who is selling it,
1:32:51 let’s say I go to Bill and Sarah.
1:32:53 I say, “Look, there’s no question.
1:32:55 Your business is worth 1.2 million.
1:32:56 I don’t have 1.2 million.
1:32:58 I have a little bit of money
1:33:00 that I’m going to invest into the business to grow it.
1:33:04 Can I pay you the 1.2 million over six years, seven years?
1:33:08 And what we will do is, this is my business plan.
1:33:11 You will be the board members, chairperson of the board,
1:33:15 and the business will be the security for that loan.
1:33:17 So if we screw up and we can’t make our payments,
1:33:18 you take the whole business back
1:33:19 with everything that we’ve thrown at it,
1:33:21 everything that we’ve done at it,
1:33:22 you’ll be able to take it back
1:33:24 and sell it to somebody else if we skip our payments.
1:33:27 So you’re securing the purchase of the business
1:33:29 with the business itself.
1:33:30 You’re doing a business plan
1:33:32 where it makes sense that the business could make the payments.
1:33:34 Now think about it from Bill and Sarah’s point of view.
1:33:36 They’ve got this thing that’s driving them crazy.
1:33:37 They want to retire.
1:33:38 They want to go south of France.
1:33:40 They want to go spend time with the grandkids.
1:33:41 And now someone’s coming along and saying,
1:33:43 “Yeah, we’re going to pay you 120 grand a year
1:33:44 for the next seven years.”
1:33:46 And if we don’t, then you get your business back.
1:33:48 And if we don’t, you get the business back.
1:33:50 And if they believe you, which is the key part,
1:33:52 if they believe in your ability to execute because…
1:33:54 And if there’s no one else offering anything else,
1:33:57 they believe you and there’s no other options.
1:33:58 It’s a great deal.
1:34:01 Now, here’s a crazy thing.
1:34:04 65% of the value of all business equity in the economy
1:34:06 is owned by baby boomers right now.
1:34:07 So if you were to take…
1:34:10 If you were to throw a dartboard at all the valuation
1:34:12 of every company in the UK or the USA,
1:34:15 there’s a 65% chance that you hit a baby boomer.
1:34:18 Right? So it’s incredible.
1:34:21 Now, all of those businesses have to be passed on somewhere.
1:34:22 Now, all of these young people,
1:34:24 they all want to have the latest psychedelic startup,
1:34:26 although, you know, something like that.
1:34:28 And they’re like, “Oh, I don’t want the elevator repair business
1:34:30 that does eight million a year.”
1:34:33 You know, it’s like, go get involved in that, right?
1:34:35 So that’s a huge opportunity.
1:34:38 The arbitrage and the opportunity here is boring businesses.
1:34:41 Boring businesses that you can bring something to it.
1:34:43 You can digitize it.
1:34:44 You can make it interesting.
1:34:46 You can create a culture that’s exciting.
1:34:47 The thing about a boring business…
1:34:48 Boring boomer business.
1:34:50 Boring boomer business, right?
1:34:51 I said that first, right?
1:34:53 That’s my next book.
1:34:55 So I said that first.
1:34:56 Trademark.
1:34:57 Yeah, could you guys grab the URL?
1:35:03 So the boring baby business, the BBBs,
1:35:06 you know, a business can be exciting.
1:35:09 It can do a boring thing, but still be an exciting business.
1:35:11 The way you run the team and the culture,
1:35:15 the money that it spits out can be exciting.
1:35:18 You can use that business to sponsor a charity.
1:35:21 You know, I’ve got a friend and a client called Sebastian Bates.
1:35:24 He’s got an amazing martial arts school that’s in the UK
1:35:26 and Dubai called Warrior Academy.
1:35:28 And he’s used all of his…
1:35:29 He’s very profitable.
1:35:33 He’s now set up martial arts schools in Kenya, Nepal,
1:35:37 all of these different areas that are struggling areas
1:35:39 now have a martial arts academy.
1:35:40 He’s set up his own charity
1:35:44 and he’s basically doing martial arts schools
1:35:46 for kids who have never had anyone look out for them.
1:35:48 They’re often street kids and homeless kids.
1:35:50 They come into martial arts and they get taught
1:35:52 life skills and martial arts and confidence and character.
1:35:55 But the point is, is you can take a boring business
1:35:57 and the way that you run it, you can do…
1:36:00 You can launch a charity associated with it.
1:36:03 You could hire young people who are coming out of prison
1:36:05 and give them a second chance to get started.
1:36:07 And that could be part of the excitement of the business.
1:36:09 There are so many ways to make a boring business
1:36:10 and exciting business.
1:36:12 Most of the times Bill and Sarah have given up on that.
1:36:15 They’re just, you know, they’ve been doing it for 20, 30 years.
1:36:18 They’re not fresh and the business has been in decline.
1:36:19 Anyway, that’s a huge opportunity.
1:36:22 Massive, way bigger than starting something new.
1:36:24 Like, if I was starting from scratch,
1:36:25 that’s probably actually where I’d probably start.
1:36:28 It’s so funny that that never dawned on me.
1:36:32 When I was penniless in Manchester and I was very persuasive,
1:36:36 but my strategy for world creation was to pitch a brand new tech company.
1:36:39 Because I’d just seen that social network movie with Mark Zuckerberg.
1:36:41 Whereas really, I could have just, you know,
1:36:45 as you said, gone for Bill’s business and presented a young, fresh,
1:36:49 digital, social first vision and mitigated his risk.
1:36:52 And even if you wanted to do social chain,
1:36:54 you could have started by buying a marketing agency
1:36:58 that was already doing 2 million.
1:36:59 That’s high watermark was 4 million.
1:37:02 And it’s halved over the last six, seven years.
1:37:05 But it still has a core team and it’s got a 20 year reputation
1:37:07 and it has a contract with AWS.
1:37:09 And it has a contract with Harper Collins.
1:37:11 And it’s like, oh yeah, we’ve got all these things in place.
1:37:15 You buy that business that’s doing 2 million as a starting point.
1:37:19 And then you say, now I’m going to do social chain on top of that.
1:37:22 So now you go from 2 to, you know, whatever.
1:37:24 But rather than starting from absolute scratch,
1:37:27 you could actually start with a couple of million of revenue.
1:37:30 Just by, just by going in and doing a deal with someone
1:37:32 who’s already got a starting point.
1:37:33 Two key skills here.
1:37:35 The first skill is sales.
1:37:36 We’ve talked about that.
1:37:38 You have to be persuasive.
1:37:40 And the second key skill is even understanding
1:37:43 the structuring of that deal.
1:37:46 You know, and those are two very different things,
1:37:46 but they’re imperative.
1:37:48 What I’ve come to learn over the last five years
1:37:52 is the people in my life that are the best wealth creators
1:37:54 have those two skills.
1:37:56 They understand how to structure a deal
1:37:59 and they understand how to sell the deal.
1:37:59 Yes.
1:38:02 Yeah, sales is sales that demand creation,
1:38:07 the doing the deal and structuring phenomenal skills.
1:38:09 And everything that you want
1:38:11 is on the other side of a structure that exists.
1:38:18 So with score app 2022, AI comes out and I go,
1:38:22 oh my God, AI changes the fundamental nature of this business.
1:38:24 We need to be on AI.
1:38:26 I thought the first thing I want to do
1:38:30 is bring someone onto the team who is an AI expert.
1:38:32 So I approach Professor Andy Pardo,
1:38:34 who’s the head of AI for Warwick University.
1:38:37 And I say, we’re setting up an AI advisory board.
1:38:40 Would you like to be on our AI advisory board?
1:38:42 Here’s how much we pay per year.
1:38:43 And would you like to join the board?
1:38:46 And he’s like, yeah, I’ll join the advisory board.
1:38:48 So he comes and joins our advisory board.
1:38:50 He starts making some recommendations
1:38:52 about how we adapt to the AI challenge.
1:38:54 We didn’t need anyone else.
1:38:55 That was absolutely perfect.
1:38:57 He brought with him a team of researchers
1:38:59 who came in and worked on the back end of our system as well.
1:39:03 But what was interesting is that that happened in two weeks.
1:39:07 So from two weeks, we went from no AI integration
1:39:11 to having Professor Andy Pardo, who’s a PhD of AI,
1:39:13 who’s got 25-year background of AI,
1:39:17 as our advisor because we set up an advisory board.
1:39:21 So I just knew what structure the structure is.
1:39:24 So how do I say, can you help me?
1:39:25 I need to figure this out.
1:39:30 But how do you get someone that’s at the very start of their journey?
1:39:31 They don’t understand all these.
1:39:32 They don’t know structures.
1:39:32 Yeah.
1:39:37 I mean, it’s hard because in theory, you go talk to a CFO
1:39:39 and you basically talk to an experienced CFO
1:39:42 who’s done a lot of M&A and you just say,
1:39:44 well, actually, do you know what’s even wild?
1:39:46 Today, you don’t even need a CFO.
1:39:47 You go on ChatDB here.
1:39:49 Act as a CFO.
1:39:52 Explain to me what structures I would use to do this.
1:39:55 How would I structure a deal with this?
1:39:58 Explain to me, I would like to buy a business,
1:40:01 an existing 20-year-old business.
1:40:05 I would like to buy it so that I don’t have to pay anything upfront
1:40:07 and that the owners of the business finance
1:40:09 my new ownership of the business.
1:40:12 Act as a CFO and advise me on how to do that transaction.
1:40:15 And what’s amazing is ChatGBT will do a good job of that
1:40:16 or a good starting point.
1:40:18 Draft the heads of terms.
1:40:20 You can ask ChatGBT to do.
1:40:23 Yeah, draft the heads of terms for that deal.
1:40:25 Review the draft of heads of terms to see
1:40:27 if there’s any omissions or mistakes.
1:40:31 Now that you’ve seen that, would you do anything differently?
1:40:32 Yeah, I would change this.
1:40:34 You can send the email.
1:40:37 Draft an email to the finance director of this company
1:40:40 proposing that we acquire the business with no money down.
1:40:42 Asking for a meeting.
1:40:45 Isn’t it crazy that we live in this new era
1:40:48 where the possibilities in terms of communication,
1:40:53 storytelling, persuasion and the cost of a sale
1:40:55 have completely, completely changed?
1:40:56 Dynamics have shifted.
1:40:58 AI is changing everything.
1:41:00 We haven’t realized yet, have we?
1:41:01 If you think about how we’re behaving,
1:41:06 we haven’t quite realized the potential of the technology we have.
1:41:08 We are like on the movie, The Titanic,
1:41:10 when they hit the iceberg and they’re all just like
1:41:12 dancing on the thing and someone says,
1:41:14 “Oh, it’s an unsinkable ship.”
1:41:17 And the guy with a white face says,
1:41:20 “It’s made of steel. It will go down. It’ll sink.”
1:41:25 When I first saw AI do what AI does, I had that moment of like,
1:41:28 “Oh, no. This changes everything. We’ve just hit an iceberg.
1:41:31 This is a fundamental general-purpose technology
1:41:33 that is going to change everything.
1:41:35 It’s going to change every industry, top to bottom.
1:41:39 Everything’s going to have to reorganize itself around an AI landscape.”
1:41:41 But we’re all pretending like it doesn’t exist.
1:41:44 We’re all pretending like this thing isn’t doing what it’s doing.
1:41:46 But yeah.
1:41:48 There’s one thing that AI disagrees with you on.
1:41:51 When I say AI, I mean Sam Altman from ChatGPT.
1:41:53 You said earlier, business is a team sport.
1:41:57 Now, he has a WhatsApp group, Sam Altman, the founder of ChatGPT.
1:42:01 And in that WhatsApp group, he’s got a bet with some friends
1:42:06 that they’ll be the first ever one-person billion-dollar company soon.
1:42:10 And they’re guessing on the date of the first ever one-person billion-dollar company.
1:42:13 Because with AI, the team sport becomes you
1:42:16 and a large language model like a ChatGPT.
1:42:22 I think that it’s directionally correct what he’s saying.
1:42:26 The one-person AI business will be beaten by the 10-person AI business.
1:42:29 And yes, it probably will happen.
1:42:32 Assuming that, of course it will happen.
1:42:34 There will be a person who creates something using AI
1:42:36 and it will be a standout thing.
1:42:38 But to replicate that again and again,
1:42:43 having what we will see a lot of is five-person teams
1:42:49 with a CEO, CTO, COO, CMO, CFO who work together as five people
1:42:51 doing the work of 500 people using AI.
1:42:54 That’ll happen definitely and that’ll be reproduced.
1:42:58 But to a degree, business is always going to be a team sport
1:43:02 that essentially five or six people will always beat one.
1:43:06 Because they’re talking to each other
1:43:10 and they’re covering different angles and whatever AI strengths.
1:43:13 AI is very good at content, but not context.
1:43:15 And having five people who share a context
1:43:18 and create a context together,
1:43:21 then the content can happen using AI.
1:43:24 AI without that context, it doesn’t know what to do.
1:43:26 So it doesn’t have any purpose.
1:43:26 Right now.
1:43:30 Yeah, to a degree, it can start to…
1:43:34 It still needs a first mover on what is the context.
1:43:35 Why are we doing this in the first place?
1:43:36 Right now.
1:43:37 So, well, that’s the one person.
1:43:42 Yeah, I agree with you that there is…
1:43:46 We are at a time in history where we can’t see around the corner.
1:43:49 We don’t know what society will look like.
1:43:51 But here’s a few things I do know about.
1:43:54 I do know that as it stands right now,
1:43:59 humans are great at context and AI is good at content.
1:44:02 And if you can provide AI with an amazing context
1:44:04 of what it’s meant to be doing, it will fill in all the blanks.
1:44:06 But it needs the context first.
1:44:08 I know that vitality versus functionality.
1:44:10 AI is great at functionality,
1:44:12 but it needs someone to breathe life force into it.
1:44:17 It’s the human life force that we breathe into things.
1:44:20 So it still needs vitality, even though AI does a lot of functionality.
1:44:22 And the warning that I have for people
1:44:26 is that AI is very good at turning you into a creator or a consumer.
1:44:30 So it essentially figures you out and it says, oh, TikTok, huh?
1:44:33 How about we get you to spend 16 hours on TikTok
1:44:38 and hypnotize you into spending way longer than you thought on this thing?
1:44:40 And the AI is really good at saying,
1:44:44 we’ll drive you down to the edges of how much someone can consume.
1:44:47 But it will also drive you to the edges of how much someone can create.
1:44:50 And one thing that is going to happen in the next few years
1:44:53 is everyone is going to have to make a conscious decision.
1:44:58 Do I want to be a creator or a consumer in relationship to AI?
1:45:01 Because if you allow AI to use you,
1:45:03 it’ll just turn you into a consumer.
1:45:04 You’ll listen to more stuff, watch more stuff,
1:45:08 do more like spend more money because AI is good at that.
1:45:11 Or if you use it to build stuff and make stuff and produce stuff,
1:45:16 you will be doing superhuman levels of creativity because of AI.
1:45:18 But it’s going to divide society into consumers and creators.
1:45:22 Okay, very important announcement.
1:45:23 Waited a long time to tell you about this.
1:45:27 Last year, I launched my very own private equity fund called Flight Fund
1:45:29 with the aim of investing in great companies
1:45:31 that are working to bring about a better future.
1:45:34 At Flight Fund, we’re committed to empowering the most innovative founders
1:45:37 by providing not just funding, but mentorship guidance
1:45:39 and a network that fuels their growth.
1:45:43 Since launching the fund, we’ve invested in disruptors like SpaceX,
1:45:46 Zoe, Hulwup, Untill and many, many more.
1:45:51 And today, I’m excited to announce that Flight Fund is now live on Cedars.
1:45:55 Head to the link in the description below on this episode.
1:45:58 It will say Flight Fund and you can learn more about Flight Fund
1:46:00 and why we’ve partnered with Cedars.
1:46:04 Quick one, as you might know, a company that I’ve invested in
1:46:08 is now also a sponsor of this podcast and they’re called Zoe.
1:46:10 And I’m coming to you today with a warning.
1:46:13 And it’s all of those diet companies’ favorite month of the year.
1:46:17 And that means that you’re about to hear a lot of jargon and words
1:46:20 across all types of media when it comes to diet culture.
1:46:23 Please don’t get caught up in the fads.
1:46:27 When it comes to your own health, you must listen to experts.
1:46:28 And that’s exactly what Zoe has.
1:46:32 Zoe isn’t about restriction or removing foods from your diet.
1:46:34 It’s about building sustainable daily habits
1:46:37 that will make your life better forever.
1:46:41 They’ll help you to discover how eating in the right way for your body
1:46:44 with what they call personalized nutrition
1:46:46 will have you feeling the benefits almost instantly
1:46:48 and far into the future.
1:46:50 If you’re looking to pick up new habits this year,
1:46:56 then use my code CEO10 to get 10% off of your Zoe kit and do it right now.
1:46:59 Work-life balance, Daniel.
1:47:01 Work-life balance.
1:47:02 Is it a thing?
1:47:07 Is it possible to be wildly successful and not work exceptionally hard?
1:47:11 The people who talk about work-life balance as an important thing,
1:47:13 they normally worked their asses off
1:47:15 to the extent that they almost burnt themselves out.
1:47:18 Then they had to come to Jesus’ moment.
1:47:22 And then they now espouse work-life balance in hindsight
1:47:23 after having a massive breakthrough
1:47:25 from the massive amounts of work that they did.
1:47:29 And that is typically the pathway towards the work-life balance guru.
1:47:34 So here’s the unfortunate thing.
1:47:37 You’ve got to look at the statistics.
1:47:43 People who earn over 100 grand typically work 55 hours per week.
1:47:46 But there’s work and there’s work.
1:47:49 So you and I work enormous amounts of hours,
1:47:52 but we’re not digging up roads.
1:47:52 We’re not laying cables.
1:47:55 We’re not doing boring repetitive stuff.
1:47:57 In most cases, our work is creativity.
1:47:58 It’s publishing things.
1:47:59 It’s pitching deals.
1:48:02 It’s sitting there in Dragon’s Den analysing what’s going on.
1:48:03 It’s doing interviews.
1:48:06 So there’s a new style of work.
1:48:08 So when people get angry about work-life balance
1:48:11 and they say, damn it, work-life balance has to be a thing,
1:48:14 it’s normally because their association to work
1:48:16 is that work is such a negative thing.
1:48:19 And work is something you have to do in order to make money.
1:48:22 And when people say, oh, I do 55 hours a week and I love it,
1:48:26 they go, well, something’s deeply wrong with you.
1:48:26 It’s like-
1:48:26 You’re toxic.
1:48:27 Yeah, you’re toxic.
1:48:28 Well, actually-
1:48:30 It’s apples and oranges.
1:48:32 Yeah, I’m enjoying-
1:48:34 I’m doing something that’s deeply fulfilling and passionate
1:48:36 and I can do it from home.
1:48:38 And I do it online and it’s digital.
1:48:40 And I see my kids all the time while I’m doing it.
1:48:42 And I actually don’t feel like I even work that hard.
1:48:44 I’m just enjoying it, but I am doing that stuff.
1:48:48 Keep in mind this, if you’re doing a lot of hard work
1:48:50 that doesn’t develop an asset simultaneously,
1:48:53 it’s probably going to end up toxic.
1:48:54 You may burn out.
1:48:57 If you do a lot of hard work that simultaneously develops an asset,
1:49:00 the asset value eventually takes over
1:49:01 and then you’re working completely by choice.
1:49:04 So simplify that as if I was a 10-year-old.
1:49:09 If you create podcasts and those podcasts go onto YouTube
1:49:11 and that people can watch them a year later,
1:49:13 two years, three years later,
1:49:15 you’ve developed something that has a life of its own
1:49:18 and it’s going to continue to create value
1:49:20 without you having to physically be there.
1:49:23 So if your work is creating a byproduct of an asset,
1:49:25 if you own the company that you started
1:49:26 and you own the shares in that company
1:49:28 and that company becomes more and more successful
1:49:31 and the equity value becomes more and more valuable,
1:49:34 your work is creating a valuable asset.
1:49:37 If, like my wife,
1:49:40 you renovate horrible properties into amazing properties,
1:49:43 her work creates income and an asset simultaneously.
1:49:44 What’s the opposite of that?
1:49:47 Where you’re working but you’re not creating any assets?
1:49:48 Well, an Uber driver.
1:49:50 I used to work at McDonald’s for two days.
1:49:51 I worked at McDonald’s as well.
1:49:52 I loved working at McDonald’s.
1:49:57 The asset that I created was a deep appreciation for systems.
1:50:00 But the problem with being an Uber driver
1:50:04 is that you can actually do 16-hour days.
1:50:07 However, at the end of 16-hour days, that’s it.
1:50:09 You’ve earned that amount of money
1:50:11 and you’ve not developed any additional asset.
1:50:13 You’ve just performed a role.
1:50:17 So you’re not building simultaneously an asset.
1:50:19 The people who love their work and don’t burn out
1:50:22 are the people whose work creates income and asset
1:50:24 at the same time and they’re doing something
1:50:25 that’s fulfilling and passionate.
1:50:29 And an asset could be reputation, deep skills.
1:50:31 Something that has a life of its own,
1:50:35 something that lives beyond the day that you created it.
1:50:37 Daniel, thank you so much.
1:50:39 We do have a closing tradition on this podcast
1:50:41 where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest,
1:50:42 not knowing who they’re leaving it for.
1:50:45 And the question left for you is,
1:50:50 what is the one thing you’d wish you’d known
1:50:52 about sex and relationships in your youth
1:50:54 that you later learned?
1:51:00 A lot of the enjoyment of sex is the relationship
1:51:03 that you’re having with someone outside of that moment.
1:51:08 So in my youth, I saw sex as a standalone thing.
1:51:10 That was a compartmentalized thing.
1:51:15 If you can pick up and have sex, then that’s a win.
1:51:19 But you discover pretty quickly that it’s actually empty
1:51:21 and meaningless and also awkward
1:51:22 and really awkward the following day
1:51:24 and all of that sort of stuff.
1:51:26 Whereas when you find someone who you really love
1:51:27 and you’re building a life with them
1:51:30 and you’re sharing highs and lows with them
1:51:31 and there’s a deep connection,
1:51:34 then it’s actually something that is,
1:51:37 it’s almost like an ingredient that is infused
1:51:38 through all of that.
1:51:42 So it’s very linked to love and connection and life.
1:51:45 Does that feel like your framework of function and…
1:51:46 Functionality and vitality, yeah.
1:51:50 So it’s either done from a space of love and life force energy
1:51:52 or it’s done as something that’s functional.
1:51:54 Probably something that people have to go through
1:51:55 to experientially learn.
1:51:58 I think that there’s…
1:52:02 The other thing for young men is that
1:52:06 the way that sex happens for a man
1:52:08 is different to how it happens for a woman
1:52:11 and that you may have a feeling,
1:52:14 or I had a feeling when I was a young, young guy
1:52:16 in my late teens, early twenties,
1:52:18 that I was unlovable and unattractive
1:52:21 and that no one would want to have sex with me.
1:52:24 So I’d have to trick them into having sex
1:52:25 through pickup lines or things like that.
1:52:28 And actually when I built my confidence
1:52:30 and when I built who I was as a person,
1:52:34 then it actually became much more of a natural experience.
1:52:38 And I’m not sure what I’m trying to say here.
1:52:40 Nobody goes back to that energy you were describing,
1:52:42 the way you don’t necessarily need the sale.
1:52:43 Yeah, with or without your energy.
1:52:44 That definitely happened.
1:52:48 Yeah, so when I became an entrepreneur
1:52:49 and I was speaking in front of big audiences
1:52:52 and wrote bestselling books and all of those sorts of things,
1:52:54 I had much more with or without your energy.
1:52:56 And the beauty was is that when I met my wife,
1:52:59 I was in a really great space where she was…
1:53:00 She had with or without your energy.
1:53:01 I had with or without your energy
1:53:05 and we recognized each other as great,
1:53:10 an amazing force of collaboration and partnership.
1:53:14 And we realized that one-on-one would be 11 in this situation.
1:53:17 And actually it was a magic moment.
1:53:19 I knew I was going to marry her within about 12 hours.
1:53:22 Daniel, thank you so much for your time.
1:53:26 You have so many incredible books that are real smash it.
1:53:29 So it’s funny that these books are growing in popularity,
1:53:31 despite the fact that times are changing,
1:53:33 which I think speaks to how timeless they are.
1:53:35 And you create a lot of content.
1:53:36 So I think if people want to hear more from you
1:53:40 on an ongoing basis and continue with this sort of education
1:53:41 that we’ve had today,
1:53:42 then they should definitely check out your social media channels
1:53:43 because I followed them.
1:53:45 And the way that you create content
1:53:46 is very much like the way you speak.
1:53:48 You’re very good at taking large, complex ideas,
1:53:51 distilling them down to sort of simple, relatable,
1:53:53 understandable concepts and delivering them to people
1:53:55 in a way that’s actionable and accessible.
1:53:56 That’s what your books do.
1:53:57 That’s what your content does.
1:53:58 And that’s what you do so well.
1:53:59 So thank you, Daniel, for being on my show.
1:54:01 It’s a huge compliment coming from you.
1:54:01 Thank you.
1:54:03 Oh, no, you’re a master of what you do.
1:54:04 So I appreciate you, Daniel.
1:54:04 Thank you.
1:54:04 Cheers.
1:54:11 The key to growing a business is making sure that it’s scalable.
1:54:14 And this comes with integrating into the right platforms
1:54:16 early in the game to support your growth.
1:54:20 A platform that’s helped me and my team to do this is Shopify,
1:54:21 who I’m sure you know by now
1:54:22 because they do sponsor this podcast.
1:54:24 Shopify is a commerce platform
1:54:27 revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide.
1:54:29 We recently launched our second version
1:54:32 of the Diary of a CEO conversation cards on Shopify,
1:54:35 which would not have been possible without Shopify.
1:54:36 When I started podcasting,
1:54:39 an online store was the furthest thing from my mind.
1:54:42 But now, thanks to how simple it is to use the platform,
1:54:45 it’s made this whole process so unbelievably easy.
1:54:49 It’s actually the internet’s best converting checkout,
1:54:54 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms.
1:54:56 If you guys haven’t tried Shopify and your business owners,
1:54:57 go and try it now
1:55:02 because you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period
1:55:06 just by heading to shopify.com/bartlet.
1:55:08 And you can get started for $1.
1:55:11 (upbeat music)
1:55:13 (upbeat music)
1:55:16 (upbeat music)
1:55:18 (upbeat music)
1:55:21 (upbeat music)
1:55:24 (upbeat music)
1:55:26 (upbeat music)
1:55:29 (upbeat music)
1:55:31 (upbeat music)