How to start a 7-figure business in 2025: Advice from 4 millionaires
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Hey friends, welcome back to Deep Dive, the podcast where it's my immense pleasure to sit down with entrepreneurs, creators, authors, and other inspiring people, and we find out how they got to where they are and the strategies and tools we can learn from them to help build a life that we love. In this video, we're looking back at previous episodes to take the best business advice from some of our previous guests. So without further ado, here we are.

To what extent do you think it's useful to join an existing startup versus just start your own and have a punt and kind of do it anyway? It's massively useful to join someone else's startup. Like I would highly recommend that to absolutely anyone. So here's what goes wrong with a lot of young people. They go to careers fairs and all that sort of stuff. It's only big corporates that exhibit. So they end up being funneled down the big corporate path.

path. Now, you can start a business that doesn't exist. You can go to a big corporate. So in the UK, there are 7,000 large companies that have more than 250 employees. There's 5.5 million businesses in the middle that already exist but don't have 250 employees. And the vast majority of them have 10 people or less. So it's hugely stacked between 2 and 10 people is the small business landscape.

So when you join a big corporate, you have no idea what the whole business does. You have no idea what everyone else does. They don't bring you in on strategy or any of that sort of stuff. You are just completely in the dark and they say, this is your job, go do that job. And if you can't do it, we'll find someone else who can is the subtext.

But when you join a business that's four people, five people, six people, you know exactly what the whole company does. You often know the revenue. You often know the profit. You often know the weekly activity of the entire team. So you get this kind of feeling and experience of what an entire team does and what an entire business does. And I would highly recommend anyone who wants to start a business, first of all,

first do two years working inside somebody else's small business. Ooh, interesting. So like a lot of people sort of in our team, when I talk to them about this, or people who've done internships with us feel like say that, oh yeah, you know, I, I feel like I'm learning a lot. And to me, I'm always a bit confused, like, what is, what is there to learn? Like, cause we're just like doing stuff, but I guess for someone who doesn't have experience running a business or being in a, yeah, it's completely different to life in Amazon HQ corporate.

It's also not too different to what you did with medicine, where you do your study and you do your education, and then you go and work in a hospital. You're working around experienced doctors. Yeah. The theory is all well and good, but the first two weeks on the job when you realize, oh, this is the dynamic between the nurses, and this is how you request a scan, and this is how you do all this other stuff that you never ... Yeah, and here's how you talk to people, and here's how long this actually takes.

You know, these little things that like in a business context, flipping back from medicine, which I know nothing about, you know, just things like, well, how do you send out like a big bulk email to a list or where do you get a list from? Or like, how do you sit down and have a lunch and negotiate a joint venture?

So for me, my two years doing that when I was 19 to 21, I actually got to sit in on those meetings. So when John was negotiating to do a list swap, you mail your list for our product and we'll mail our list for your product, I'm sitting in on that meeting quietly,

and going, oh, wow, that's how that happens. That's the thing, yeah. Yeah, and when John was proposing, oh, here's what we'll do with the revenue. We'll do a revenue split and we'll actually, this will be the first chunk for costs and we'll take that out first and then this will be, and here's how we'll measure it. And it's like, oh,

oh, right. Okay. That's just a meeting that you have and you just agree that in the meeting and then you write it down and confirm it and then you put it in the heads of terms. Yeah. Okay. Now I get it. Yeah. I think there's so much stuff like this where until you've had experience in a thing, it's just, it's hard to even fathom what goes on. Like this weekend I was, I was at this like philanthropy conference type thing where there were people from like nuclear policy making and like grant making. And I was, I was asking all the basic questions. I was like, like what,

what does it mean to like lobby a congressman? And they're like, oh, you literally queue up and then you literally give them money for it. And wait, what? That's a thing? It's like, how do you contact a government official? Do you just like Google their name? And they're like, well, no, it's opaque for a reason. And you have to do this. It's just completely mind blowing that this whole world of like government and policy and grants and philanthropy that I have zero experience in

I can read all the books, but I wouldn't know how to contact a government official unless I know someone who is literally doing the thing. Yeah. And you hear these fancy titles. It's like, oh, I'm an analyst with KPMG or Goldman Sachs. And it's like, but what do you actually do? Oh, I get given a list of these people and then I have to go and put these spreadsheets together. Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. So you're 21. You've started your own, I guess, lead generation company. Okay. So

Is this like, let's say I am an estate agent and I want to sell houses to-

Now, as a $60,000 franchise, we would get 15% of the franchise success fee as our marketing fee. So they paid us an amount that covered costs first, and then we got 15% success fee on top of that. So that was a great deal. They'd put a lot of energy and effort into creating a franchise. When I met them,

I went to a franchise expo and there were 300 franchisors all trying to say that they had the best franchise. Franchisors as in like the five guys, McDonald's, KFC would be a franchisor. Yeah, exactly. And like those are like McDonald's is the biggest well-known franchise. They sell you the rights to run their business, but there's all sorts of little franchises like mortgage broking franchises and even things like gardening franchises and cleaning franchises. So, um,

You basically, I go along to a franchise expo and I see that there's 300 franchisors trying to stand out and be different. And I go, this doesn't work for anyone. Because if you're a customer thinking about buying a franchise, you've now got way too many choices. And if you're a franchisor, you're just standing right next to 300 competitors. So it's just feeling too weird, like too, you know, too...

it feels too saturated. So we just basically approached one that I thought was great and we negotiated a deal and we did a roadshow where instead of them being shoulder to shoulder with competitors, we would put them in front of 50 people who were potential customers. How would you find these 50 people? So we'd advertise, do direct mail campaigns. We would do, um, uh,

There was something called fax broadcasting at the time. Fax broadcasting. Okay. Let's not even go... I'd have to even begin by telling your audience what a fax machine is. I'm going to make up a random offer. So let's say I lose everything on my YouTube channel. I get cancelled overnight, but I still have the skills. I'm keeping in mind that my business ideas have to be something I can sell for ideally 2K, ideally five sales a month. I might be thinking either...

web design agency type situation potentially, but I've kind of been outside of that market for a while. Or I'd be thinking video content. Just quickly, you've been outside of that market. Do you know someone who's credible? Web development? Do you know someone who's a web developer? Yeah. Yeah. Sell them.

Yeah, that could work. In my head, I was defaulting to, oh, I guess I'd have to do it myself. So I need to learn quite a lot of stuff. No, you don't. You can find someone who's good at web development and you can just go running around selling two grand packages for them to build. Oh, okay. That could work too. There you go. There's 10 grand a month.

What if I was like, hey, I know how to use a camera. I know how to do video editing. Therefore, if I do personal brand video content for startup founders who I know have money or business owners like you who I know have money, and I could be like, Dan, you have books. You want to be on all the social platforms. I'll show up to your house once every month and we'll film a bunch of stuff. I'll just ask you the questions. I'll chop it up. Content for Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, et cetera, et cetera. Sign me up.

Yeah, rock and roll. Of course. So that's a great example, yeah. And you just sign me up and you might say it's initially two grand and see if you like it and then it's two grand a month after that. Now you might say, by the way, I've got a whole team. I've got an amazing team of people. I've actually found...

I've got lead content creators here in the UK. I've also got an international team so that we can do an initial style guide and some signature content. And we can also do brute force content through our team in the Philippines. And then we've got a team in Ghana. And actually, we send all the footage to them and they create lots of videos. And we then put that on TikTok and all that sort of stuff. We see where it sticks and bring it all together.

I'm like, whoa, that sounds really great. So yeah, that would be like, I'm really big on the idea of the entrepreneur's job is to be the organizing force, not to do the work. So like you keep getting into like, oh, I know how to edit videos. It's like, it's like that's doing the work. You're not being an entrepreneur. You're being in a video editor. So the entrepreneur's job is to be the organizing force. You're the organizer. I don't know how to do anything.

Like just on that, I've built multiple $10 million plus companies. I don't know how to do anything.

Like as in I don't have any web development skills. I don't have video editing skills. I don't have design skills. I don't have any skills. I can write, right? I can write books and I can speak. But that's it. I'm an organizing force. I'm the guy who just organizes it. I bring together talented people and I say, hey, you're good at video editing. You should join my team as a video editor. And you're good at designing. You should be part of our team. So all I'm good at is enrolling people in stuff.

So the sort of person who enjoys organizing people, who enjoyed like organizing university societies back in the university days and like bringing people together and like keeping people organized. The entrepreneur's job is to be the organizing force. It's not to do the work. I still keep on thinking it's like, yeah, you know, what skill do I have? What skill can I offer? That's the schooling system. That's the schooling system. Yeah, you're component labor. You're like, which component do I fit in? It's like none. You're not in the business. You're the entrepreneur. You're building the business.

Your job is to get really clear about what the customer is trying to achieve and then be the organizing force to fill that for them and bring together all the people that you might need in order to do that. So that's your first 10 grand. Concept, audience, offer, sales. That's all you have to do. It's cheap to do. You can do it with Microsoft Word. You can do it with Apple Pages and Keynotes. Okay. Before we go on to the next stage, let's talk about sales. So sales...

Sales is scary. Sales is a dirty word. I don't want to be a salesman. I feel that emotional response of even the word sales. How do I approach sales for my web design agency or for my... Assuming I'm not doing the work, I'm just going out there. Almost everyone's had a positive experience with a salesperson and a negative experience with a salesperson, but that could be true for any profession.

I've had negative experiences with bookkeepers. I've had negative experiences with lawyers. I've had negative experience with doctors, fairly. There are good doctors and bad doctors. There's people who've got amazing bedside manner and people who are really not that great. So when it comes to sales...

The word that everyone says about a good salesperson is professional. They were professional. They approached it professionally. So what does professional mean? It means that they ask great questions. They give you guided advice. They are not pushy, but they also do give guidance.

They've done their homework. They've done their research. They've got great product knowledge. They listen. They understand. They're trying to get on your side to figure out what it is you actually genuinely need, and they're making sensible recommendations. So all of those things are professionalism. So sales is a science, and it's a very valuable skill that you can use in any profession. It doesn't matter what you are or what you do. A sales skill is a powerful skill because...

Sales is listening, understanding, and then creating a good argument for the right solution and being able to marry up. This is what you're trying to achieve. This is what I think you need, and here's why, right? So you're creating a path of least resistance. Here's the mental model you should have with sales.

there is the current reality that the person has. That is their current situation. There is their desired reality. That's what they want. And then there's the obstacles and criteria that are in the way, right? These are all the things that stop them from getting what they want. And then there's you who says, this is the path of least resistance. Here's what you need to do. You need to go and do this, this, this, this, and this. And that is going to get you from your current reality to your desired reality. And it's a lot like being a doctor. So if you're a doctor, you're actually, it's so similar to sales.

When you see someone who's not happy with their current reality, you ask them what's going on. You ask them a load of questions. And then you might say, the first thing I want to do is a diagnosis. I want to do some sort of assessment. So then you do an assessment and then you say, okay, so I think I've got a treatment plan, which is just a path of least resistance or a solution.

oh okay what do I have to do well you're going to have to do some antibiotics but you have to take these every day for seven days okay what else do you need to well you need to do this thing with this thing okay great what else do you mean to do well you have to stop doing this okay great so that's the treatment plan and essentially you are recommending a treatment plan so in there you you're talking to them you're asking a lot of questions you're doing an assessment

You're figuring out where are they now? Where do they want to be? What's in the way? What's stopping them? And then you're advising them about a treatment plan. And that's sales. That is sales. That's great sales. I guess when I think of sales, I think the combative adversarial relationship that I go into a used car dealership with thinking they're going to try and get me to spend 10K. On a serious note, have you actually ever had that? Uh...

Like, have you actually ever had a used car salesman do that to you? No, I haven't. But I've been imagining and expecting it. Like, and I've been to these dealerships with my mom and she approaches it with that kind of like... When you went and bought your Apple stuff and the Apple genius came up and asked you, like, what are you going to use it for? And, you know, what do you do? And all that sort of stuff. Here's what I recommend. Was it a positive or a negative experience? It was a good experience. Yeah. Do you know they do 40 minutes of sales training every day?

What? 40 minutes a day? 40 minutes a day. Oh, wow. It's like Peloton. They have a central sales trainer who does video, uploads to the iPads. They do 40 minutes of sales training every day. Oh, wow. They do a combination of product knowledge and they do rapport building, objection handling, and they actually make suggestions as to things you can buy right now today. That's part of their process. They want you to walk out of the store with something.

But it's positive, they're professional. They're not pushy, they are making recommendations. They're trying to solve your problem. If you go in there and say, "I'm a professional speaker and I like to give talks." They're going to go, "Okay, so you use a lot of keynote. Yeah, okay. Did you know that this thing here, this is like a touch bar and it actually shows you your slides as you're going through and you can see your slides when you're speaking and you can jump to slides from slide and it's like, "Oh, that I would use that all the time." Yeah, that's a really good thing that you might want to use. I want that.

Let's box it up. Okay. So they're doing 40 minutes of sales training a day, right? And it's a positive experience. Everyone likes geniuses. Yeah. But they're salespeople.

So it sounds like to go from zero to 10K, all we need to do is come up with some kind of concept that we can charge ideally 2K for and find a way to land five clients a month through a sales process. Through sales process. I will say one more thing about sales. You need to learn how to do laps, leads, appointments, presentations, sales. So you just keep a little spreadsheet. Who are your leads? Who are the people that might buy?

Can you book an appointment to speak with them? Right. Actually get their commitment to just focus. Can you present them with a solution? Can you actually do a presentation or an actual conversation?

And then can you ask them whether they would like to go ahead or not? And those are the four steps, lead, appointment, presentation, sales. So great salespeople do a rhythm of weekly laps. They do leads, appointments, presentation, sales, and they just have a good salesperson has a dashboard, digital or physical, and they just have a set of leads, appointments, presentations, and sales. So laps, laps, laps, laps, laps. And entrepreneurs need to do that as well when they're launching something.

Getting to six figures is literally just like sell something to someone. That's it. That's all you have to do to get to six figures. One channel, one product, one avatar. That's it. You don't have to do anything else. And then when you want to get to seven figures, then you just do that and then add the word consistently, which is you put the inputs in the system in a way that's consistent so that you get a consistent output. So whatever way you acquired those customers, whether it was reach outs, whether it was content, whether it was paid ads, whether it was affiliates, whether it was referrals, whatever the thing was that got you the customers,

Cool. Do that consistently and you'll be at a million. You know what I mean? Which is still only 20K a week. It's not like a huge number. You know, one to three is usually increasing output of that main thing to a small degree and really just like baseline efficiencies and building out the core team. So usually at that point, going one to three is getting the person out of delivery to a large extent. And usually they get their first kind of first follower, first like one or two

I'm trying to think the right word to how to say this, competent individuals who are helping them out. And then, you know, a handful of frontline. And so it's usually like companies that's 3 million, they're like 5 to 15 employees. And so, and there's usually really only like two-ish good ones and the rest are okay. Right.

And so at that point, you know, going from three to 10 is usually where we get, it's the minimum level that we take people on. And it's not because there's something magical about 3 million is that 3 million typically checks two boxes. Box one is that they have product market fit at some level. People want something from them. Like something they're selling is resonating enough that they can generate sales.

And the second thing, I guess there's three boxes. One is that the second is that they have at least one reliable acquisition channel that they're currently doing. And the third is that they have a core team in place. So they've demonstrated product market fit. They have a reliable acquisition channel, just at least one. And they have a core team in place, which may be relatively dysfunctional and have very few key players, but at least they have some semblance of structure. And so if they meet those minimum requirements, then we can at least start from at least some level of leverage to start helping them grow.

Okay, so I'd love to talk a lot about that initial bit that you sort of

threw away with like, oh, one product, one channel, one avatar. So for a bit of context, a couple of weeks ago, I happened to be on vacation on some Greek island and I posted an Instagram reel of like, hey, this is the creator life. I'm working on my iPad and stuff. And there were a few comments from people being like, I'd love to live this sort of lifestyle, but I just don't know where to start. And that sort of, that idea of I'd love to be able to...

If we imagine 99.9% of people listening to this, if you told them they could make six figures a year doing what they love, they'd be like, mind blown, would absolutely love that. So I wonder if we can kind of explore that zero to six figure jump or sort of process. Let's say someone has got a full-time job. Let's say they're working in, I don't know, consulting or something corporate, and they love the idea of, I want to make a living doing what I love. How would we break that down? And this is under the assumption that they hate doing what they're doing. Yes. I was like, because...

I always like to be clear. I was like, I've got employees that make a million bucks a year plus. So like you can absolutely become filthy wealthy and that's income, right? And so a lot of businesses that are at $10 million a year, the owner might only take a million bucks in income depending on, you know, margins, et cetera. And so like,

A lot of employees will wish for – they see top line as income, which is just a very employee mindset. They're like, oh, if I make six figures a year, I'll make six figures a year. It's like, well, if you really want to make six figures a year, I'll probably make 500 grand a year. You know what I mean? Revenue-wise, at least. If you don't want to have just bought yourself another job, right? So let's talk through this transition. So if you're an employee –

When you make the switch, you're still an employee. You're just an employee of a different business that you happen to own, and you are basically 100% of the expenses. And so the business itself actually makes no money. You as the sole employee of that thing and the boss gets to call your own shots, but you were still the employee, right? So you're wearing all the hats, etc.,

And so it's relatively nuanced. You know what I mean? Like if you had a six-year consulting job and then you start consulting on the side, for example, through your own LLC, you have the same job. You just got rid of the person who was giving you direction and now you are responsible, right? The thing that most people have to do is they have to go get money, right? You have to go make money.

And the way you do that is you sell stuff, right? And the way that you can even begin the conversation to sell stuff is that you have to have people who show interest in the thing, which means you have to make your products known. And we do that through advertising, right? And there's five ways to advertise, which I just went over earlier. And so it's like, pick one of those five ways, start doing it on a consistent basis, bring people in. What do you sell them? That's what the $100 million offers book is for. It's like, this is how you figure out what to sell.

And then you sell them the thing. And then after that, you'll have some delivery. Now, usually if you have a consistent method of advertising and selling with a what to sell from the offer, then you can start getting people to help you on the level of delivery you have, which comes down to breaking the delivery into chunks rather than holistically and saying, how can I specialize the labor? Because you trying to say, I just need somebody to do what I do is silly, right? You need to figure out how can somebody do

How can I get five people to do 20% of what I'm doing and do it consistently, right? And then you can increase your advertising. Sales is a very high leverage thing in the beginning. If you spent all day selling, just you, you would have enough for five people to do work, right? And so then you would have a business, you know? So let's say someone's listening to this and they're thinking, all right, cool. I know, like I've read Alexis Berkey. He's telling me I've got to sell a thing. I don't know what to sell. I don't know if I have any skills. I don't know what I could possibly offer to the world. How do we break that down? Yeah.

Yeah, this is actually a topic that I cover more in the Leads book that's coming out soon. Soon, relative terms, six months-ish. Everybody knows something, all right? And so the idea is, what do you have... Everyone has unique depth of knowledge in certain areas because you've been alive and your eyes and ears have taken inputs, period, right? And so I like to think of people starting... So if you look at... Are you familiar with Y Combinator?

I see. Yeah. So Y Combinator is one of the most successful – I don't know if they're technically VC. They're seed capital startup investors in Silicon Valley. And they have a very standard deal structure and they have criteria for what they look for in companies. And one of the most important criteria that they look for is past experience.

And so they're okay with somebody who's super young, et cetera, but they want you to have experience in the industry because there's just so much ignorance debt that you have to pay down if you literally know nothing about an industry. Like there's just so much, like if your dad was a mechanic, you know so much about cars just by osmosis of being around a mechanic for 18 years. And so I like to think,

Past jobs you've held, you will know stuff about that industry. The jobs of your parents are things that you will know about that industry. And then you've got personal interests. And so I think that if I had to put those into three buckets, it's like parent stuff, past jobs of self, and current interests. And so it's like of those three things, which of those three buckets do you think you could help someone do a thing better? And so the idea is you want to sell the most valuable thing.

Right? And so the most valuable thing is what is the problem that I can help somebody else solve that I could charge the most money for? Or in reverse, that could make them the most money. And then I will be able to charge a percentage of the money that I'm able to make somebody else in this thing. Now, that's in a B2B setting. In a B2C setting, it would be how valuable do people perceive the problem that they have as, right? Whether it's like I can teach music,

Tons of people want to be able to learn how to. And if you're better, because you've had a side interest in that, awesome. Maybe you have a side interest because you're really good at editing the songs. Well, there's tons of musicians who hate that part and would love to have it. So it's like, we all know how to do stuff. And all we have to do is package the thing that we're doing. And I think the big problem is that people expect that they're going to have a perfect business. But if you look at the track record of all, I can't think of an entrepreneur besides Jeff Bezos, who's a freak of nature.

whose first business becomes the most valuable business in the world, is most people have a graveyard of failures behind them. And so the idea is you start not with the intent of saying, this is going to be the one thing I'm going to do for the rest of my life, which is the fallacy that employees have.

that whatever they pick is going to be the thing they're going to do for the rest of their lives. When in reality, it's, I just have to do a thing that I'm good enough at that I can learn the game. And the thing is, once you start taking steps, the next step becomes illuminated. You trying to think a hundred steps into the future when you have no context is irrelevant because chaos is going to break your plan anyways. And so do what you know,

Exchange, I like service businesses to start because they are, in my opinion, the lowest risk to start because it's just your time, right? So service businesses meaning? Do stuff for money.

Like mowing the lawn or cleaning windows or like- 100%, service. Clean houses, like whatever. Like all of those are just service businesses, right? And they're fine. And a lot of people think they need to have some novel idea to start a business when, I mean, the best, in my opinion, if you're getting into it, the best way to start a business is just look at what everyone else is doing and just try and do it better.

Like, I mean, and there's obvious holes. Like if you've, if you've gone to, if you've gotten your dry cleaning, it's like, can I do this in half the time? As this guy, if I do the lawn care, what are the things people hate about lawn care? Ah, they leave the, the trimmings around the edges. They're all shitty. The person doesn't speak English that well. Like, well, cool. Then I've got advantages, right? So it's like, what are the things that I already know how to do or I have past experience in?

What things, because I have past experience, I know that other people struggle with that sucks about this thing. And then I will solve that specific problem. And it could also be a problem that other people solve too. You just try and do a little bit better. Like it's just not rocket science. You know what I mean? And then you exchange, you start selling your time for money. So yes, you're still trading time for dollars. You don't need to read Rich Dad Poor Dad just yet, right? You're still trading time for dollars, right? But the point is that you're trading that time for money in order to learn not to earn,

You need to earn in order to pay your rent, eat, et cetera. But the major thing you're doing is you're paying down ignorance debt. So the vast majority of your income is coming in the form of education rather than earning. Just a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get back to the show. So if you are making money online or saving up,

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I took away from your first book, Happy Sexy Millionaire. We can talk about the title of that in a moment. But one of the things I really took away was the quitting framework. I wonder if you can talk through that for people who might not have come across it. I feel like you know it better than me. But I'll pop in it. So the reason I wrote the quitting framework is because I realized in hindsight that I was able to quit things

easier than most people. Let's take one step back. Why is quitting important? In life, we glamorize starting, right? But my observation was that the advantage I've had, as I've said, was being able to quit fast and eat with peace and ease. And when you just think logically about starting something, right, or saying, it's also the same with like saying yes and no to things. In order to start something in life, you actually...

first need to quit something else. So you can't start a new relationship unless you quit the last one. You're not going to start a new startup unless you quit the last one. You're not going to start a new career unless you've quit the last job. So quitting and starting should be held in equal regard. And there should be acknowledgement that they have a two-way relationship with one another. They're both the actions of winners.

People say quitting is for losers and they say like starting is for winners. In fact, quitting and starting are both for winners though. And the most successful intelligent people I've ever met have an unbelievable ability to quit things that make no objective sense. You're quitting that high paying job to go and deal, to go and do card tricks at a table in Bristol, Darren Brown. You're quitting that amazing career as a lawyer and

that your parents are now so proud of you, to go and spend the next 10 years going up and down the country in pubs and cracking jokes, Jimmy Carr?

It just, it objectively seems to make no sense, but subjectively they've reached a certain level of ease. So I, I could relate to myself in the same way in the regard of, if you look at what I've quit from, like stop going to school. Cause I realized that that wasn't going to be the paper that I got at the end of the process. Wasn't going to be enough, especially compared to my brothers. Quit university after that first lecture, quit my first startup after two years, quit my second one after about six years. Um, and lots of little quitting in and amongst there.

Why was I able to quit with peace at times when objectively you would think I was a madman for doing so, when I was leaving so much apparently on the table? And so I tried to make a framework, a framework that other people could use to try and make their quitting decisions through. So at the start of the framework, you ask yourself, am I thinking of quitting? See the, you know, yes or no. So if you are thinking of quitting, the framework begins. And I created these two subcategories.

what you can define for yourself, which I think is important to do. You're either thinking of quitting something because something's really hard, like it's difficult.

And then, which would be, you know, you're running a marathon and you're on the 23rd mile and you're doing it, you know, to raise money for a charity, but it's really, it's painful. It's difficult. It's causing discomfort. Or you're thinking about quitting something because it like, it sucks. And that's more of like an emotional, mental thing. It's just, it just doesn't feel good to you on an emotional, mental, psychological level. So let's go down the hard route. I'm thinking of quitting because it's hard. The first question you should then ask yourself is,

Is the hardship worth the rewards on offer? So you're running that marathon, you're raising money for that leukemia charity, you're on the 23rd mile, but it's worth it. The hardship is worth the reward at the end of it. If the hardship is worth it, don't quit. If the hardship isn't worth it,

then you should quit because the worst thing to do in life is to do something that is hard and meaningless like those are those are where all the problems happen when i think about studies of the impact of not having autonomy in your work and working on a production line and not having meaning and purpose in what you're doing every day and how that impacts your health and disease rises in your body that is the worst situation to be in let's go down the other side of the framework

By the way, do correct me because you know this framework better than I do. No, you got it spot on. Okay, good. We'll go down the other side of the framework. So you're thinking about quitting something because it sucks. You're in a relationship, your husband, you know, the magic has just left the relationship. You're in a company and there's problems at work, but you, you know, you haven't yet had the conversation with your boss. The next question becomes, do you believe you could make it not suck?

Right. So in the context of a marriage, that might mean going to marriage counseling and having a difficult conversation, thrashing it out with your partner and going through those issues. If the answer is no, so it sucks, you think you can't change that, quit. If you believe you could make it not suck, the next question to ask yourself is,

Is the effort that it would take to make it not suck worth the rewards on offer? So like you look at how that marriage might look if you were to resolve it, you believe you can. Is it worth it? Is Dave worth it? Is the reward on the other end of that process to fix it sucking worth it? If the answer is no, quit. You believe you could make it not suck anymore, but the effort it would take is not worth the reward on offer, quit.

If you believe you can make it not suck, and the effort it would take is worth the rewards on offer, stay and fight for it. And that's my simple framework, which is intentionally ambiguous. Productizing yourself.

So turning your knowledge in whatever domain and using writing as the ability to scale yourself and productize yourself. So we did this with Ship 30 for 30, which is our course, right? So it's all the things that I and my business partner, Dickie, talk about in terms of writing, and then we scale it through an education course that's writing-based. You can also do that with eBooks and you can do that with other assets. But the goal is instead of

providing whatever you're doing as a service. So being like, I'm going to be a ghostwriter for you, or I'm going to be a consultant for you or a editor for you, right? It's all one-to-one. You're using time as your measure. Now you're just packaging it digitally and that allows you to scale it. The beauty of productizing your service is that you, like we were talking about earlier, you're removing the constraint of being paid for time.

That's the whole, that's like the biggest challenge is as long as you're being paid for your time and not the outcome, it's really hard to have some sort of exponential jump in income.

You need to divorce the two. Yeah. But I guess like, you know, it's very useful to start up being paid for your time. Because I think another mistake people make is jumping to, let me create a course. And it's like, no one's going to buy it. And that's why one of the things that I often encourage is start by providing a service. So it's like start for free. Prove you can do it.

When you can do it, people will pay you. Trust that that will happen and they'll pay you well for it. And then use the paid work to learn what questions do people have? What problems are they facing? What are your unique frameworks for solving those problems, right? Once you get paid to learn all of those things, then when you go to productize yourself, you

You're not sitting in a room going, well, how do I magically come up with all these answers, right? You already got paid to do it. So now you're just transforming your service into a digital product. And the whole model for this, going back to free work, is give away 99% of what you know for free, right? The mistake everyone makes is they go, I'm going to productize myself. And before I tell you anything, you have to pay for it.

Well, it's the same mistake as providing a service, right? You don't walk up to someone and go, hey, before you know what I can do, here's how much it costs. They're like, get out of here. But if you start by going, here's everything. Here's how to think about it. Here's how to solve the problems. Here's the interesting frameworks to frame the solutions. Here's everything you need to know. The person then goes, well, if all the free stuff was so great, then what's in the paid stuff?

right? And what most people don't realize is most courses, most books, most like paid membership communities, all of that, you aren't really buying information. What you're buying is implementation. You're buying accountability. You're buying access to the person that you want to learn from. So you can use all the information in your course as your free content.

It's just when someone pays, they're not buying just the information, right? It's that you packaged it. You're saving them time. You're giving them access to you. You're answering their questions, right?

That's what someone's paying for. 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 going to 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 aren't already, and I'll see you next time. Bye bye.