Oh, by the way, before we get into this episode, I would love to tell you a little bit about Life Notes. Now, Life Notes is a weekly-ish email that I send completely for free to my subscribers, and it contains my notes from life. So notes from books that I've read, podcasts I'm listening to, conversations I'm having, and experiences I'm having in work and in life. And around once a week, I write these up and share them in an email with my subscribers. So if you would like to get an email from me that contains the stuff that I'm learning, almost in real time as I'm learning it, you might like to subscribe. There is a link down in the show notes or in the video description.

Now, I know that we have a lot of people listening to this podcast who potentially want to start their own business.

someday, maybe even today or tomorrow. And so this interview is with Robin Waite. Robin is a professional business coach. He's also a public speaker and he's an author. He previously built and sold a web design agency and is also building a software company on the side. Get out there and sell something for some money and see how you feel about it afterwards. It's as simple as that. You'll learn 90% of everything you need to know because within having to do that, you had to market.

because you had to make somebody aware that you had a program to sell or that you had a lawnmower to push around somebody's garden or whatever it might be. This has been one of my favorite episodes of the podcast and Robin's book, Take Your Shot, was one of the books, I think I read it in like 2020 or 2021 and it featured in my top 10 books that I recommended that year. The reason why I wrote the book is because I know that there's some smart people out there who will read the book

learn what they need to do, they'll go out there and they'll just execute it. And then I went to deliver a talk in front of about 60 people and somebody asked me, what's the thing that stops people from achieving their goals? And I said, fear, basically. Business owners need to fear the little things in life, business, ever so slightly less, that stop them achieving their goals.

All right, Robin, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. You are, according to your bio, an author and also a speaker and also a business coach. You're the author of this very good book, Take Your Shot, which I read a couple of years ago and shared the shit out of on my email list because I just absolutely loved it. But I thought we'd make this episode about the business coach stuff. So what is a business coach?

Yeah, there's a lot of common sort of misconceptions about the differences between business coach, what's a mentor, what's a consultant. So in my view, so a mentor typically has been there and done it, got the t-shirt, maybe they're 10 years ahead of where you want to be. For example, if you want to run a business, we'll go and find somebody who's run a similar business with a mentor and they'll tell you what to do. A coach, in my view, tends to sort of ask questions

well-formed questions. They're not necessarily there to tell you what to do. They're kind of more of a guide. And I suppose like my approach is a bit of a mixture between sort of business coaching and mentoring. So I ran the agency for 12 years, got that t-shirt. And sometimes as much as you can kind of lead a horse to water through coaching,

well-formed questions people don't often get it and sometimes they kind of need to just be told or shown what to do and away they go nice so it's like like and so when you say business coach like let's say someone is like for example if i want to if i want to learn tennis

I might be able to read a book. I might be able to watch some online videos. But like if I hired a tennis coach and I was like, look, I'm a complete beginner and I want to learn how to play tennis, they'd be able to help me figure it out. Is it the same thing for business? It's exactly the same thing for business. But there's a really important piece which you kind of missed out there as well, because there's going to be one day when you kind of are a bit lethargic, wake up in the morning and you don't really want to play tennis that much. And so your coach will be there and they'll like,

hopefully not with too much kicking or screaming, drag you out of bed, get you onto the court, make sure that you're taking the right sort of nutrition and self-care and things like that. And

It's kind of more of a nurturing sort of process than it is, you know, just sort of giving people a formula and away they go. So there's a lot of accountability, which I do with clients. So again, when you're coaching somebody, typically what tends to happen is you're inviting them to do something which they maybe are a little bit too scared to have. They know they need to do it.

but maybe they haven't quite got the confidence to get out there and do it for whatever reason. So it could be, well, fear is the obvious one, like fear of failure, fear of

Fear of success in some cases. Fear of, you know, rejection. So sales, for example, is something which you cover a lot of because you're going to get an awful lot of rejection in there. And obviously as human beings, we like to be liked. So getting out there and getting lots of no's doesn't come naturally to a lot of people. And as human beings, we tend to avoid the things we don't like, the things which kind of offer us discomfort. We move towards comfortable things, you know, nice fluffy pillows and cushions and things like that. So coach's job is really just to like,

get people out there slightly outside their comfort zone i don't really like that term because if you're too far outside your comfort zone for too long it actually has an opposite effect it's like it's a demotivator at that point so um so you want to push them just a little bit outside their comfort zone but enough so that they can learn through that experience of doing something new and then they from there it's it's kind of easy at that point because they start to build muscle memory they start to do things on autopilot and then you get that really like

happy parent sort of moment where you're like, oh,

Like really proud of like watching your, you know, clients kind of grow and do stuff that they weren't doing before they met you. Nice. Okay, sick. So we have a lot of people in our, who listen or watch this podcast and in our Deep Diver community who are interested in starting their own business, interested in becoming entrepreneurs. They see the benefits of the entrepreneur lifestyle. They might see a business like mine and be like, damn, he quit his day job and now makes millions on the internet making videos. That seems pretty freaking cool. And yeah,

I think, especially with the whole cost of living crisis, the pandemic, people losing their jobs, a lot of people have kind of seen that, hang on, the default path is no longer working. The path where I get a job, I go to a decent uni, that lands me a decent job, that lands me promotion after promotion, and eventually I'm happy. That default path, and I'll be able to buy a house and stuff, no longer really works. And so a lot of people are looking to entrepreneurship, to starting a business as something

a kind of way out of the situation that they're in or a way into a more fulfilling life filled with freedom, fun, flexibility, money, impact, all of the good things. But the problem people have is that taking that first step and getting started. So I wonder if

Can we sort of do a bit of a role play where I'm a total beginner coming to you as a coach and I'll try and play the part and imagine myself how I was a few years ago potentially and you kind of coach me through the process? Is that reasonable? Yeah, we could do that. Okay, sick. So I'm going to be like, right, Robin, I've heard, you know, I heard you on Ali's podcast. I've heard you're a business coach. I think I want to start my own business, but I did, you know, it's overwhelming. I don't even know where to begin. I've got a day job.

I don't, yeah, help me. What do I do? Cool. So my first question is why? Why? Okay. So I am working as a junior doctor at the moment and it's really grueling and I thought I enjoyed medicine, but actually now that I'm actually working in it, I'm realizing that spending 40, 50, 60 hours a week working in the NHS is

You know, I'm not sure if I want to leave leave medicine, but I watched some of Ali Abdaal's YouTube videos. He talks about the power of having multiple streams of income, preferably passive income. And so I was thinking, you know, if I could make an extra 2K a month, 3K a month, that would be completely life changing. I'd be able to go part time in my day job, working maybe two or three days a week. And I'd be able to actually spend time with my girlfriend who I want to propose to and we want to have kids. But I don't want to live a life where I'm sort of tied to wage slavery for 60 hours a week. Cool.

Cool. Okay. So my next question is for you. So thank you as well for giving me all that backstory. I suppose I want to get an idea about how big a problem is for you at the moment. Like how long can you tolerate being where you are right now? Would you say? Okay. So I'm like two years into my doctor career.

Could you do it for another six months, a year? Yeah, I've got my, you know, I'm finishing off my F2 year in about six months time. So at that point, there's a very natural break point, but I don't have enough money to be able to sort of not work. And so I'm planning to do locums and extra shifts and stuff. And I can probably do that for a year or two. But if I continue on that point, and if I really want to go into medicine, then, you know, the more years you take out of the thing, the harder it is to go back in. But honestly, if I had to...

The last six months, if I had to relive those for more than maybe another six, I don't know if I can handle it. Okay. And did you say sort of 2K to 3K a month extra? Is that what you want to earn? Or is it 2K to 3K to get you out of where you want to be right now? So at the moment, I'm earning about 3K a month. And I'm thinking if I can get... If I could have a business that even makes me...

2k that would be the absolute the absolute dream it would be so good i'd be able to then go down to three days a week so down okay so an extra 2k drop you down to two uh three days a week okay cool what do you love doing i thought i loved medicine um that's no longer it's no longer entirely the case what do i love doing i don't know really i mean i spent spending time with family and friends okay i used to play world of warcraft back in the day did you yeah it's interesting um i guess i

Yeah. What do you, what do you mean? What do I love doing? So when you're, I believe when you're starting a business, you kind of need to, um, there's three kind of, you mentioned lots of F's earlier on, but there's three F's which are really important to me. So freedom is the first one. So to be able to kind of live life on your own terms and do what you want to do. Um, the second one is fulfillment. So find something which you're deeply passionate about that you jump out of bed in the morning and,

Even if you weren't getting paid for it, you would do it anyway because you just love doing it so much. It just fills you up. And then obviously the third F is finance. So we want to create something for you that gives you the freedom you want, fulfills you, and also pays the money. Finances. Nice. Okay. So for example, and this is where we just throw some ideas out there and see what sticks. So imagine if you could earn an extra 2K a month.

streaming World of Warcraft. That would be pretty cool. Yeah. That would be really cool. Are there people out there doing it at the moment? There are, but they're so like... That's like trying to be a professional athlete or something. Like it's such a small percentage of... Yeah, but they started. They did. Why can't you? I think what's stopping me from streaming WoW is that...

I know that there are about a million people trying to do it on Twitch, for example, of which like 10 are making money. So that's like one in 100,000 chances of actually making any money from it. Yeah. Which to me feels like not great odds. Okay. And ideally, I'd like to start some sort of business where I feel the odds are more stacked in my favor. Okay. What are you good at?

You know, I'm actually, I think I'm reasonable at web design. Okay. In that I used to do it when I was a kid. And then I kind of got out of practice when I got to med school because there wasn't enough time to do anything.

But I always enjoyed that at school. And that was the thing I'd, you know, I'd get home from school and I'd be tinkering away back in the day on like my MySpace graphic banner thing. And then when MySpace died and Facebook became a thing, I would design signatures for people's forum accounts back when forums were a thing. I can't believe you still remember MySpace. Yeah, exactly. I know. I'm so old. Yeah. You know, this business thing is a young person's game. I think I might be too old for it. Yeah.

But I used to really enjoy designing websites. And I used to really tinker away at my own personal website. And I thought about trying to make money from it. But then something always kind of held me back. And so that's something that I think I actually used to really enjoy back in the day. So there's something holding you back. There's already a recurring theme or pattern in here. And I wonder what that might be. What do you think it might be? If I think, okay...

I could make money from web design, for example, because I know that web designers are a thing and I know that people do make money from it. And I know that web design agencies are a thing because I've come across them on the internet. But if I think of it, I think I'm not good enough. I think I don't have skills. I think why would anyone pay me for anything? I think even if I did have the skills, how on earth would I find people to pay me for websites? And then I think even if I did do that, is it actually something that I would enjoy? Okay. Yeah. So all of those things like perfectly valid. Yeah.

How do you know that any of them are true? What evidence do you have? Yeah, honestly, I don't really have any evidence for it. I think it's just the fear of like, I know my skills in web design are kind of old now. I know that the frameworks and stuff have evolved. People are using all this new software, which I don't yet know how to use. And yeah, I guess in my mind, I'm thinking it's going to be a way harder hurdle to cross. Okay. But you thought becoming a doctor might be hard. You did that. That's a good point. Yeah. So you're perfectly capable.

Yeah, I guess the thing with medicine is that the path is laid out in front of you. You have a very clear next step and you know that, okay, I just need to do this thing. And if I just do the thing, and I'm very good at doing the thing once I'm told what the thing is, but when it comes to actually figuring out the thing and being a bit of a self-starter, that's when I think I really struggle. So long as the pathway's there and it's clearly laid out and you can see it, you're happy with that, okay? Yeah. So it's a little bit like, imagine you're driving a car at night

You can see the headlights are shining up the road, but they only shine up the road so far. You have faith that the road is going to keep on appearing in front of you. Otherwise, you'd just stop dead, wouldn't you? You wouldn't go anywhere. So that's the paradigm that you'll find yourself in at the moment with the web design side of things. It's just that at the moment, it's dark and the lights aren't on.

So we've got to create for you your equivalent of what that roadmap looks like to get a web design business up and running. Okay. So in your eyes, how would that work? What would you do? Hang on, before we go down the web design route. So aren't there other businesses I could do? Like I've heard day trading is a thing. I've heard people doing paid surveys. I've heard Amazon, FBA. Why do you want to do any of that?

It's because you see people on TikTok getting rich quick, right? Like the 0.1% of people. So do you have any passion for any of those things? No. No. So let's not even go there. So it's okay. Okay. That makes sense. So I should start with something I'm passionate about. Find something you like enough that you can get started, that when you are challenged by it, that you have enough impetus to want to carry on and work through those challenges, like you did with medicine.

If you get into things purely like you have to, if it's just for finance, if it's just one of the Fs that's taken care of, there'll be a point when it becomes a bit hard and because you've got no fulfillment from it, it's not really giving you the freedom you want because when things start to go wrong, you'll just think you can fix it by putting more time into it. Right? So now your freedom's gone as well. Your fulfillment is just non-existent and you're just doing it for the money. Like, are you going to carry on for much longer or are you just going to stop? Yeah.

Right, so you need all three Fs. They need to be there to some degree. They might not all be 10 out of 10.

It might be web design. There's a lot of hard work to go into web design. It's technical. There's late nights. There's things like that. But freedom-wise, you can sit down at your computer and build a website whenever you want. If you've got kids, you can do it once they've gone to bed. If you're studying, you can do it around your studies or just spend a couple of hours at a weekend or something like that. So maybe freedom-wise, it's like a 7 out of 10. It's not a 10 out of 10, but 7 out of 10, and that's tolerable.

But fulfillment wise, when you actually sit down to do it, you love it. And you're like, you get this creation at the end of the process and website for a customer. And you're like, wow, like they're pleased. You'll, you get some enjoyment from that. You're like a nine out of 10 on the fulfillment factor and finances will, you know, maybe to begin with, you do some websites, um,

For not very much money, but to get reviews, case studies, testimonials. So initially the finance might be a six, but you can see the potential in it. You get some money on the back end for hosting and support and care plans, and then gradually the money starts to build up. So you can actually influence that from a six out of 10 to eventually a 10 out of 10 over the next year or two.

But with what you suggested previously, if it's just about the money, you can't influence the other two. Okay, yeah. Because I guess part of me was worrying like, yeah, I think I enjoyed web design, but to be honest, I haven't done it in like 10 years at this point. And I enjoy other things as well. Like we said, playing World of Warcraft, watching Netflix. I enjoy playing badminton, but I'm pretty unlikely to be a professional World of Warcraft player anymore.

not many people make money for watching Netflix and very few people become professional badminton players. So it's like, how much does a viable business model… Imagine if Lewis Hamilton looked at Ayrton Senna 20 plus years ago, or 30 years ago when he first got on a cart and he thought, "I'm never going to be as good as Ayrton Senna. We'd never have a seven-time world champion." Any of the amazing things out there, if you look at it, rather than looking at it and going, "Oh, I can never achieve that," look at it and go, "Well, they've done it, so can I."

Yeah. And then it's about thinking. So that's the future version of you way off in the distance. But the future version of Ali in 12 months time or 12 years time needs today's Ali to do something. So what's the first step you're going to take with your web design business? Hang on, hang on. I'm still not sold on whether it's a web design business. Let's just go with it. We can always change the product later. Business is business, right?

It doesn't matter what the product is. Businesses work the same way the world over. So you have the same function, sales, marketing, finance. The different functions of a business are the same no matter what business you're in. They're all the same.

So the products can change so long as you understand the concept around how to productize any kind of a service. It doesn't matter whether it's web design or videography or podcasting or whatever, you know, whatever it might happen to be. Yeah. Um, as long as you get the concepts of it, you can apply the frameworks to anything.

So then how important is it to, because for example, I've got a full-time job, I don't have very much time on my hands and I ideally want to get to this kind of 2K a month dream world in the next, say, six to 12 months. So how important is it that I get the right topic? Like whether it's web design or tennis coaching or personal trainer, or like, I feel like there are all these options of making money. And I'm often, I think in the past I've been held back by just seeing all these viewers on YouTube getting rich. That's true. So at least if we do something, we can start to eliminate stuff.

So perhaps, perhaps maybe build a five page brochure style website for somebody for a friend, family member, doesn't matter whether you charge them for it or not. Don't care, but just get out there and build a, build a five page website on Squarespace and see if you can do it. See if you enjoy it. At least if you do it and you don't really enjoy it that much. Well, go and do something else. Let's have another conversation. Let's come up with another idea.

Okay, nice. So it sounds like it's less about like exploring all the possibilities in abstract before committing and more about like, let's commit to something that ticks the box that ticks the three boxes of FFF. Yeah. Fun, freedom. No, what is it? Freedom, fulfillment. Freedom, fulfillment and finance. Freedom, fulfillment and finance. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Nice. Mate, I'm glad I hired a coach. Okay, so this is good. I would have been overthinking this shit for years. Most people do, and that's why most people never start. There was a mutual connection we've got. It's just set up this amazing not-for-profit business help group. Simon Squibb, we both know him. And the most common question, which is appearing on his platform at the moment, is around funding. I need to get funding before I start anything. And it's like,

I don't know why it is, but there's so many people when they haven't run a business, they think that, again, it doesn't matter what the idea is, they have to somehow go out and get investment or a loan or something like that. Yeah, that's what I was thinking, because like Dragon's Den and stuff. Yeah. You know, I follow Stephen Bartlett's podcast. I saw he was on Dragon's Den and I'm like, oh, you know, you've got to get that 100k investment before you start. Yeah. And it's BS. It's a complete misconception because there is a...

In any business, there is a version which you can start from the ground up with no capital. You can just do something towards anything. It doesn't matter. You can go and register a domain name. You can go and set up a social media, like a Twitter account. All these things that you can do for free...

Yet people sit there and go, well, I can't get a loan. You know, I've got CCJ against me. I can't get a loan. So therefore I can't start a business. Well, you're no better off if you take literally no steps towards whatever, you know, your goal is. So people just end up procrastinating. So the question I always look at is you just need to reframe it ever so slightly. You just need to say, well, if funding's off the table, it's not an option. What is the first step you can take towards the smallest first step you can take

towards getting this business off the ground? What could you do today? And it might even just be get out a sheet of A4 paper and write down all of your ideas on it. Yeah.

Like that's just doing something. At least from that, you can start to say, well, that was a good idea. Or I could charge this for that. Or maybe actually I don't really like that idea. Maybe I'll do this. Writing down a list of ideas on a sheet of paper. And then across the top of it, you can then put some criteria against it. So this is, so again, a lot of people get, they, like you said, you can do trading or you can do websites, you do streaming. It's all these different amazing things which you can do in like 2023, right? Thanks to the internet. Okay. It's a little thing called the internet. Yeah.

And again, that causes people to procrastinate because they've got too many choices. Again, they don't start. They can't decide which one to do. So write them all down.

And then in the three columns across the top thing, again, the link to the three F's. So, um, which, uh, how much do I love this idea on a scale of one to 10? Right. Uh, and the second column is, um, if I do this, if it's like a business idea, um, and I do this for clients, um, what results, you know, how likely is it that I can get good results for the clients? We'll mark that one out of 10. And then the final one is, can people afford to pay me for this?

And we grade that out of 10. And you can add in as many criteria as you want. And so each idea, then you end up with a score out of 30. And quite often cream rises to the top, you end up with one or two really solid ideas where they might not all be 10 out of 10s. But if you can help somebody and you're passionate about it, and they can afford to pay you for it, that's a solid business idea.

This episode is very kindly brought to you by Huel. I've been a paying customer of Huel since my fifth year of medical school, since 2017. Actually, since before I started my YouTube channel. And I first started using Huel because my life was pretty hectic. I was juggling lots of different things like medical school and exams and trying to sort out publication points for my future like doctor job applications. And alongside, I was running a business, I was building an app, and I was trying to maintain some semblance of a social life. And so Huel actually came in really handy for that.

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Let's wave a magic wand and pretend that it's no longer a web design business. But it's the thing I'm passionate about is giving relationship advice to my friends. And I would love to build a business around that. Awesome. And I'm keen, you know, happy to take the next step in that direction. Cool. Are you doing any of that at the moment? Yeah. So my friend, I mean, I'm not charging anyone for it, but my friends, like they all come to me for relationship advice. And it's like, I love it.

you know, I get home from a day of work and I feel drained. But when a friend comes over, I'm making him a cup of tea and we talk about their relationship and I feel so energized by that. Awesome. How are you thinking about sort of launching that as a business, just out of curiosity?

I know that relationship therapists are a thing. And I even heard, I was listening to one of Stephen Bartlett's podcasts. He had a relationship coach on there where you don't need a qualification to be a coach. And so that thought, I thought that was pretty good because I don't have much time to get a qualification or something. But if I could build a business around helping people get better in their relationships or feel better about their relationships.

that would be really cool yeah um at the moment i just think i just think it would be cool i don't actually know how i'd find clients and stuff so what do you think is that a viable business we'll come on to that and you've before we do that you've raised a really valid point there because there is a there's a great there's a line fine line between therapy and coaching and i think it's massively important to kind of point that out and a lot of people start coaching and then

just because they're enthusiastic and as you know they kind of do it for the right reasons but unfortunately execute it poorly they start to transgress into like my belief is when you you don't need a coaching qualification for coaching i should say but when it comes to crossing over into the the mind body spirit type stuff and it becomes therapy related work that i believe you need a certificate for because you're treading like a very fine line between sort of mental health issues and physical issues and things like that so it's really worth

sort of emphasizing that, but coming back to your idea about sort of setting up as a relationship coach, for example. So what steps would you take an individual through to help them, I guess, find a partner or have a better relationship? Which approach would you take? What would the steps be? Okay. So I guess I've helped friends in both camps. Okay. So if we say finding a partner, for example, I would take them through

Oh, you know, I've never really thought about the steps for this, but I guess I would find out a bit about them and find out about their goals and what they're actually looking for, whether they want to go for something casual or something serious. Mostly my friends, you know, we're getting into our late 20s. We want to go for something serious. I would then...

Help them set up a dating app profile because I actually think dating apps are basically the easiest way to meet someone I would help them optimize that profile through because I you know, I'm a nerd so I read stuff about that I just love reading stuff about relationships and so, you know black and white photos and like balance between selfies and professionally for professional photos and what sort of prompts they should answer and I'm really good at that like I love going through my friends hinge profiles and just sort of revamping them and they love it and they get good results and

But at the same time, I would also get them to attend meetups or something like that, take part in groups and stuff where they can meet people in a more casual setting. And then once we've done that, once they're on a date, then I would get them to go into the date with a few different mindsets. And then we'd debrief after the date. And we'd do this a bunch of times. And I basically guaranteed that if they'd go on enough dates and follow my method,

then they'll find someone to be in a relationship with. Cool. So you've got, I lost count of the steps there, but let's call it Ali's seven step relationship method. Sure, we could come up with a better name than that at some point. But your unique seven step process to find your ideal partner. Just out of curiosity, how long do you think it might take to, and I know it depends is going to come into this, but we'll tackle that later. But on average, so remember it's on average, how long does it take to go from...

Starting the dating process, your seven step process to the end, hopefully finding somebody and settling down a little bit, would you say? I would say I'd be very surprised if they followed my steps and went on a date once a week, which is what I advocate, that they wouldn't find someone within six months. Six months. Okay. So you have a six month transformation program where you take them from single to a relationship following your seven step process. Huh. Right.

Okay. That sounds pretty good. Yeah. I guess that's what it is. And then how often would you kind of meet with them during that six months? Would it be like a monthly coaching session? Would it be, would you meet with them weekly? What do you think you would, how much time would you have to put into it? Okay. Probably a sort of two hour intensive thing to start off with while we get the profiles and all that kind of stuff. And then I think if I met with them once a week.

that would be great for them okay i feel like would i have time to meet yeah i'd have time to time to meet with them once a week okay but like once they start dating then instead of actually a one-on-one call they could fill out a thing or we could do it asynchronously through whatsapp voice notes or something like that but i think i think i feel like once a week would be good so it might be an intensive period for i don't know 8 to 12 weeks for example which is weekly then it gradually sort of ekes out into more of just a let's catch up yeah that sounds good yeah so okay um

Just out of curiosity, if you had to charge, I don't know, let's say an hourly rate for each session over those 12 weeks, what would that, how much would you charge? That's where I feel like there's a bit of a hurdle here in my mind, because like, for example, I know I could make £40 an hour by taking an extra shift at the hospital. And so I feel comfortable charging £40 an hour for that.

But when it comes to the relationship stuff, like I don't have any qualifications. Yes, I've helped my friends, but I feel I'd feel really, you know, charging 40 pounds an hour is charging it to the healthcare system. It's not charging it to a person. So I'd feel really weird if someone asked me.

For my help. And I would charge them £40 an hour. I'll share a little story with you. So I met Mrs. Waite, Charlotte, through a website called Muddy Matches 11 years ago. Muddy Matches? Muddy Matches. Muddy Matches. Yeah, because we live out in the Cotswolds, so it's a bit... Oh, wow. Yeah, very country. So how much would I...

to have had the opportunity to meet my future wife through online dating. And I wasn't particularly good at the dating game, let's be fair. You can't put a price on that. And so I think where you kind of have looked inside yourself and kind of looked into your own value system there, and I'm not going to give you a therapy session now about around that, but it's common what people do is they kind of base their prices based on their own value system. But what you're actually doing there is you're making a decision on behalf of everybody else in your world.

All of your clients. So when you say, well, I think I'm only worth £40 an hour, you're kind of making a decision on behalf of all of your clients, which may or may not be serving them justly. So think about it this way. There are things where maybe if you haven't paid enough for it, do you really value it that much? Whereas actually, if you've paid a lot for something...

Do you covet it, cherish it, look after it, take care of it? Think whether if you have capitalistic, expensive cars and things like that, like you get the slightest ding, you're like, oh my God, just ding my car sort of thing. So you really covet things that you're actually invested in. So when it comes to coaching, especially, it's much better to be at the more expensive end of it because then what you get is clients who are invested in the process. They're more likely to do the things which you're encouraging them to do.

And as a result of that, they're more likely to get better results. So if you're charging 5 to 10K for this transformation program… 5 to 10K? My goodness. We'll come on to that. This is part of the coaching process. So let's say you're charging 5 to 10K for this coaching process. You're going to get very committed clients, but also you don't need that many clients to work with each year in order to build a sustainable, profitable coaching practice.

10 clients a year, 20 clients a year, and actually you've got a six-figure income. Bloody hell. Right? It would take me 10 years of training in medicine to even approach a six-figure income. Yeah. So, and this is where a lot of people get business wrong. So I want to focus on, let's stick with where we're going with your coaching business for the time being though, coaching practice.

So six-month transformation, we've got this intensive 12-week period. You were thinking, well, £40 an hour. I was thinking like £10 an hour because I'm like, what the hell do I know about this? Okay, even at £10 an hour. So for a weekly session, say, which is an hour plus all the different touch points. But you're talking there of like charging like, I don't know, £200 for like a program, six-month program, right? Yeah.

Yeah. If you think about it. Yeah, that's pretty cheap. Okay. So this is where we break into, like, people see pricing as binary. Okay. So binary thinking. So it's either yes or no, a minimum amount, it's too cheap or it's too expensive. Okay. Yeah. Right. And at 200 pounds, I think you probably, well, your face said that's too cheap. I can't believe I was going to charge that much of my time. I'm worth more than that. Yeah. Well, you don't earn more than that. Yeah, I can make more than that. I can make that in one shift.

And then when I said 5 to 10K, your eyes popped out of your head, you know, across the table. But what we've got now is we've got 4,800 numbers between £200 and £5,000. Okay. And there's a future version of Ali that's, again, selling his coaching skills.

program for 5k maybe not today but in the future yeah so we we can do do you want we can do you've seen me do this before i think ali but the jedi mind trick do you want to play a jedi let's play the jedi mind play the jedi mind trick game okay so let's start 200 pounds and the reason i do this exercise well i'll explain it afterwards okay so we're going to figure out

what level you need to be selling this at as of today. If you're going to step out and work with your first coaching client, okay, so £200, £500. For the six months. Yeah, for the six months. £500, £800, £1,200. Already? Crikey. £1,200. Yeah. So everybody has a poker face, right? For whatever. So whenever...

Initially, when you were trying to figure this out, how much you should charge and the structure of your program and what am I worth, you're trying to solve it intellectually. And we all know you have, without going too woo-woo, you have more than one brain. Our subconscious brain is very intuitive. And so that's why intellectually you were like 200 pounds. But when we started to look into your subconscious of where you actually truly value yourself, you're like, well, 1,200.

well it was between 800 and 1200 pounds where poker face came out and you couldn't keep a straight face and I knew that that's where your subconscious was telling you even now when you say 1200 I'm just like I find myself just not being able to keep a straight face so it was 800 comfortable

You're not disagreeing with me. So what we want to do is we don't want to stay in comfort zone because we don't actually learn that much in there. You've got to stretch yourself a little bit. So my advice would actually be if you were going to go out and sell this hypothetical coaching program, you'd go and pitch 10 to 20 people at £1,200 for that six-month transformation process. And I know because I've done this with over 700 business owners now.

um the pricing thing that is get people to elevate their prices i know that um a good conversion rate for most service businesses like coaching is somewhere around about one in five to one in three that's round the numbers call it 20 to 40 percent really so if yeah so if you pitch 10 people enormously high uh it's it's not actually it's 20 so one in five is actually quite it's quite low a lot of people think it's quite low but like how if i if i think of like

people that I know at work, they wouldn't pay a thousand pounds, 1200 quid for like a six month. Maybe they're not your ideal audience. Okay. How do I find my ideal audience? Or are we going to come to that? We can do, but the other way to look at it as well is, again, people approach this from the wrong way around. They go, I'm going to build my product and then hope that people come and buy it.

right yeah what we actually want to do is we want to come from the other the other end of the spectrum okay so if your goal was to um make 100k from your coaching business 100k damn okay yeah right but let's okay what would your goal be if you were starting from scratch you're going to give this a shot if i can make 2k a month so that's like 24k 24k a year okay so now what we do is we take 24k we divide it by 1200 pounds and it's roughly 20 clients

Yeah, if I had 20 clients. Could you service 20 clients? Do you have the capacity to work with 20 clients over the course of a year? So if it's weekly calls, that would be 20 hours a week. 20 hours a week. That's quite a lot. It's a lot coaching-wise. Yeah. Very energetic. I don't know if I'd have the time to do that with my day job. So how many could you, do you think, work with? Okay, let's think about this. So, you know, I work Monday to Friday and then some weekends and night shifts and stuff. So if I had flexibility on when I could book them because my roto is weird. Okay.

I think I could do five, five a week, five calls a week probably. Cause that's like one a day on average. Yeah. So, so what we've done is this, this called capacity-based pricing, right? So you work out your, your end goal for your business. What's what, how much money do I want to make? Basically it's very simple terms.

And we divide it by the price that we've kind of come to a conclusion, this is roughly what I think we should be charging. But now we've got a gap. So if you only get five clients concurrently, which probably means like 10 clients throughout the year, because you're going to get a little bit of overlap, a bit of churn. Some clients leaving, they meet their future wife, husband, whatever, and they don't need your help anymore. Maybe they come back when they've got relationship problems further down the line. I don't know. Yeah.

But so 10 clients say, so actually what we've established is that you're going to fall short of your financial goal because you don't have the capacity to service 24,000 pounds worth of business. Okay. So the real price point. Yeah. So this is, so capacity has a mate. It got your goal. It's important. Capacity has a major part to play, especially if you're setting this up as like a side hustle alongside a full-time job. Yeah.

So now we've got a difficult decision here. We go, well, £1,200, I know that was going to be a bit of a stretch, but if somebody can afford £1,200, could they afford £2,500? Probably. Over six months, don't forget. If I could get people at £2,500, that would mean I would only need 10 clients in the whole year. Yes. And you could go down to three days a week. And that, yeah, I feel emotional just thinking about it.

And I'm not even like faking here. I'm just like, I just sort of imagining myself in that position. If I break the fourth wall a moment, I'm just like, oh my goodness, that would actually be transformational. But I have all these fears coming up around like charging 2,500. And even how do I find these 10 people? Forget about the money. Forget about the money. Can you visualize yourself working with those people and transforming their lives? Yes. Okay. Yeah. Can you, do you feel confident enough in your ability to deliver like such remarkable results for them that you'd have no problem refunding them if they had a

If they didn't meet the love of their life and they say, Ali, this is rubbish. You didn't find the love of my life. I want a refund. Would you have any problem refunding them? If they did the work, then no. If they didn't do the work, then, well, they didn't do the work. Okay. Well, let's assume they did the work. You threw everything at it. Best will in the world. Didn't get the results. No, they can have a full refund. I don't want their money if they don't get the result. Yeah, 100%. So no, de-risked it. There's no jeopardy here.

What do you mean? Oh, okay. Like if someone doesn't get the result, I can just give them their money back. Provided they've... And this is where the contract comes in. Okay. So the contract states you've got to show up to all of the calls, you've got to do all of the homework, you've got to go on the dates, et cetera, et cetera. And if they do that... If they do that... I mean, they're basically going to find a relationship. And if they don't, then I'll happily refund them, sure. But I'm kind of worried, won't everyone ask for a refund? They won't.

Yeah, no, they won't. If they actually did that. Like I've talked to so many of my friends through this with way fewer touch points. If someone actually followed my advice, their life would change. Even if they didn't find a relationship, their life would 100% change. Yeah. But okay, nice. Okay. So I could, okay, that's interesting. I've never thought about that before. I've always been scared of charging for anything, even the thought of it. But the thought that I can just always refund their money. Yeah. And 10 clients over the course of a year, that's less than one a month.

Yeah. Right. That's one client a month. Somebody who's, what type of person has disposable income of two and a half K. And again, don't forget it's going to be spaced over six months. Okay. So they could pay for it all up front if they want to. Okay. So that's like 500 quid a month basically for six months.

Who is the sort of person who would have that kind of disposable income? Okay. So, well, firstly, all my friends working in finance. Yeah. All my friends working in tech. Basically, none of my friends working in medicine. But, you know, my mom's a consultant psychiatrist. She has colleagues who are trying to get into dating after divorce or something. They easily have 500 quid a month to throw at this problem. Yeah. So I think basically...

people who have lots of money. They're the ones who can afford 500 quid a month for myself. It's the unique Ali dad program. Dating after divorce. There you go. That could be a nice niche to go into. The thing is, you've got all of those choices. You can make all of those choices and adjustments as you go further down the line. They don't have to be perfect like right now. Okay. Damn. Man, I feel so inspired already. And I know we haven't done anything, but just like,

Seeing you break it down, I think in my mind, 2K a month was the most obscure, like there's no way in fucking hell this is ever going to work. But...

it's just 10 clients paying two and a half K for a six week transformational program where I'm showing up every single week to help them through the process and they're going to find the love of their life fingers crossed or at least someone to be in a long-term relationship with yeah that makes it so doable now there was something there was something which popped up as well yeah and I don't know if anybody will have caught this actually what maybe they'll have to go and watch it back you might have to watch it back but there was a part of you which was like oh but all of those doctors and nurses that are single at the moment who are struggling to date which I know is probably close to your heart and like

quite rightly so we can help them too okay what we do is we we build a business with um parameters so it might be and i i call those clients love clients okay and um again i meet so many business owners that are like i want to i want to give back i want to help as many people as i can especially coaches they want to save the world they want like eight billion people like to work with all of them and change their lives right like it's just not practical it's not going to work

But what we can do with the love clients is we can build a business where, let's say, for example, if you accelerated this and maybe you charge even more or you get a few more clients in on that one-to-one basis, now you're working full-time in this business. Well, now you've got five days to do as you please with, right? How about if you actually carved one of those days out for...

the doctors and nurses. That's your hero product. You'd have to charge them a lower rate, potentially, if they can't afford it. I'm surprised they can afford to eat at the moment, the amount doctors and nurses are paid. Maybe what you do is you introduce a group program.

You know, a membership or something like that where they get access to the IP. Maybe it's a self-paced learning with a weekly Q&A on a Friday just for the doctors and nurses. Right? And they get a preferential rate for that when they show their doctor or nurse badge. And that's your way of giving back to those love clients. I could even give it to them for free. You could do, yeah.

Yeah, 100%. My hesitation with that is would they value it if it was free? Would they do the work if it was free? Do they need to have a little bit of something, a little bit of skin in the game? Yeah, doctors are notorious about signing up to free stuff and then not actually... Yeah. So it might be that, I don't know, they get it but at a reduced rate. Maybe that's the price we started off at, £900. One thing that I've seen this other business do is that you pay something up front, but if you do the work, you get a full refund. Yeah. And that would be sick. Yeah.

Like if I could charge them like, I don't know, even like 500 quid for the whole six months and they know they're going to get the refund if they do the work. Yeah. That would really motivate them to do the work. And so many more doctors and nurses would be in relationships then. Yeah. Sick.

But I can't build a business around that because the economics don't work out as we've figured out. Yeah. Okay. But I can have that as like my side hustle once I'm making my 24K a year. So full-time coaching program, unique Ali Dad program to transformation and yeah, side hustle, helping the doctors and nurses meet the love of their life. Wow. That sounds so good.

Okay. Right. Where do we go from here? What's the next step? I'm sold. I'm down to make this happen. Brilliant. Excellent. So next step is you just got to get out there and start pitching. So now it's, you know, we've agreed the price point's two and a half K. You've got to go and find 10 people, sit down and have a 30 minute conversation with them and then pitch your offer. I can guarantee that if you find 10 people who are pretty much the right sort of client for this,

based on that one in five to one in three conversion rate, which I talked about. So somewhere between two, three or four of those people are going to say yes to this out of those first 10.

And like if we're working on just like worst case scenario, one in five are going to say yes. So you've only got to do five consultations a month with prospective datees to get that one client a month that you need to make this work. That feels very doable. Yeah. I'm a pretty good, I'm pretty sure I can convince people that this is worthwhile. I've also got the whole clinical communication skills going for me. My only, I'm just like, how the hell am I going to find five of these people each month? Where do they hang out?

Where do single people hang out? VARs? Yeah. What are they searching for on Google?

Are they in Facebook groups? Like this is where you've got to start, like Marketing 101. Okay, that's what you're asking me for, basically. So Marketing 101 is four very simple steps. Okay. So first of all, once we've figured out who our ideal client is. So if those are, like you said, you kind of listed off a few. Yeah, the consultants, the bankers, the lawyers, the people working in finance in the city. That's it. Yeah. So there's a few different audiences there. Step number two of Marketing 101 is,

is we then ask the question whether they hang out so probably they're looking through scrolling through facebook maybe on instagram probably looking at dating sites and things like that um we can start to look at psychographics and demographics based on those our ideal clients so

Demographics is easy because that's like, you know, age, gender, location, those sorts of things. Psychographics though, which is where it starts to get interesting with step two, is like, what are their behaviours? So what magazines do they read? What Facebook groups are they in? What pages, who do they subscribe to? You know, what podcasts do they listen to? All of those sorts of things. Behaviours. There's another tier below that, which is like, I call it the identity layer. So this is like...

It's probably easier if I talk about the types of clients I work with, because this is where I sort of learnt about this.

I've noticed that a lot of my clients have like a slight edge to them. So me, for example, I like to go surfing and cycling. I love going down a hill. I think the fastest I've been on my pedal bike is 52 and a half miles an hour down a hill locally. So it's pretty fast and scary. I surf 12 foot waves. So I have like this edgy sort of side to me and it seems like that's my identity. I like surfing and cycling.

And I seem to attract clients who have that similar sort of edginess to them. They're into their like slight extreme sports or ultra marathons or they go out doing, you know, wild camping on Dartmoor and stuff like that at their weekends, you know, on their own and whatnot. So they've all got this slight edge. So finding clients who share similar values to you, have similar sort of identity to you actually makes the process of finding clients that much easier. Interesting.

So you can identify them where, you know, where they hang out. Okay. Yeah. As you said, that identity thing, it reminds, it made me kind of realize that I think my identity, you know, I was very sort of bookish when I was in school and university and still am, and wasn't really want to hang out at parties and things, which is why when we thought about the bar thing, I was like, Oh, I don't really, I don't really go to bars, but yeah.

I imagine there are lots of people like me who are kind of a little bit socially awkward, but who still really want to be in a relationship and who could do with a lot of help with their dating profiles and things like that. Because those are the people who I was like that back in the day. And it took me reading about relationships to really diving, diving into it and then applying the insights to my own life for me to realize, oh, there's actually a method here and it's not that hard. And so if I can find those kind of like nerds rather than the jocks, like my ideal client is not someone who was on the football team at school. There's someone who was...

maybe top 20 in the year group at school and was in the bottom set of PE. That's the person who I think... Booksmart. Yeah, exactly. That's the person. But is it any wonder that your friends come to you for relationship advice? Yeah, all my friends are nerds. So the identity layer is actually massively important. It's more important even than the demographics and psychographics. And that gives you clues because there will be places online where they'll hang out and you can start to then target your marketing at them. So

So step one, who's your ideal client? Step number two, where do they hang out? Step number three, we've got to go to them. And the reason we go to them is because people are busy. It's 2023. We've all got busy, hectic lives, especially post-COVID and all that sort of thing. It just seems like it's nonstop go all the time. So if we can find creative ways to get in front of our ideal client without them having to extend any extra effort, we stand more chance of being able to just start to build rapport and build that relationship with them.

So we need to put things in front of them to start to raise their awareness of our brand and what we're up to. And then step number four, and this is the bit that a lot of people, especially starting out, don't realize. You then have to be tenacious. You have to show up regularly and often with the same consistent message.

Because how many times have you probably seen like ads pop up on as you're scrolling or on telly or something like that? And you see the same ad seven times, 11 times, 20 times. And then you just think, oh, I'm going to buy that thing. And you think you just did it on the spur of the moment, but it's actually because you saw the ad like 20 times. It's sowed the seed of an idea or that brand becomes familiar with you. So for example, like the dating side of things, and if you know that people are book smart,

Well, you could set up a Facebook ad, for example, which gives away your unique seven-step process. Not the whole kit and caboodle, but you could give away all of the IP value if you wanted to. But run a Facebook ad, give away, you know, in exchange for their name, email address, and telephone number, give away a Google Doc which outlines your seven-step process.

And if they're that way inclined, they can follow those steps and go and find the love of their life under their own steam. So it's the reason why I wrote the book is because I know that there's some smart people out there who will read the book, learn what they need to do, like what they need to get from the book. They'll go out there and they'll just execute it. There's a small percentage of people who are able to do that. But we also know there's a bigger percentage of people who get very excited about that seven step process, not quite have the confidence to be able to

do it themselves or can't quite see themselves doing it or whatever, whatever is stopping them from like getting started with it. So who are they going to turn to, to get some help? There's going to be a banging Google doc. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's going to have, it's going to have a couple of case studies in there of like happy, you know, success stories of clients, clients, couples that have got together as a result of the work you've done with them. Maybe you've built a Facebook community and it's got some, you know, clients, it's got some wins in there. So if people like you have your Friday wins, people put, you know, I went out on a date last night. It was absolutely amazing. Hoping to go on a second date behind that. We cut and paste that. We pop that into the Google doc. Yeah.

You know, so we're building up a whole sort of thing around sort of social proof. And it's a Google, like it doesn't need to be a fancy website. You can build a website if you want to, but for now we want to, we want to get something up like bootstrap it. We can make it better later.

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The way that I've approached everything in school and university, it's like trying to aim for perfection. Because when you hand in the assignment, you can't just improve it later. You have to work on it so hard. But you have to remember though, Ali, when you're in medicine, lives depend on it. It has to be perfect. And there's not many things that have that level of jeopardy in them, like what you worked through with medicine. And when it comes to business, I think everybody thinks that it's the equivalent of

somehow walking across the plains of Africa and you know a bit different when you've got to walk 10 miles to the river to get and there's hippos and lions and things actual things that can eat you whereas like in business you can make mistakes you call them failures if you want to but you can use them as opportunities to learn and there's only two things that can possibly go wrong you lose a bit of money or you lose a bit of face so you look a bit stupid or you back to where you started again before yeah and you go again you come up with another idea another google doc another facebook ad another whatever

And the thing is, inside, we think that everybody's watching us. Yeah. I'm thinking all my friends, all the nurses at work, all of my junior doctor colleagues are going to be like, huh, what a twat, this Ali guy thinking he can give relationship advice. He doesn't even have a qualification. Sounds to me like they're not true friends.

Your true friends will be like supportive. My true friends wouldn't care. They'd be like sick. Yeah, exactly. I'm thinking about the colleagues at work. Yeah. Well, screw them. Screw them. Let them deal, you know, do them. And this is about building success for you. Okay. So marketing 101, figure out the target audience. Yep. Where do they hang out? Yep.

Go to them. And what was the last one? Be tenacious. So show up regularly and often with the same consistent message. Do I have to do this via Facebook ads? No. What are the other... You could go... So it could be...

There's probably like dating meetups, for example, where single people go on like, you know, I know you said you don't necessarily like the whole idea of going to a bar. It could be a bit cringy, but there's... I haven't been single for a very long time, at least I don't actually know, but...

I'm kind of making a few assumptions here. Okay, but if I think about it, my ideal target market is basically a professional who is a nerd, who is making decent amounts of money, probably earning at least, I'd say, 50k a year. That is someone working in... Okay, cool. So...

things that I could do to get at that target market. I could run a Facebook ad. I mean, I don't know anything about that, but I'm assuming you can target it at particular occupations. LinkedIn. Loads of these people are on LinkedIn. Yeah, there you go. Loads of them on LinkedIn. And also...

I think one of my friends works at McKinsey, and I know they put on all these afternoon talks and shit at lunchtime. I could say to the friend, hey, I'll do a totally free workshop on helping management consultants with dating. And I could, oh, they love a good PowerPoint. I could put my seven-part method into a good PowerPoint. And if I can get my foot in the door with McKinsey, those people at that lunchtime talk will be perfectly primed to be young people with loads of money,

with shitty dating lives and they could benefit from my model from my model yeah there you go okay nailed it you didn't even need me to give you the blueprint you came up with all of that yourself mate okay and then i've got another friend who works at bane another friend at bcg another friend at deloitte another friend at pwc another friend at goldman sachs even if mckinsey say no i'm sure i could say to all these mates working in all these different companies like actually dot dot and actually i

If I think about it, all my friends working at any kind of finance or tech thing in London, any kind of job in London, all of their workplaces, with the exception of the NHS, do lunchtime teaching type talks. So I could just copy paste message to all of them, be like, hey, I'm doing this thing, totally free workshop. What do you think is going to happen as well? So the first few clients you get in, they're success stories. They follow your methodology. They meet somebody. And then somebody says, oh my God, Ali, you're so happy.

like what's happened how did you meet them yeah like what are they going to say you're going to refer me yeah yeah even offer them affiliate commission wow okay this suddenly seems doable okay fine so i know this now i know i could run a facebook ad even though i mean okay so let's say it's not let's say i don't have access to these kind of networks um

and let's say I don't have any friends working in the sort of places where I could attract my target audience. How would, for example, a Facebook or LinkedIn ad help with something like this?

I've seen ads on Facebook, LinkedIn and stuff, but I have no idea how they work. Yeah, so it accelerates the process. I mean, if you think about it, people are saying that people are sort of mass migration away from Facebook and into TikTok and other things like that. But right now, there's still how many billion, four billion people still registered on Facebook. So you only need 10 people. Surely there's 10 people out there who fit the profile that you've kind of laid out. So it's kind of more to amplify...

I like to think that your first 10 clients probably are already in your network. You probably already know them, all of those people you just listed off. So it might be that that works. And then let's say, for example, if it's so popular and you're getting loads of inquiries, you might then want to turn this into a group coaching program, not a one-to-one coaching program.

right so now rather than helping 10 people take 10 people a year you've got so much demand actually we want to help 50 or 100 or 200 people i could do weekend workshop seminars i could like just rent a hotel conference room in london and like totally put on a workshop if i if i had if i knew people would show up yeah so if you're once like i always recommend like coaches start one-to-one because that's where you sharpen your sword you you learn you see whether your methodology works or not you improve it if there are bits which don't work

But once you've got a proven methodology, quite often then you can transfer it across into a group setting. There'll be a version of it that you can make work. Yeah.

But the challenge is a lot of people don't have demand. So they don't have the size of audience to be able to fill it at scale. So that's where you could use ads then to amplify your message. Everything is downstream of lead generation. That's what I heard in a Dan Priestley interview on a podcast one time. Lead generation. That's what we're talking about, right? Lead generation. We're trying to generate leads by identifying a target avatar, figuring out where they are, going to them and doing it repeatedly. Easy. Yeah.

Why do so many people struggle with this? When you lay it out like that, it just seems so straightforward. Well, I mean, there's technology involved, isn't there? So there's... Like, ads is a science in its own right, and Facebook changed the rules, like, every five minutes as well. But I guess there's technology involved in every job. Like, I learned how to...

do an arterial blood gas, which involves stabbing someone in the arm. I'm sure I can learn how to set up a Facebook ad. How hard can it be? But you're a smart guy, Ali. There's people who are technologically averse. Now, the way I look at that is, is that true or are they using that as a bit of an excuse, a crutch to lean on and say, oh, I'm not very good at this? They fall back on it a little bit.

One of the most common things I hear in businesses are I'm not very good with numbers, right? And that really angers me. I nearly swore then. Really angers me, right? The reason for that is because everything about business involves numbers, okay? Profit and loss, turnover, gross profit, net profit, overheads and expenses, all numbers. Conversion rates, number of leads which you need, number of website visitors, number of likes, comments, and shares you get on your Facebook posts, number of people who like your Facebook page, they're all numbers, okay?

You look at everything within business, it all revolves around numbers in some way, shape or form. So I don't believe business owners can sit there and say, I'm not very good with numbers. However, slight caveat that said, you only have to understand enough about numbers to then be able to delegate responsibility to somebody else.

Because otherwise, again, I see a lot of people who hand off like, "Oh, I'm not very, I don't understand tax, so I'll give it to an accountant." And then they wonder why they get a surprise at the end of the year because the accountant says, "Well, you've got to pay X number of thousands of pounds in tax." "Oh my God, I wasn't expecting that." Well, no, it's because you kind of just delegated responsibility to somebody else. You didn't delegate responsibly, you delegated responsibility and you don't, therefore, that's always going to come back as a shock when you've got to pay tax at the end of the year.

So what you want to do is you want to understand numbers enough so that when you make 10K in a month, you know that... And this is where you get into like profit first territory. Are you familiar with Mike Michalowicz's book, Profit First? So he talks about... I think I am, but not the relationship coach version of me. So in it, he basically talks about like... Because having like five different bank accounts effectively and like...

Starling and Monza, so online banking apps now, have made this so much easier because they have these little things called spaces. So you have one bank account, but you siphon off little bits of money. But he basically says, well, you set aside in the UK your VAT, your corporation tax if you've got employees, PAYE, National Insurance Contributions,

You have a little, I call it the fun pot. So normally for me, that's like buying camera gear. And then the other one is the rainy day fund. So you have a savings kitty for if we had no money for six months, would the business still work, basically function? Yeah.

And then your main account is then just like a float. So just day-to-day expenses, money coming in and out and things like that. And the idea is so that if 10K comes in, well, 2K goes to VAT, 1K goes to corporation tax, 1K goes to national insurance contract. So you divvy it up the moment the money comes in. So by the end of the year, when you do your returns,

You've got the money saved up to pay all of your taxes up front. Hopefully you've got a bit of extra money because you've put some in your fun pot and in your rainy day fund. So you could draw some of that down if you want, you know, and spend that on just fun stuff or reinvest it into the business and things like that. And like, again, the amount of times I hear business owners say, oh, I've got a cash flow problem.

I'm sorry, I'm a total geek when it comes to numbers. You're going to hear me. Cash flow. What do you mean by cash flow? So cash flow, they see it as like the money just basically flowing in and out of the business. Okay, right. So having a cash flow problem, is that just a euphemism for I'm broke? Kind of, basically, because it's not a cash flow problem because if money flows in, it flows straight back out again. So there's no cash flow problem there. They've got two problems, though. The actual real problems are making more money. So this is where we have the pricing conversation. And second to that is then keeping that money. Yeah. Right? Because...

What I typically tend to see is the, I don't know how you're going to explain this to podcast listeners. Hopefully this will work for the video, but people have said turnover starts to increase like that, which is like the dream, isn't it? Straight line upwards. The overheads start to track up with it because we're like, right, we've got money to reinvest, whether that's in staff or...

machinery, kit, whatever it might be, marketing, starts to track up. Now we have a bad month and now our expenses are up here and our revenue's down here. So we're now in this position of loss. And that's where the fear really kicks in for a lot of people. Now normally you can see it because it doesn't just all of a sudden go like that. It starts to sort of tail off. So I'm a big fan of bootstrapping businesses as best you possibly can. Bootstrapping? What does that mean? Keep your expenses as low as you possibly can do.

be really conscientious about where, where and who you're spending your money with. Um, you know, especially on things like marketing, there's like a thousand and one shiny marketing things you could, could spend your money on. We talked about some of them, websites, marketing, branding, you know, lead generation, you'll, you know, you'll get sold those like every day of the week by lots of different people. But, um, and, and,

People invest so much money in those sorts of things on the hope that they will work. So they don't really tend to do their due diligence. Somebody will say, oh, do this and you'll get 10 to 15 leads a week and all that sort of stuff. Invariably from my experience, those two, those, you know, it sounds too good to be true. Invariably it is, but they do tend to cost quite a lot of money. So be very, you know, it's just a cautious cautionary tale about just be careful about letting your expenses track up too much. Another common mistake in business as well is, um,

uh and again it's it's a it's a an irk i've got with marketing is that um people believe the goal in business is to get as many clients as they possibly can do for their business right do you do you agree with that or do you think there's an alternative goal i think based on the capacity pricing conversation that we had my goal is not actually to get 100 clients because i don't think i can service 100 clients because i just don't physically have the time i'd rather get 10 clients who pay me

more yeah then have 100 clients who pay me less so you've got 10 clients to pay you more what does that mean for the business that means i have more time to give to them yeah so better better quality results yeah yeah it means i'm less stressed because i only have 10 people to deal with rather than 50 and it means that through the revenue generated through those 10 people i can then do my pro bono service to my doctors and nurses friends

for free so it's profit to reinvest back into the business yeah so imagine now like imagine if you went from 10 clients to 100 clients what have you got to do you've got to spend loads of money on marketing so all of a sudden the investments like go up tenfold and i'll probably have to hire people as well to deal with 100 clients because it wouldn't just be able to be yeah yeah so collecting clients like yeah i've got no problem you obviously have to do some form of marketing but you have to be savvy about it

Um, you know, out of, I liken it to, um, I call it, it's the marketing mix. Basically you find two, three or four things which work really, really well for your business marketing wise. And then you rinse and repeat those and they might have a half-life. They may only last for so long, especially if they involve technology. Um,

Probably wouldn't surprise you, I've used Facebook ads for my business in the past and I lost nine grand as a result of a mistake I made with running Facebook ads. And the reason for that is because it was working to a certain point, but I made a kind of like cardinal error. In your audiences, you'll have people who are just like ready to buy.

Already in your circle of influence. Okay. Okay. So we reached a point whereby we, all of those people who are in our circle, my circle of influence, who'd, they bought from us. Yeah. And then all of a sudden our conversions dropped off a cliff. So we weren't signing up as many clients. Yet my ads are still running and I'm spending three grand a month. Yeah. And it took me three months to figure out what had gone wrong with my,

Again, numbers. I was trying to analyze the numbers, but I couldn't figure out what the problem was with it. And eventually I figured it out. But in the meantime, I've spent three months spending three grand. So it's a costly mistake, right? So we kind of got on this when you said that you don't like it when people say, I'm not good with numbers. Yeah. Like half the people I know, even the doctors would say that they're not good with numbers. So does that mean- That's worrying. Well, exactly. Yeah. So does that mean that people who are not good with numbers can't run a business?

Not necessarily. In many respects, like if you're numerically dyslexic, for example, then like I see the books over your shoulder there. It's an unfair advantage because it forces you to be creative in other ways. So you make up for it in other aspects of the business.

It might be that you've got to find the support of somebody who does get numbers within the business. So have a mentor or a coach or an accountant, some kind of an advisor who can help you out in that respect and just say, oh, you're overspending a bit here or you could be making a bit more profit there. I think if I'm being honest, most people I know who say they're not good with numbers, they're not actually numerically dyslexic. Maybe like one in 30 of them, if I think of people that I know.

They managed to do drug dosing completely fine. They managed to do like kind of weight and drug calculations. But maybe because they didn't do A-level maths or A-level further maths, they think, oh, I'm not good with numbers. And it's like a story that they just told themselves repeatedly to the point that the thought of dealing with tax or hearing fancy words like operating profit and margin and all that shit.

gives a real kind of emotional like sense of overwhelm yeah i think it's a sense of stepping outside the comfort zone rather than really being a case of being numerically dyslexic the motivators though to understand like just profit the goal the goal in business is to make money by the way yeah like have a profitable sustainable business um and that is ultimately the thing that everybody wants yeah if you said to those people that you could be making 3k a month doing your business will that prompt you to learn about the numbers they'd be like well yes obviously

But yeah, I think it's one of those excuses, just like I'm not good with technology. Yeah, but we like, come on, let's be fair, tax is boring. I'm not going to lie. Sorry if there's any accountants listening to this, but it is dull. But again, just you don't need to understand tax and things like that. Leave that to an accountant. But so long as you understand turnover and net profit, just those two numbers. Yeah, how much money is coming in and how much you have left. Yeah, then that's a good start. Right. So at this point in our relationship coaching practice,

By the way, do I need a name? Do I need a business card? Do I need a website? Like, what's the deal with all this stuff? Not yet. Those can all come later. But to launch a business, you just need to get out there and start talking to people. And should I register the business? Should I make a business bank account? No, none of that. So the reason for that is so...

Now, I have to know my numbers here to be able to give advice. So in the UK, for example, there's a certain amount of money which you can earn on an annual basis as a side hustle without having to register it as a business. £1,000 or something like that. So you could, for example, just go out and your first client actually charge them £900 and stay within that threshold just to try it out, just to see whether it works, for example. Yeah.

uh you can go self-employed to start off with and then obviously as part of a you just have to do a tax return at the end of the financial year declare any income pay the tax keep it nice and simple you don't need a business bank account or a limited company or anything like that you know some sometimes when you're starting out simple is better um that said it's i think sometimes it's good to offer the the other flip side to it as well so for example when i

shifted from my agency practice, which I was running into the coaching practice, there were certain things that I wanted to set out intentionally to do things the right way with. So for example, I knew that I wanted to earn 100k a year in my coaching practice. I set that as like my big hairy audacious goal from year one, like that's what I wanted to achieve. And so 100k business has to be VAT registered.

So from day one, I went limited. I went VAT registered and I set out with that intention. And part of that was like just future pacing myself because that's the business I wanted to be, right? So you can have the more...

laissez-faire approach might be and people vary so if you're slightly risk averse you're not sure whether this has got legs or not let's just dip our toe in and try it on for size and see whether the shirt fits or if you're like no I'm going to make this a thing I'm going for it I'm going to

do it properly. Let's set up a limited company. Go for it. Okay. I've just asked Chad GPT, give me name ideas for a relationship coaching business where I do six months transformations for people to help them find a life partner. And I've got a bunch of names. I like option number nine is connection catalyst. Nice. And I've just searched for that on Google and there is in fact a connection catalyst limited, but it was dissolved in 2018. So that's probably good. Cool.

Connection Catalyst. That's the name of the name of my business. Boom. Okay. Job done. So the stuff that we've gone through so far, kind of figuring out the business model, identifying the target market, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Would that happen in like one coaching session with you? Or like what's the process for like an ordinary person starting completely from scratch? And how long does it take to get them to a idea that they then take action on? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it's like anything. Sometimes people get it in one session and away they go. Sometimes people, everybody operates at different speeds. So sometimes it might be a three or six or 12 month journey, which they've got to go through. And especially like one of the things we were talking about was running, running this as a side hustle. Yeah. So if you've got a full time job and you have less resources available, obviously it's going to take a bit, little bit longer potentially to achieve those goals. But yeah,

I did work with one client who, so they joined Fearless on the Tuesday. We did a coaching call on the Wednesday. They had two sales calls on the Thursday and Friday. And they doubled their investment that they paid me in that. So in four days, they'd made double the money back that they'd invested with me. So it can happen super fast.

On the flip side of that, I worked with a communications consultant and she was very honest up front. She was like, I've got some money to save. I'm not desperate for clients. I've got one specific client I want to work with. So she was in the educational space. She wanted to work with UCAS and that was like her dream client. And so she did some other bits on the side as and when they came in, but it was effortless, organic work.

And it took a year, but eventually she closed 180 grand contract. So in her words, it was worth the wait. And that was when she'd been doing sort of previously sort of day rate at like 200 pounds, 250 pounds a day to then get 180 grand contract. It was life changing. That was the catalyst for her communications consultancy then to go on and get bigger and better clients off the back of that. Nice. So, okay, question.

Let's say we'd taken the conversation towards the relationship thingy. We went down this route of like, what's the transformation you can get them in what amount of time? And I just kind of went with that because you pushed me in kind of in that direction. But now I think about it, what is wrong with just charging hourly?

I'm teeing you up for a lay-up here. Thank you. What's the problem with hourly pricing? Or like a day rate, that seems cool. I did a video about this. I actually truly believe that hourly rate charging is unethical. And the reasons for this is, so imagine if you did want to go and get a website done, for example.

Well, maybe you're doing a beauty parade and there's three web designers, okay? So web designer number one comes along, Ali, and he says to you, well, I can build you a website. I'll do everything you want to do. It's going to take me 10 hours and I'll charge you £100 an hour for it. So about £1,000. And you think, okay, cool. Yeah.

So he goes away. What he forgot to tell you though, was he's not been doing it for very long. He's not particularly good at it because he's not charging enough. He's taken on too many clients. So he comes back eventually about five months later with a bit of a hack together sort of website. It doesn't have the blog or the shopping cart on there that he promised you. And what do you say? Where's my blog and my shopping cart? And can you add them on? And he says, well, yeah, I can add them on, but it's going to cost you another five hours.

And you're like, well, okay, but I thought you told me it's going to take 10. And so he reluctantly agrees. He says, okay, well, I'll just build it. Now you're annoyed that he's, you know, at one end of the spectrum as a customer. He's now a bit like, you know, reticent because like he's not getting paid what he thinks he's worth because now he's doing work for free effectively. Most people are like ethically, morally upstanding human beings and they wouldn't just tag on the extra money. But the mere fact that you could tells me that hourly rate charging is a broken business model. Okay. So there's our first clue.

that hourly rates don't work right web designer number two comes along right so he says to you he's more experienced he says ali uh could build your website in in 30 days um it'll have everything which you want on it um and um i'm gonna charge you 100 pounds an hour for it um but because i'm better than the other guy i can do it faster so it'll take me five hours to do it

I'm thinking, well, you're getting a good deal as the customer, but surely the guy who can do it better and faster and deliver better results, why does he get paid less than the guy who's less experienced and is still learning and making a bit of a hash of it? So again, tells you that there's nothing unethical going on there, but it tells you that hourly rates is a broken business model. The incentives are wrong here. Yeah.

So now we get where designer number three comes along. It's absolute like website ninja. He says, Ali, I'm gonna build you the website in seven days. I have a shopping cart. It'll have the blog on there that you wanted to be able to edit all of the content yourself. We'll get it connected up to Google store. So your products will be listed in there within about 14 days. And we'll be selling your products. And by the way, if we can't get you a 10 X ROI on the investment you make with us within the first 12 months, we'll give you your money back for that. Plus we'll also pay you a thousand pounds for wasting your time. We

Which you can spend on the other two people who are kind of playing at it. Yeah.

That's someone I'd be like, wow, this is like some good energy. Cool. Ask me how much? How much is it? 10K. 10K. Yeah, let's go. Cool. But it's 10 times the price of the other two, if you think about it. Yeah, because he's got a clear idea about, he's got his processes down, it's all systemized. He knows that he only works with YouTube influencers, for example. So he only has one type of client service. He knows that he could, I say he, it could be a she as well. Yeah.

that they can deliver remarkable results and they can do it predictably. And therefore they can put that guarantee in there that they're going to deliver you those results. So the value proposition is that much stronger. Hourly rates don't exist in that transaction, even if it only takes that person an hour to build it. Yeah. Nice. So if I were to start starting a relationship coaching business, I shouldn't think hourly pricing is my go-to. Definitely not. It's got to be based on the results which you deliver for clients. Pure and simple. Yeah.

is there any business that is good to do hourly pricing on like it could i not just do some one-on-one consulting e-calls and oh i don't have to think too hard about it they can just book via canley link or something you could do but listen to the do you notice the language you used and oh i could just do this it kind of feels a bit like you're just playing at it i'm just half-assing it yeah so are you serving the client when you're running your business like that

No, I am essentially serving myself because I don't want to work too hard. Yeah, exactly.

He kind of made it about you. And in this instance, like, well, in any instance, the client is the most important person in the relationship. So it's the same reason why people get really hung up with sales, like sales calls. People have so much fear around selling. And they get onto sales calls and next thing you know, their palms are going sweaty, their heart starts racing. It gets to that really pointy end of the conversation where the person says, "How much?"

And then they kind of retreat like Gollum and then they're like, I'll pass. Right. And you kind of, at that point, what have they done? They've made everything entirely about them. They're no longer serving the client. Like how can you operate with the client's best interests at heart when you're only thinking about yourself? Nice. It's the same reason why people in like when they're selling, they have this massive fear of no fear of rejection.

I mean, it's a human instinct. We're herd animals at the end of the day, pack animals. We like to be accepted. So if we hear the word no, we take it as a massive rejection. But what are they actually saying no to? They're saying no to the offer. Yeah, saying no to the offer, which is attached to... Is it attached to the person or the business? It's attached to the business. Attached to the business. Yeah. Right. And this is where you get into just a really simple model of how to...

When things aren't going to plan in your business, normally it's because things aren't going to plan with you. That's the royal you, not just you, Ali, but the royal you. So imagine we've got Ali over here and we've got Ali's business over here. If Ali's value systems are all over the place, his relationship is up or down, he's just having a bad day and he walks into the office and those two things are attached, what's going on? The business is having a wobble as well. But what the business needs is...

Solid foundations. So all the things which you've been through with your coaches and mentors, the growth journey, but in the new business, it's all about building solid foundations. Having a team in who understand what their roles and responsibilities are, systems and processes like SOPs, standard operating procedures, all of that sort of stuff. And the key thing is as well that your business's oxygen is money.

It needs a good income to provide security. That's like the walls, if you like, and the roof going on the top to protect it. And what it needs is so you can have all of your wobbles as a business owner going on over here. But when you do show up to...

for work, for business. Like you're a rock for your business and then you switch off your iPad or your laptop or whatever at the end of the day at five o'clock and then you can carry on having your wobbles over here. Like the business. So when somebody says no, they just don't get the value that your business offers. It's not personal. It's not an insult. It's not anything. It's the business which they have a problem with. I love it. Okay. So I've got my business connection catalyst and I've managed to land one

free workshop at like a consulting firm of some description and because i listened to the daniel priestly interview on ali abdal's deep dive podcast i chose not to charge for that workshop so because i wanted to get my foot in the door because everything is downstream of lead generation and i've got like 15 people in a room they've showed up they've their arms are folded they're a bit skeptical they're like you know what is this relate connection catalyst bs and

And because I know my shit, I prepared my talk. I've prepared my PowerPoint and my slides. I take them through the seven-part method. I may have read Russell Brunson's book, Expert Secrets, which talks about exactly how to do this. And then what do I do at the end of it when it comes to telling people about my thing? Well, first mistake is you wait until the end of your presentation to tell them about what the next step is. Okay, interesting. So like...

Do you not get the ick whenever we've all sat in these presentations, right? Workshops, conferences where the speaker is like building up to this crescendo, this offer and they get to the end of it and then they start talking about their value ladder. Oh, we normally sell it for this, but we're going to today, we're going to knock down the price, but we're going to sell it. And we all get the, we don't like that bit, right? Yeah.

So put the offer at the start of the presentation. Okay. It's a bit like, because then they've got something that they can measure the value against. Okay. So at the start of the presentation, you're going to do your, hey, that's great. Thank you so much all for showing up today. Massively appreciate it. We're going to make this a really fun and interactive workshop. I've got seven really cool steps, which I'm going to take you through. And by the end of it, you'll know everything you need to go to get your dream partner. But just before we go into that, I just want to tell you a little bit more about me and what I do. So then we pivot into the pitch where you can tell people about

your credibility, your authority, like why you, all of those sorts of things. And it's okay at that point to say, actually, we have a coaching program which takes people on this journey. So if you go through the seven steps, you can take it away, execute it if you think you can. But if you feel you want a bit of help, get in touch with us. But one of the things I'm interested to learn about is how ready you all are in terms of getting yourself out there in the dating game. So

We've created a very short 15 question questionnaire. I think you know where I might be going with this. On Score app. Here's the QR code. Scan the QR code and just quickly take the quiz. And then you sit back two or three minutes. Everybody scans it. They go through. People love taking quizzes. And what it tells them is you could make it about what type of data am I? So like a profile type quiz. Yeah.

It could be which area of the dating game do you feel is the worst that you might need to work on? Or where do you feel you could get the best results if you did X, Y, and Z? So you can give them some kind of a specific outcome for it. Now you've got the leads, which is great. Name, email address, telephone number, hopefully, and a bit of data about them through your score app. And all of that icky sales bit is kind of done now. We can just park that and we can just go and deliver the value. Man, that's good.

That is good. I'm going to start doing that at the start of my keynotes and stuff. Because people love a quiz. And it's so much nicer to have at the start than at the end. Yeah. It's like a little icebreaker. Yeah. And they get a bit of information. We get the salesy thing just out of the way and done. And everybody can relax. Yeah. Do you think you're going to get better or worse results after that? Probably better. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. That's more chill. Yeah. That's way more chill.

Yeah. And then like them doing the quiz as well, like the thing with a lot of these quizzes is that it makes you realize all the holes in your knowledge. This is like one of the things in learning design as well. You give them you give the class a quiz up front before you teach them the stuff. So they see how bad they are and they're like, oh, crap. OK, I don't know this. I'm therefore going to pay attention. Whereas if they don't know what they don't know. Yeah, it's it's less powerful.

Well, and what's interesting as well is like, if you do it at the start and nobody really knows what to expect, whatever you kind of throw at them, they're more inclined to do it. Yeah. Because, and I can't remember who it was, but getting people to take action. So I think it was Simon Sinek talks about the laws of diffusion, about how

So you have like the early adopters and then, you know, as people, as you implement change, at what point do people kind of adopt that change and then start to kind of get engaged with it? And then you get the laggards of people who are just like, they just won't do anything that you throw at them at all. It's a similar sort of process when you're doing sort of presentations and things like that as well. Yeah.

Where am I going with this? So, um, and what kind of backs this up? There's a, another great internet marketer, a guy called Frank Kern, who's like brilliant in like the copywriting sort of, um, space and internet marketing space. And he did a talk in front of several thousand people and he said, I'm going to, um, I'm going to give you the secret so that you can all be millionaires, but you need to follow these very simple steps. Hmm.

And he listed off the steps, which was basically going by this book, make sure you follow the steps in the book.

"Read the book ten times and follow all the steps, and then you will get all the riches that you want." The book was called The Richest Man in Babylon. Oh, yeah. And as he's walking people through these steps, the camera panned around to the audience, and he's like, "Right, I want you to go to Amazon or Barnes & Noble. I want you to search for this book, so get your phones out and search for this book. I want you to buy the book now."

And it pans to the audience. And it's like several thousand people there. And you could count the number of people who had their phones out buying this book on like your hands and your toes. So there's 20 people out of thousands of people who are about to be delivered the secret to buy a book. And yet they can't even find the energy to take the first step to buy the book. Yeah.

let alone then actually follow the steps in it and execute it. It's probably like one person out of that entire audience who did it. So this is like the, I don't know what you'd call it, the resistance you're up against. Not just when you're trying to sell something. In marketing, there's this natural sort of resistance which you're fighting against. There's a Twitch streamer called Ludwig, who's also a YouTuber. He's absolutely huge. And he has a YouTube video, which is something like,

how to be a successful streamer in like 10 steps. And it's like a sort of hour long video. And he's like, starts off by being like, okay, I'm going to teach you the 10 step process of how to be a successful streamer. Why should you listen to me? Well, because I've blown up and I've done this and I've done this and I've done this. So you really should listen to me. I'm going to tell you the steps. Let's go for it. Step number one, pause this video right now and just answer these three questions. What's your goal? How much time are you willing to put in blah, blah, blah. And then he's like, no, I'm serious. I know, you know, I'm sure you guys are going to keep watching, but like genuinely pause the video right now. I just

I seriously pause the video and write down these things. And he says that like five or 10 times. And so I, you know, I was like, okay, you know what? I'm gonna pause the video. I wrote down those things. And then I pressed play. And he's like, right, I estimate...

Less than 10% of you actually stop, actually pause the video. If that's you, then quit right now because there's no way you're ever going to make it in the streaming world. The streaming world requires so much this, this, this, and this. I am the biggest streamer in the world. And the fact that you've literally not followed me saying to you 10 times, pause the fucking video and write these three things down means there's just no way in hell you're going to make it. So switch this video off right now and just...

And the comments in the video are like, oh my God, he called me out. He called me out. He called me out so much. And I felt good because I was like, I actually paused the video and took action. But I could have imagined a time in my life where I was like, oh, you know, it's fine. It's not going to work anyway. But I was like, this guy knows his stuff.

If I follow the steps of a guy who's done the thing, then it's obviously going to get results. It's natural selection, basically. That's what's going on in that moment. And then people are sat there at home going, why him? Why not me? And it's like, well, you didn't do something simple. You didn't take the simple first step to start to move towards your goals. You made up any excuse or put up any brick wall for yourself that you can possibly find to not make it work. I think there's almost a natural kind of defense mechanism that people have when it comes to

I think especially in the UK, I feel like Americans have less of this defense, at least from what I've seen at conferences. Any sort of a natural defense to anything that seems even remotely like, oh, this person's trying to tell me what to do, or they're trying to promise something that's too big. And this sort of natural skepticism that we have towards

following the advice of someone who's been there and done that and we don't have that skepticism when it comes to a tennis lesson or a guitar teacher but we have that skepticism when it comes to a sales coach or marketing coach or a business coach or anything remotely in the make money realm why any any thoughts on that um i think it's down to just um what our pre preconceived ideas are about that thing like you kind of know a little bit

about, like, if you're going to show up to a tennis lesson, you know that you're probably going to have to run about a bit and swing your racket and hit a few balls, right? So that you've kind of got a preconceived idea about it. I think to a lot of people, there is a certain element of mystery around what business is, what it means. And I always say to people, like, you can do the website and the branding and the domain names and all of the things, like the goal setting, the business planning, all that sort of stuff. But

90% of everything you need to learn about business you will get from just getting out there and selling something and it doesn't matter whether it's 20 pounds to mow somebody's lawn if it's a you know a six-month transformational dating program it doesn't matter what it is get out there and sell something for some money and see how you feel about it afterwards.

It's as simple as that. You'll learn 90% of everything you need to know because within having to do that, you had to market because you had to make somebody aware of

that you had a program to sell or that you had a lawnmower to push around somebody's garden or whatever it might be. You had to sell something because you had to have that awkward conversation. Okay, yeah, I'm interested in you mowing my lawn, but how much is it going to cost? Well, I'll do it for 20 quid. Oh gosh, well, my gardener charge is 15 pounds now. Why are you so much better? So in that sales process, you learn something about yourself and about your processes and your business and all those sorts of things.

Then you move into client onboarding, giving somebody the next steps. What's their first session? What does that look like? What time am I going to show up with my lawnmower? Then it moves into client fulfillment, actually doing the work.

At the end of it, the doing the work is tricky because unless you're getting feedback throughout it, if somebody's watching over you whilst they mow the lawn and they have a go at you because your stripes aren't quite right on the lawn or whatever, or maybe in the coaching program, somebody sat there a bit confused and saying, well, I don't think that's going to work for me because I don't want to use that app for my dating for whatever reason. So you might get some feedback within the fulfillment. But then at the end of it, you can then see, well, does the client pay you and are they happy?

or do they not pay you? Are they unhappy and leave negative reviews? But within that, what can I learn from it? Yeah, it's a fairly step-by-step process. Yeah, basically. But along the way, for some reason in people's head, there's peril. Oh, what if I put my marketing out there and it doesn't work? What if I try and sell something and they say no? What if I...

try and onboard the client and then they backtrack on the agreement what if i try and start doing the thing and find that i'm not very good at it uh what if i when i've done it and i'm not very good at it i get a negative review so there's peril you know think about harry potter and the journeys that he goes through there's adventures there's peril all along the way in there but again it comes back to what's the two things that could go wrong in business you look a bit stupid or you end up losing a bit of money and actually neither of them are that bad in the grand scheme of things

Yeah, I think one of the things that really helped simplify the whole business stuff for me is just appreciating that there are only a finite number of actual business models that you could follow. There's like the service-based business model where you are selling a service and you do something and someone finds the thing valuable or you help them with something, they find the thing valuable and they pay you for it. Cool. Or you make some kind of product.

whether it's a physical product or a like online product whatever the thing is and someone finds the thing they pay you for the thing and that's all well and good and then maybe on the side you have like a content business model which is like you make the content the platforms pay you for it and then you sell something either a good or a service to someone further down the line essentially outside those three

Then you start getting into complicated territory, like, for example, you know, day trading and sort of trying to use money to make money type stuff. And it starts to get complicated. And I think when most people think of, oh, I want to make money on the internet, I want to start a business, they don't think, oh, I'll just sell a service or sell a product. They think, oh, my God, there's all these different options out there. There's like the day trading, the paid surveys, the this, the that, start a YouTube channel, become a TikToker.

I guess I could, I don't know, start a web design agency. It feels like one option out of many. But whenever I speak to actual entrepreneurs, it's like they've built a service business or they've built a product business. And that's kind of all there is to it.

Are there any other models that are missing? How do you think about this, simplifying this? I suppose you've got the passive income model. I think that's kind of what you're alluding to. Again, there's a lot of people who have sold the dream by influencers out there about building passive income, but passive income is based on active income. Where does active income come from? Products and services. Basically. All the roads lead back to that, basically. I don't believe there are any other models out there. Yeah.

No. Nice. I like it. I think it really simplifies things. Okay. So I've been working with you and we've said, and I've said to you, Robin, right, you know, these are my slides for my talk at McKinsey. And you're like, hang on, I think you should put your pitch at the start. You're telling me about this thing called ScoreApp, link down below, where I can build a scorecard or a quiz or something. And I'm like, oh, cool. And then we're like practicing the presentation and stuff.

And then I go to the session and I'm like, you know, we check in afterwards. I message you on WhatsApp or something. And I'm like, Robin, the session went great. I've already got three people at the end of it who came up to me and who said that they wanted my coaching services. And at that point I felt scared and I was like, okay.

So I said, I'll get back to them. So I've got their numbers. What happens next? Well, there's nothing to be. So again, if there's a fear factor around that transaction having to happen, well, let's see if we can eliminate that from the process a little bit. So what might be a bit of a compromise there that you might feel more comfortable with? Could it be something like, well, maybe let's just do a 30 minute chat, see if it's a good fit.

Oh, that sounds good. I like that phrase. Let's see if we gel together. Let's see if we can work together. You've got a bit of data about them already. And that's a free chat. It's a free chat. Some people you could pay, some you could charge for it if you wanted to, a small amount if you wanted to get commitment. But given they've sat through like a 40 minute presentation with you, filled out your scorecard, you've already built up a bit of trust. They know you from your YouTube channel, for example. They're more than likely going to show up. So free chat takes all of the risk out of it for both of you.

You still need a process for that chat. There needs to be some sort of structure for that. So you take the person on a bit of a journey. But ultimately what you're looking for is like that chat, it's a qualification process. Think of it as like an interview.

they're interviewing you to see whether they can work with you but you're also interviewing them to see whether it's a good fit okay and i i have a rule of three for those those chats um three red flags if i spot three things during that conversation where i think hmm not sure about that um i'll try i'm gonna have to think of some examples now just so you've got something at this point of reference but um it could be that um

I don't know. Maybe they worked with three dating coaches before and it didn't work out. Okay, that's interesting. Why didn't it work out? Is it the date three? It'd be unusual for them to have found three of the worst dating coaches and it not work out. Or is it just a coincidence? Or is it them that could be the problem? And a lot of people don't like making it about the client necessarily, but we want to focus on them and have their best interests at heart. We don't want to take their money if there's going to be no chance of them...

meeting the love of their life at the end of it, right? That's the right thing to do. What other red flags could there be? It could be if like all the way through that chat, they're like, how much does it cost? How much does it cost? How much does it cost? How much does it cost? How much does it cost? And you want to pace them. You could either be transparent and just give them the price and say, but how I would position that is,

I'm going to give you the price, but we're still going to go through a process on this course. You get value from it. And at the end of it, I want you to tell me yes or no, whether you feel that that's a fair exchange, whether you think that's good value for money and whether we're going to work together or not. But don't choose to buy this product purely based on price.

And then you'd give them the price up front? Yeah, that's it. And you could give them the price. Okay. So again, there's rules of engagement there, but I'd kind of be thinking, okay, why are they so desperate? Because it might be that maybe they're speaking to three dating coaches. And I'd be like, okay, well, can I be the last one you speak to? And the reason I'd want to be the last one is because now they've got all of the information from the other two, and they're going to get some more information from me. They have everything they need to know now to make a decision. And I can help them make that decision.

even if it's going and working with one of my competitors because they're going to get better results with steve who works with people just like you yeah like this isn't a good fit that's okay that's a good result steve is a jock you're a jock yeah he was on the football team you guys would get identity layer we're back to identity layer if we just don't think it's a good fit yeah cool okay

But that could be a red flag. And there's others as well. It could be they want to rush the process. Maybe they're like, I have to meet somebody next week because I'm going to a wedding. Like this cannot fail. Right. That's not how we work. This is a six month process we're going to take you through. Yes, we have had some people who've done it quickly. So all the way through the process, you're kind of managing expectations. Yeah.

you're also they'll be raising concerns you're addressing their concerns um some people call those objections i don't objections a bit harsh like hard yeah uh normally it's like people if it's genuine people are just raising their concerns yeah how do you address concerns you have a conversation about it yeah chat yeah nice okay so i do these calls um i do my 30 minute session and of this like of the three two of them are like at the end of it what what do i say at the end of it i'm like

You know, we've gone through this process and presumably I... So if I was working with you one-on-one, we'd figure out the process together. But like, if someone's listening to this and is not working with you one-on-one, are there any books that will teach me about this process? How does it work? Is this like... Is it technically like a sales course? So like books about sales would be the thing? Yeah.

Yeah. So, um, uh, just trying to, now I'm trying to think of some sales, good sales, good quality. Or like people who do sales training. Yeah. There's a guy called, um, Benjamin Dehaney. Um, he's a, he's an Aussie guy. He, he's got a big beard and wears a bright red baseball cap. Nice. Um,

So he's worth checking out. He does a lot of telesales-type training and just how he A introduces the conversation, but B also pitches the offer and deals with objections, the types of questions he asks. I mean, a lot of it's like hamming it up for social media and things like that, but actually there's a lot of truth in the way that he positions the conversations. So he's excellent. There's another guy called David the Sales Angel, who is also brilliant as well to follow.

He's a bit more hard-nosed sometimes, but one of the nice things is, and I don't know how ethical this is, but he does record his, like live record his sales conversations he has with prospects, his own prospects for his business. So he's actually having real-life conversations with people. And again, how he sort of positions people

you know, crossing the chasm from A to B, you know, gap selling and that sort of thing. It's brilliant. Gap selling is a brilliant book. And even if people just like search sales, I've just searched sales training on YouTube and there's just loads of stuff. Yeah. Chris, Chris Doe also talks about an amazing book called Socratic Selling.

Which is, again, very conversational. You imagine like Socrates, it's a philosophical approach to asking good questions, basically. Oh, this is a really old school book. Yeah. You can't get it. I don't think it's not an audio book for sure. I think it's only a hardback, which you have to buy. The alpha is in the books that are not available on Kindle these days. Yeah. This is great. Okay. We'll put links to it in the show notes and the video description to all of this stuff. It's exciting. And then I guess...

The client starts with me and I've got my day job on the side. I'm hopping on the Zoom calls with them and I'm sort of making it up as I go along, presumably. Well, you've got your sort of seven step, you know, framework, which loosely you're kind of working to. Yeah.

Coaching has a bit of flow to it. So sometimes the client might show up with a bit of a curveball, you know, something which has happened from one week to the next, which you have to address, you know, and work through with them. So it might be that, but, you know, over the course of the six months, you're going to make sure that loosely you stick to the plan and get them to work through each of those steps in your seven step process. Nice.

Sounds pretty doable. I remember I launched… I'd been coaching for seven years. I cut my cloth doing one-to-one for three of those first three years. Then I got busy, just too much demand. So I was like, "Right, I've got to go group." At the time, that was the only option I saw of it. I think it was 2018, I did my launch. I started the launch in October.

By end of November I had 24 people signed up. My goal was to get the first cohort of 30 people into the group. So I got 24 people signed up and then I had to take break over Christmas. And then I was like, damn, I'm starting this thing on the 1st of January and I haven't built anything yet.

Because I had this idea in my head of, I didn't want it to just be me talking because when people learn, you have to get the different modalities down. So audio-visual kinesthetic. So if it's just me talking, it's just audio-visual. It hasn't got any of the kinesthetic stuff in there. So I wanted to have a portal. I wanted to have a really decent workbook and various things like that. So I literally had to lock myself in a room for five days between Christmas and New Year. My wife hated me that week.

and just build the damn thing. It just had to be done. And I think, again, this is where a lot of people get tripped up. They're like, I've got to build the perfect product before I launch anything. Like I can't possibly, I've got to cover everything off. And I was like, well, so I locked myself in the room for five days, shot all of the videos. I built the workbook. I got quite ill in the process as well because I pushed myself like way, way too hard, but I got the job done. And sure enough, I started delivering the thing. And then there was,

Two or three modules where people were just like, no, this doesn't work, Robin. Because I asked for honest feedback and they were like, these videos just don't work. This worksheet doesn't work. So I was like, cool, okay, we'll change them. We'll drop them out. There was two or three things that were just neglected. We just hadn't planned for during, you know, when I designed the thing in that short period of time.

um so structuring in a way that was adaptable that we could just add bits in take bits out you know and make it work better um worked really well if you try and i've seen so many business owners who spend months and months and months designing the ultimate like program or course or product or whatever it is and then look they launch the thing and then there's crickets and they get like it's quite disappointing um you know um

Eric Reese wrote a great book, The Lean Startup, where he talks about creating a minimum viable version of it. So if you could create 80% of the end products, but in the shortest possible time, what would that look like?

Then let's say, if your product, if you'd spent 12 months designing it, well, if we could build that first MVP in a month and then launch it and get a few early adopters onto it, going back to Simon Sinek's thing, and we get some feedback and we improve it. And then a month later, we get some feedback and improve it and we get a few more people. So we're building our audience as we grow. We're improving the product as we go. So that rather than...

you know, getting to like this point and start here, get to here. So we've had a little bit of an improvement on our products with just one cycle. If we've had 12 feedback loops happen during that time, your product's going to be like way better. Plus because you've been building an audience as you go, when the product's reached its like beta level and we're ready to launch, you've got a prebuilt audience to go, right, here's my thing. And I see so many business owners who

Yeah, their product's great. Don't get me wrong. Product's brilliant. But they've put no time into building an audience. And sometimes it's like chicken and egg. Which do you do first? I'm very much in the build the audience, whatever that looks like. If you could, I don't know, get a Facebook group to like 500 to 1,000 people, then do a product launch. And you've got that pre-built warm audience to then launch something into. Yeah.

Final couple of things I want to talk about. What are the biggest mistakes you see people make on like in the early stages of the entrepreneurial journey? So, I mean, hourly rates we talked about comparisonitis, like the moment you compare yourself to other people, like again, things start to creep in like imposter syndrome. You start to self-doubt. You start to

One of the things you mentioned, oh, you know, there's people out there and they're doing it and they're absolutely killing it. Oh, so why me? But that's actually going to stop you from starting anything. Like if you don't even, what was the famous quote? You miss 100% of the shots you don't take. I can't remember who that was by, but it's that sort of philosophy. So the best thing you can do, everybody has something unique to offer.

Think about it, there's hundreds of thousands of business books out there, so why should I write another business book? Well, it's because it's me, it's unique. You're writing a book, there's going to be something unique in that book that only you're able to convey your message in your own unique way. Comparisonitis is like the death of most entrepreneurs.

I get it. It's quite hard, you know, to face up to the fact that there's going to be challenges, potential failures, knockbacks. It's going to be hard work and things like that. But let's not like stop before we've even got started, basically. One thing that people struggle with is, yeah, just to this point, you know, why would anyone sign up to my relationship coaching business? There are other relationship coaches out there with more experience who are charging less or maybe charging more, but whatever that thing might be.

And if I were starting this relationship business from scratch, I would be feeling a lot of imposter syndrome because I'd be like, yeah, I don't have all the clients that these people have. So how might I approach that if I were thinking about it? How much do you want it to work? A lot. A lot. 100%. I'm all in. I'm just going to go for it anyway. I know that these things are there, these challenges, these worries are there and they're real. Yeah.

But can I see myself just working through that? I guess the fear that would hold me back is this thing of what if it doesn't work? Okay. Imagine in 12 months time it's worked. Yeah, then my life would have changed. Okay. But in 12 months time, what does that business look like? What's given you the confidence for it to have worked?

If I can land even five clients at that time. Five clients. Okay, so there we go. So five clients. Well, what's the route to five clients? Just our first client. Okay. So there's these little, they're called OKRs, objectives and key results, right? Amazing book. It's like a library recommendation this week. Measure what matters. Measure what matters. Absolutely.

Objectives and key results, that's what OKR stands for. And the idea is that you have one overarching objective and then there's a series of key results which kind of lead you. They give you little signals that we know we're on track to achieve our objective. So if your goal is to have a successful dating coaching business, which is making 25K a year and it's got 10 clients in it, well, step number one is a client.

step number 0.5 is to go and have one of those first five conversations chats that we talked about i should have started with step three step number 0.01 is like to go and put yourself forward to go and do one of the talks so it's like there's these little steps you know that you're kind of on track so reminding yourself um about the smallest first step uh the second thing is also it's i call it the truth exercises reminding yourself what you know to be true about you

So Ali, and this is really hard as an exercise, but list off 10 things that you know are true about you. Right now? Yeah, right now. Okay. 10 things that I know are true about me. Yeah. Are we talking, I mean like- Anything, life, business, doesn't matter. I'm male. Yeah. I'm five foot 11 and a half, but I go by six foot one on hinge, obviously. Yeah.

I enjoy playing video games, though I don't make much time for it. I enjoy reading books. I have a YouTube channel. I have a podcast. I went to medical school. I vaguely enjoyed working as a doctor. I used to play chess and would like to get more into it. I like playing the guitar. I love musical theatre and Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift. I'd like to release an album of songs one day.

Cool. I think that's about 10. Yeah. At least. And you could probably come up with a hundred different things, a thousand different things, which you know to be true about you. And the thing is, nobody can take those away. You own those things. They are like truths about you. Right. And so alongside that, there was a journey. The makeup of you made those truths happen in 12 months time. What do you want to be true about you? I'd like to be a published author. I'd like to have written a book I'm proud of.

I'd like to have shored up the foundations of the business. I'd like to have lived in Austin for a bit, you know, a few things like that. Okay. So one little tweak to that is the language which you used. So you said, I'm going to, I'm going to. So when you say I'm going to, it kind of gives you permission to kind of put it off as a future. Okay. So when you're creating future truths, you have to treat them like they've already happened. Cool. So you just change the language that I have. I am. Cool. Yeah. I'm a published author. I have lived in Austin for a few months and

I've written a book I'm proud of. I am currently working on my second book. I have built my business in a sensible, operationally effective way, etc. Yeah, there you go. So that's Ali's identity in 12 months' time. That's who you are. I encourage everybody to... I call it my morning formula, although ironically, I only ever read it in the afternoon when I have a break, my afternoon break. But literally, I have a list of like 100 truths, all of those things

Both future ones and pre-existing ones are never true about me. Whenever I have that moment of self-doubt, I go back to that. And I look at the legacy which I built up. And I look at who I am in my makeup, my identity, everything. And it makes me feel good. Am I more or less likely to do stuff when I feel good? More likely to do stuff. More likely. It's a piece of my book. You're going to see those challenges that you might see as challenges. You're just going to have taken the edge off it by just giving yourself a little boost of self-confidence and self-worth.

Because these things are true, they can't be taken away from you. And that often just helps people just to get started with doing something. The other thing as well is even if you have a go at those things, nobody can ever take those truths away from you because you've already got them. They can't go anywhere, right? And in 12 months' time, the future version of Ali is thanking today's Ali for doing something to create these future truths. What is that? Hmm.

12-month Ali is definitely thanking present-day Ali for going to the gym more regularly. Yeah. In fact, every day. Because I've realized that if I do it every other day, that, like, I think every day is easier than every other day, in a way. Future Ali, 12 months from now, is definitely thanking present-day Ali for doing daily writing as, like, a habit and sticking with it. Because everything is downstream of writing when it comes to the business. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's a good exercise. It's a really powerful exercise. Whenever my clients experience those little bits of self-doubt, we just write, truth's exercise. Let's get into it. Nice. I love it. Why is your business called Fearless? What does that mean? There's a backstory. It was a bit of a happy accident. So I started off life as, well, Robin Waite. And then Robin Waite, the business coach,

And then I went to deliver a talk in front of about 60 people and somebody asked me, what's the thing that stops people from achieving their goals? And I said, well, fear, basically. Business owners need to fear the little things in life, business, ever so slightly less, that stop them achieving their goals. And one of my best mates in business, he was listening in the audience and he literally stood up in the middle of my talk. He pointed at me and he went...

the fearless business coach. And so that's where fearless came from. It's about fearing those little things in life ever so slightly less that stop us from stepping out and achieving something. So, you know, a 60 second pitch. Again, there's like worst case scenario, you fluff it up and you walk out the room. Nobody cares, right? It's just like, you can't let those tiny little things stop you. Nice. What's your biggest challenge right now when it comes to the business? Oh, great question. Um,

So my biggest challenge is time. And this is a bit of, um, I didn't realize when I had kids, how much of an impact it would have on my life and not, not, I don't mean that in terms of like, they take up loads of time. It's just, uh, there's a big shift in everything, like perspective wise. Um,

And so I kind of, with my businesses, I'd played all out. I was doing all lighters. I was all sorts of things, just crazy stuff just to make my businesses work. And then Pops and Soph come along and immediately it's like life gets turned upside down and you realize kind of really what the important things in life are about. And I know that's like totally cliched.

But equally, what that means is that there has to be compromise along the way. And I've chosen to have a slower pace of life with my business in order to be able to make sure that I'm not compromising on the time that I get to spend with my girls. And that does mean a little bit, my personal goals get...

They're not eradicated. I think a lot of people make the mistake you have kids and things just stop, personally-wise. They're by no means gone, but the process of writing a book becomes just a little bit harder because it takes a bit longer. My kids, not everybody's kids do this, hopefully, but my kids, for example, from the moment you wake up in the morning, it's all about school runs. I get probably six hours during the day when they're at school, if I'm lucky, and

pick them up tea time, bedtime, everything else. And right now they're not going to bed till 10 o'clock at night. So it's not like I can hustle harder and go out to my office at 10 o'clock and write a thousand words. It's like I'm beat at that point. And I think it's that fighting against the, I mean, this is why, I mean, I'm only 41. I'm a long way from being over the hill yet, but this is why footballers retire at 41. I've got that whole

male body sort of slowing down thing at sort of 41 not feeling like I'm I have to push myself harder to be at my optimal so going to the gym cycling and stuff that I have to work a little bit harder just to keep fit I'm feeling quite tired and I've got the pressures of kids there's just this stuff that's just going on that you know

There's times when I look back on sort of my 20s when I was growing my business pre-kids and I had all the time in the world. I don't think I optimised my time enough in my 20s to be set up right to have kids in my 30s. Okay. What advice would you give me? I've just turned 29 and I don't have kids yet, but hoping to in the next few years. God, that's... It's so personal. I think...

I mean, it's hypothetical because it is what it is. My truths are I have kids, right? And the business is set up the way that it is. But I think I probably would have built a business that had more sustainable recurring revenue coming in faster. I left it probably not long, but I left it probably three or four years too late.

So in the agency, we did web design, we did hosting, and actually my business's valuation was based on the hosting. And I wish I'd got to work building that revenue four years earlier. I wouldn't have sold it. Because the cash flow would have been just too good. Okay, interesting. But I certainly don't regret it. It's a massive lesson which I've learned. And I bring a great amount of that learning into, well, one, into my current business now or two businesses which I run.

But also now I'm able to help my clients not make that. It's a mistake. I'm like, cool, accelerate your recurring revenue and do it fast. Nice. That's a good tip. Yeah. That's a good tip. Anything else while we're on the topic? Well, you're kind of doing it already. Like going to the gym every day. Again, I wish I'd focused on my fitness and health so that when I had kids and I knew that my time was going to be slightly less.

less yeah um uh i wouldn't have to fight so hard when i got to the gym because like you go into an optimal sort of fitness yeah you have less fitness to lose if that right got it you know it's hard it's harder to keep maintain that fitness whereas at the moment i kind of feel again like i'm playing catch up um although granted i had an operation on my ankle like in october so i just got excuses for not getting on the bike but they are excuses i'm back on the bike now but it's just that recovery time again it's just that much so if you start

in an optimal place, pre-kids, it's easier to maintain, I believe. So you're an entrepreneur. You know, this is a question I've been asking people recently. You know, you're an entrepreneur. You like the freedom, fun, flexibility that the entrepreneur life gives you. Otherwise, you probably wouldn't have started a business. How does that desire for optionality and freedom square with having a wife and kids? So it's really interesting, actually. So my...

My whole, I mean, this is, this goes back to this. It's quite a deep question, Ali. I mean, how, how far do you want to go? Yeah. Um,

So all of my childhood growing up was watching my mum and dad like work so incredibly hard Everything was all about you got to work hard to earn your money to put a roof over your head to pay the mortgage put food on You know the story all of the arguments. They're about money like there was there was a it was very much like all about work in our household and

So there's a part of me which is, that's my story, that's my pattern I go back to. I have to work hard, that's what gets the results. I've probably spent the last 20 years or 19 years running my businesses, unpacking all of that and creating a new story. And the times in my life now where it feels easy and effortless don't involve work.

But it goes against my better nature because it's always included work. So when I'm not working, I'm constantly like, I get the work guilt still. I'm like certainly nowhere near where I was like five, 10 plus years ago. You know, when I'm sat out on my seats, looking over the Cotswold Hills, sipping a beer, occasionally I get the nagging little, oh, you should be working. And you don't need to.

At the start of this year, I made a very firm commitment to myself that everything would be easy and effortless. Less is more. I would make very conscious decisions about what projects I would undertake, what partnerships I would form. I was very intentional about who I would choose to work with this year, client-wise, marketing-wise, everything, and not work very hard. I'm the happiest I've been in a... Told you it'd go deep. Yeah. Yeah.

How was the balance between like work and life, I guess, before this year, like last couple of years? It was just frenetic, like mental, mental crazy. And this is actually it makes it really hard because I know that like right now, for example, I know that my wife is still still working so damn hard. And I wanted to see this opportunity, this life, which I'm kind of starting to peek and see inside of.

She's a lawyer basically. She just works incredibly long hours. She's recently kind of got a sideways promotion, but just so much more pressure. And I don't know, you realise that there's just more to life, I think, than work and money and stuff like that. The biggest challenge though, and I think this is where sort of a lot of the emotion comes from, is that because my childhood has always been about work, it's hard not to fall into that with the relationship between my girls. Do you mean? Because I...

Say my relationship between mum and dad was all about work. Yeah. It's the apple falls from not far from the tree. It's, I play that out sometimes. I get caught up in the work story and I have to be very, very conscious about not getting caught up in that story and creating a new story for my children. It's hard. It takes, probably out of everything, that's what requires the most amount of work. What does that look like? Like what's the...

What does that look like, playing out that story? Well, work is serious, isn't it? It's like very focused. It takes all of your attention away, right? But with kids, it's fun, playful. It's exploratory. It's like dancing. I don't know. You can imagine all the fun stuff. The stuff that went through our minds when we were kids that we've forgotten about, that our kids, my kids are now, you know, want to enjoy in life.

And it's being able to get involved in that without being drawn into the work series thing. Just stay in the fun, playful space for them. Yeah.

So is the guilt around it from like, oh, if I work harder, then I'll make more money and therefore be able to give the kids a better life? Is that the pattern or is that the script? Like what's the script that's leading to the guilt? My challenge, Ali, is I love what I do. I love my work. Yeah, that's the thing, right? It's a different kind of love though, obviously, to family and kids and all that sort of stuff. But I'm so passionate about helping the business owners, but...

But then am I just using that as an excuse to get more tied up in work and ignore the work I need to be doing over here with my family, right? It's such a complicated battle, which, you know, it's a lifetime's worth of stuff that's got me caught up in that, which I'm now probably spending the next part of my lifetime unpacking. Yeah, when I project my life out into the future, I can very much see a world in which my default is work.

There's a good book, How Will You Measure Your Life by Clayton Christensen, I think, where he talks about like how for most people who are sort of, I mean, he, I think he's like a Harvard Business School professor or something. So people in that sort of camp, Harvard MBA students, but also like entrepreneurs and stuff.

You know, when you look back on your life a couple of decades from now, the thing that they all basically do is over-invest in their work and under-invest in their health and relationships. Yeah. And it's just such a common pattern. And I'm like, oh, I need to fight really hard against that inertia. It's provider traits. We've done it since we were cavemen. Yeah. You know, it's a natural instinct, but we don't have to do that in 2023. Hmm.

There's a whole other episode and probably people who are better educated to speak about this than me, but the whole sort of equality, male-female equality and everything which goes along with that. I think it's about being open to just breaking those sort of... The provider trait is that I think it's quite toxic.

in men. Because quite often men absorb themselves in their work. I've done this, I've been totally guilty of this, I don't mind. Not ashamed to admit it, well probably slightly shameful to admit it, I don't know. But sometimes I've used work as a reason to hide from problems, challenges in my life, whatever shape or form those take. And that's the toxic side of it. And I think if men become more aware, I'm just going off on a proper tangent now, but if men become more aware

of the reasons why they're turning to work, and they're able to face that reality that maybe they might be hiding away from something with their work, we will have a lot more happier men out there, I think, in the long run, if they can start to understand that. As you're saying that, I'm thinking like, "Shit, what am I hiding from?"

Yeah, because I think especially as an entrepreneur, it's easy to sell yourself the story of like, I enjoy my work. I happened to spend a few hours with a guy called Bill Perkins last week. He's said this like ridiculously wealthy hedge fund manager in Texas. He's written a book called Die With Zero, which is about how to make the most from your money and from your life. And I asked him, you know, one thing he said was that most rich people don't understand money because they keep on working for it.

even though it comes at the expense of their like family or the friends their their hobbies and things like that and i'm like okay come on but like what about the people who say they enjoy their work and he was like well you know a crackhead would say they enjoy crack a heroin addict enjoys heroin it's the same kind of thing i was like huh interesting because i guess like there is that balance right because if you do genuinely enjoy your work but you also want to spend time with the family and stuff then there's that natural tension that's there

Again, I talked about binary thinking. So there's this thing about work, not work. But within work, if we can see that there's different degrees of it. So coach, you've seen me work, coach, right? 10 out of 10 for me. I'm all in. I love it so much because I know, one, the impact that it's creating for clients, but it's my flow space. That's when I get into my...

My natural, that's my happy Lego space, if you like. There's other bits of the business that I can leave it or take it. Sales I enjoy because it's still coaching. Marketing, when I'm doing stuff like this, I'm in flow state, I get into it. Speaking on stage, things like that. So if you can fill your work life up with all of those things that are 10 out of 10, and then anything which falls short of that, which...

You can compromise and give to somebody else. Obviously, bearing in mind what we've talked about numbers and things like that, but the other bits of the business. It's okay to, if you only need to spend four hours doing that amazing, awesome stuff that really fills you up, gives great value to the people around you, and the other 36 hours of the week that you would ordinarily use to hide, give that to somebody else. You've got 36 hours back now to learn something new about yourself. So with all this in mind,

It sounds like, I mean, both you and I are quite bullish on entrepreneurship as a career because of the Fs that it unlocks, the freedom, flexibility, fulfillment, et cetera, et cetera, finance. But those benefits, you know, any virtue taken to excess can become a vice. Yes. Given your experience in entrepreneurship now for the last 20 years, I guess, if Poppy and Sophie were like, Dad, we want to be entrepreneurs, would you be like, yes? Or would you be like, I think again?

I'd probably be like, don't mistake entrepreneurship for work or vice versa. Okay, what do you mean? So if you're going to step out and do entrepreneurship, don't put yourself through the mincer, basically. It should be easy and effortless and do something you love doing. And it should provide a life for you that, and not just money, but a life for you that you want to... It's like Ikigai, you know, Ikigai, like the Japanese sort of...

framework isn't it the four pillars of ikigai um what's it mission passion vocation and purpose i think something similar to that um you know if you if you get all of those four pillars right you can have a great life help amazing people earn some good money you know it all you achieve ikigai which i think is i think that translates roughly and i'm going to completely get this wrong but it's the state of flow in your life um

So that would be the route which I would take with them. If I saw them working too hard, I'd probably step in and say, you're working too hard. You don't need to work so hard. Let's try and find a more easy and effortless way for you to do this. So easy and effortless goes against the grain of most... The hustle and grind culture is bullshit. I'm sorry to swear, but it's all complete BS. There's times when you have got to work hard, but if you're doing that too much, it's toxic. It falls into that...

what you were saying about alcoholism and stuff like that. I think that's touted about too much, way too much. It's what basically everyone who I interview on this podcast says. They're all like, "Oh yeah, it's all about work-life balance. I wish I hadn't worked so hard." But that's easy enough to say when you've already got a successful business. I often like to ask, "Do you think you could have built the business that you've had, like the agency and the coaching business and the apps and stuff?"

Would there have been a way of doing it while also enjoying the journey along the way and being chill about it and stuff? This is going to sound awful. Mentors. Mentors, coaches, books, podcasts, YouTube videos, lifelong learning.

Again, mistake I made, I finished uni and I've been doing little businesses and things along the way. I finished uni and I thought, that's it, I don't need to read books anymore. And I didn't read books for six or seven years in the first few years of my business. And I bitterly regret that. I think what I've learned from the connections I've made and the books I've read and things like that

I, I actually wish I hadn't gone to uni in the first place. Now I'm not suggesting, it's not a suggestion for anybody to skip uni, right? There's, there's some value in that. It's one of my truths. I have a business management degree. Hey, that's, that's got some value to it. Um,

But that said, I think if I'd started a business at 18, if I'd had a good idea, I think I lacked the idea then. That's why I didn't go for it. And I didn't have parents who were in the entrepreneurial space to push me. The internet was very young, so we didn't have all these influences out there that are out there. But

Like people in 2023 don't have any excuses. You can listen to any amount of podcasts, get as much business information as you want for free or inexpensively. You can get any amount of mentoring and advice you want for free or inexpensively. I know my thing is pricing and let's raise the bar a little bit, but the entry point is low. You know, get on that train and start learning. Yeah, that's so true.

Yeah, it was only about six or seven months ago that I read my first ever book on sales and marketing. I read Dotcom Secrets by Russell Brunson. And I've been on Russell's email list since the age of 13, but always thought he was a bit of a scammer. So I just ignored all his emails. And then I read the book and I was like, oh, my freaking God, why didn't I read this? Like, freaking five, six, seven years ago, as soon as I started selling stuff, I've been selling stuff on the Internet for 10 years and making it up as I went along for the last nine and a half. And I'm like, oh, yeah.

It started to make sense. But I love that thing. It's like what Alex Ramosi says that, you know, you're paying off ignorance debt fairly early on. And one way to pay off ignorance debt is to do the thing. But another way is to learn from people who have made mistakes doing the thing while doing the thing. And you just accelerate your learning so much quicker. And I think that, yeah, speaking to the value of having a coach, having a mentor,

For me, business coaches, CEO coaches have been probably the single most ROI positive expense throughout my entire life. Because one of the things, the guy I work with these days, Eric, who's going to feature on this podcast soon.

His whole thing is, his coaching model is partly about the business, partly about leadership, but also partly about the health of the person. And so one of the OKRs that we set is me going to the gym X number of times a week and that kind of stuff. Because the health and relationship stuff is so tied up with what makes a good CEO and what makes a good leader that I think we ignore that stuff at our peril.

Well, I think health full stop is the most important. I mean, this isn't my domain, by the way. I lead a relatively healthy life. I eat well, I go and exercise. Surfing, cycling. Well, exactly. But think about it. If you're unhealthy or you're ill, you're no use to anybody. You can't run a business. You can't be a good husband, father to your kids, can't look after your parents when they're sick. You can't do anything. So health is paramount. It's the most important thing to focus on. That's the one.

I'm going to be heading to the gym straight after this. Can we talk a little bit about the book and the kind of offer that you're extending our listeners?

What do you want to know? So what is the book about? So, you know, this is your book, Take Your Shot. This is, you know, we got to know each other through a Zoom at Mastermind in lockdown. And then I heard you have this book. So I got the book in Kindle and I read the book and I was like, oh, this has given me a firmware update about how to think about business. So what is the book about? And what's the deal with all these free copies we have available? Yeah, so the book's actually, so it's told as a parable and it's only 100 pages. So it's a nice short sort of,

pithy tale about, it's actually about a golf professional, but it could be about any service business owner. And actually how it came about. So it's based on the true story. I tell, I actually tell the story of my journey working with this client. And when I sold my agency, I did a webinar, which was designed for other web design businesses, basically to learn how to build and sell their businesses and

And about 40 people on there. And afterwards I got a phone call from this very excitable guy named Russ. He's like, it's amazing. It's the best webinar I've ever been on. I've got so many questions. Oh, cool. So what do you do? He's like, I'm a golf pro. I was like, my marketing clearly failed. But anyway, so, um, you know, uh, uh, so we, we got chatting and then actually he ultimately ended up becoming one of my first clients. Um, and so I kind of tell his story about, in the book about, um, what it feels like to grow his business, the challenges, the pain points he has, the struggles he goes through and,

I won't give too much of a spoiler alert on it, but he meets a coach. The coach then helps him to restructure his golf lessons and start to play out his dreams and ambitions that he had for himself, his life and for his family and things like that. So I'll leave it. So if anybody reads it, I'll leave it for you to figure out who each of the characters are based on within that story. Because there's obviously various different characters that play parts in the story. I've kind of come into my life as well.

But in terms of the offer, so Ali and I are both going to sign 15 copies of the book before I leave. And so the first 15 people who apply, so go and fill out the scorecard. So I've got a scorecard which I've created to see how fearless you are in business.

which is just fearless.biz, sorry, fearless.scoreapp.com. Yeah, we'll put a link in the show notes and the video description. Perfect. And then, so the first 15 people who fill out the scorecard and apply for a copy of the book, they'll get a signed copy of it, basically. Nice. Wherever they are in the world, except for South Africa, everything I've sent there has either been nicked or it's been returned. Okay, so any country in the world except South Africa, you will post them a free copy of the book. Yep. Any strings attached to that? Nope.

So you're just going to take the hit in postage? Yep. Nice. Yeah, absolutely. They can donate some beer money if they want to, to cover postage. That's fine. My thing is all about...

you know not not everybody can afford coaching um books are one of the they've helped me so much so i just want to i made it a thing that i want to give away like 50 to 100 copies of my book a month and i don't care it's if that's a major part of it yeah it's a bit in marketing but also i know that those books help people so it's my one of my little ways of of giving back and i know people get value from it um you know i guess if people want to help out they can leave a review if they like it yeah hopefully positive review nice

If there are more than 15 people, would you be open to giving the PDF to the... I can give away PDFs, yeah. Oh, nice. Because I guess that doesn't require the cost of distribution kind of situation. Cool. So we're only mentioning this at the end of the episode. So if you currently are listening or watching to this, then you are the very few people who've gotten to the end of the episode. So have a look in the show notes or in the video description. We'll put a link to that scorecard.

And then you'll either get a free physical copy from Robin or you'll get a PDF copy. That's it. Yep. Love it. Beautiful. Those are great. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Any parting words of wisdom for people who have gotten this far in the podcast? Well, there's probably quite a few people watching this who maybe have started to think about, oh, I've got an idea. My advice is just don't overthink it. Just get out there and just start it. Take your shot. Love it. Thank you, Robin. My pleasure.

All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are gonna be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode.

So thanks for watching. Do hit the subscribe button if you want already, and I'll see you next time. Bye bye.