Entrepreneurship Masterclass: How to Make $10k - $1M per Month - Daniel Priestley
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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.

I've built multiple $10 million plus companies. I don't know how to do anything. 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, all 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.

What you're about to hear is a round two interview between me and the incredible Daniel Priestley. Now, Daniel is actually one of the most popular episodes that we have ever had of the podcast. And the first episode that we did, which was around a year ago, still continues to get thousands and thousands of views every single day. In this episode, we talk specifically about how to go from zero to 10K a month as an entrepreneur. And then we talk a bit about how to go from 10K to 100K a month. And then we talk a little bit about how to go from 100K a month

to a million dollars a month as an entrepreneur. - 10 grand is not a lot to certain people. If you've already got a half a million pound business, a half a million dollar business, 10 grand's okay, yeah, we can do that. - And we're gonna be talking about a bunch of frameworks that you can learn and apply to whatever stage of the business career you're at. We're gonna talk about the four different types of products, including the Eiffel Tower metaphor. And throughout the episode, we riff on a bunch of different business ideas and we apply the principles to these ideas kind of in real time so you can see how they apply in a real world context.

anyone who can run a pub can run your business a pub has drunk people and people like hooking up and having relationships a pub is like got razor thin margins you just do not need to be running your business that's not what you're good at as a key person of influence you should be out there doing the thing that only you can do daniel welcome back to the podcast it's good to be back this is sick like you are one of the most viewed episodes of all time and if we sort of

exclude the people who are already like like super celebrities you are the most viewed episode of all time i'm totally stoked about this this is incredible what do you think landed so much with people from the previous time you came on on the podcast i think we just went through a journey and we hit a whole bunch of bases i'm hoping we can deliver as much value today as well yeah

And also here's the other thing. I think everyone's interested in becoming an entrepreneur. The world has changed so much in the last 10, 20 years and the rules that many people grew up with have changed. The schooling system is preparing people for a world that doesn't really exist as far as many people see.

There's a lot of people who are dissatisfied with the game of work because it doesn't pay enough and the conditions aren't good enough and it doesn't feel like it's giving you enough freedom and flexibility and something that's going to be exciting and interesting and engaging.

And a lot of people are turning to entrepreneurship and they want to know how to do it. Nice. So we're going to be talking about how to do it in this episode. We're going to go over the entrepreneur journey from zero to 10K a month, 10 to 100K a month, and then 100K to 1 million a month.

No pressure. And we'll split up the podcast into these three chunks and we'll try and just sort of blitz through as many of the frameworks and the philosophies and the ways of thinking about it as we can. Love it. So that people can at least know what the roadmap looks like and then they can fill in the gaps with specific implementation based on other reading and other resources and things like that. Here's the thing I want to say up front.

a lot of people think that entrepreneurship is a really unpredictable road. They think that it's dangerous and risky and all of those sorts of things. I've got an analogy that I think is worth saying right up front. So as you know, I've got three little kids, a four-year-old, a five-year-old, and an eight-year-old. So we do lots and lots of Lego.

So imagine you start with this Lego box and you look at the front of the box and on the front of the box is the picture of what it should look like at the end. And then you tip the Legos on the carpet. It's a big mess. And you go, how do I get from that mess to that box? And then there's a little set of instructions that says, do this, then this, then this. And it breaks it down just step by step by step.

And then you don't have to really think. If you just simply do the steps, very rapidly it starts looking like the front of the box. Now, entrepreneurship is actually very similar to that. There are a series of steps and you go step by step by step by step and then it starts looking like the front of the box pretty quickly. So that's what I want to cover today. I want to basically try and demystify it a little bit. I want to take all the kind of weird, risky kind of misconceptions out of entrepreneurship. Okay.

Okay. But surely this is too good to be true. I've heard that entrepreneurship is like 99% of startups fail or whatever that number is. I know so many people who've bought a course on day trading, trying to make money online, and they've just failed. And it seems like the only people getting rich off of this are the people selling the courses. Yeah. So what's going on there? Okay. So great first frame statement.

The first thing I'd say is entrepreneurship and trading are very, very different, right? So trading is a zero-sum game. You're buying and selling equities or you're buying and selling a financial instrument. And these are zero-sum games. There's winners and losers and there's nothing in between or there's brokers in between. But you can't value add. You can't buy some shares or some currencies and value add those. You have to basically trade those and try and get in and get out at the right time. The reality is because it's a winner and loser sport, something like trading, you

You are not going to beat the winners, right? So the people who are the best in the world, it would be as silly for me to go into the NBA and say that I'm going to try and score a few points against the professional basketballers. I could try for 10 years. I wouldn't score a point, not one.

because they're professionals. They're built for it and they're like paid crazy amounts of money. So that's who you're up against when you're in the trading space. So entrepreneurship is not trading. That is definitely not the case. When we go into the world of entrepreneurship, you can value add and you can do all of those sorts of things. Why is it that it's not more predictable for most people? Well, for starters, entrepreneurship...

You're figuring out what the market wants and most market needs are already met. There's already businesses. There's millions of businesses. Yeah. So most market needs are already met. And people, it's like, yeah, I already have a company that makes great cupcakes. I don't need another cupcake company. So...

The thing is that we're trying to go through a process of discovery to find something that is an unmet need, something that the marketplace wants but doesn't actually have access to. And that is hard, right? So it's not that it's easy, but there are a series of steps that allow you to de-risk it and to de-mystify it and to not over-commit, not take yourself into a position of throwing money at something that's not going to work. Hmm.

Okay. That makes sense. Before we get into the, I guess, the entrepreneur journey, you know, you've written a book called How to Raise Entrepreneurial Kids. And you have some thoughts about the school system and kind of

how we got here. I wonder if you can just sort of riff on that for a moment. Like why is entrepreneurship so alien to the way that most of us were educated? Yeah, so entrepreneurship feels very counter to the way we were educated because the education system was created in the industrial age when they had to create something called component labor. Component labor was creating nicely machined parts that fit into somebody else's organization, someone else's machine. If you think about the world prior to the digital revolution,

You had local economies and you basically graduated school and had to fit into a local economy. So some kids were going to grow up and become local police officers and some were going to become local doctors and nurses and some were going to become local teachers and some were going to be butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. So all the things that were in that local environment and you essentially had to graduate school and then fit into a business that was already up and running and established in the local environment.

So the model for schooling was to create component labor, people who fit nicely into other people's businesses. Where we're at right now is very different.

So, the world that we live in right now is teams that are geographically spaced out, business opportunities that could be incredibly narrow and niche but a mile deep, customer base that's all over the world. And you can, in that environment, you can actually be very different. You can be highly creative. You can be innovative. You can be creative.

exclusive, you can be specialized, all of those sorts of things. So it's a very different environment in the digital age. The next thing that I would say that's different is that when you're an entrepreneur, you're looking at a problem that exists and you're trying to come up with a solution that fits that problem. When you've come out of a school system, you're developing a skillset and you're trying to find an employer that needs those skills. So slightly different. Yeah.

So when we think about like a Porsche 911, Porsche 911, they don't say, what are we good at? And they go, okay, we're really good at making the chassis of the car, but we don't do tires and we don't do stereo systems. So we're just going to sell the thing that we're good at. They say, what does the customer want? Well, the customer wants to be able to drive the car straight off the dealership and feel great about their purchase. And to do that, they need tires and they need...

stereo system in the car. So what Porsche does is they ask, what does the customer actually want? What's the experience they're looking for? And how do we bring together everything that's required for that to happen? So they say, okay, let's get Pirelli tires on there and let's get a Bose stereo system in there and let's get two and a half thousand suppliers and let's bring them all together. So what businesses do is they find a solution to what the customer wants,

What employees do, and especially when you've come out of school, is they have skills and they try and market the skills to an employer. So these are slightly different. They sound similar, but they're quite different. And that's why entrepreneurship feels a little bit different when you move from employment into entrepreneurship.

Nice. And how would you define entrepreneurship? So entrepreneurship is a couple of things. Number one, you are trying to do something that commercially is successful. You want to make money, right? So let's not beat around the bush. A big part of entrepreneurship is you want to make money. You're doing something for commercial success. It's not...

a charity, you're trying to make a profit. The next thing is you're taking a risk. So entrepreneurship has an element of risk. And normally it's even it's a risk for the entrepreneur. You're in some way risking your time without a certain outcome, or you're risking money, or you're risking someone else's money. You're doing all of those sorts of things.

And the next thing you're doing is you're organizing the resources beyond your own control. So you're starting with limited resources and then you're expanding your sphere of influence over resources. So when we think about those three things, if you weren't really taking a risk, you'd just be a leader or an asset manager. If you...

You weren't trying to make money. You might be a changemaker. You might be a positive force in the world, but you're not an entrepreneur, right? So it has to combine all of those elements. And when you say, what was that thing you said, sort of organizing resources? So if

If you had all the resources, right? Let's say you're a trust fund kid. You've got millions and millions of pounds already that your dollars that you're starting with and you've got all these people and it's all there. You're essentially, you're a leader. You're leading the money or you're asset managing. An entrepreneur,

is normally someone who's accessing resources beyond their control. So they have to enroll other people to join their team. They have to enroll investors to put money in. They have to enroll customers to buy something that isn't really proven. So you're kind of influencing people outside of your current sphere. And how would you define entrepreneur versus solopreneur?

That's a thing that's become popular recently on Twitter and one-person businesses and things like that. Yeah. So you're still commercial. You're still taking a risk. You're not really organizing a lot of human labor. You're not organizing people outside of your control. I'm not a big fan of solopreneur. And the reason for that is because if you're a quote-unquote solopreneur, you're basically...

If you go on holiday, the whole business goes on holiday. You can imagine what it would be like if Microsoft said, everybody's on holiday this month. We're all going away at the same time. Microsoft would shut down and the stock price would crash. So...

If you're a solopreneur and everyone goes away all at once, which is you, then that's a very precarious position. And the truth is you never really switch off as a solopreneur. So what you're trying to do is you're trying to create something and sell something and deal with customers and all this sort of stuff all on your own.

And the truth is, as soon as it starts showing sign of working, why wouldn't you have a salesperson? Why wouldn't you have an assistant? Why wouldn't you have someone who's, you know, customer service role? Why wouldn't you start bringing together a few people to make this thing actually a proper business and to also specialize your own time on the most high value thing that you do? I mean, people famously say, oh, I don't want to manage people. Well, I think managing people is when you go past...

In some cases, six or seven people. Sometimes you can manage up to like 12. But certainly once you go past 12, you are into management teams and all that sort of stuff. And it gets hairier and more complex. Let's just call it 10 people. So under 10 people, you normally find that you're a self-organizing team. Think about it like a dinner party.

If you have six or seven people around for a dinner party, it really does self-organize. People just like get their own drinks and they like bring things to the table and everything kind of works and it's kind of a flowing conversation. If you go over 10, 11, 12 people, 13 people,

Now it's kind of like you're organizing people and you really, the stress comes on and it's like, guys, it's time to sit down to the table over here now. And who's got the drinks and who's doing this? Have we got enough food? So suddenly it's like a, it's a much more complex production to bring that many people together. So there's something magical that happens, which is a self-organizing little team. Certainly three, four, five, six, seven, eight people, um,

Eight people, you're definitely a self-organizing little team. There's not a lot of managing people in that. Okay, nice. Cool. So apologies for taking us on a little bit of a tangent down that route, but I know that people are interested in the whole sort of situation. So zero to 10K a month, that's like our first step of the process. And so I wonder if...

you know, this is something we tried on a previous podcast. If we can sort of pretend to be coaching me as a beginner to entrepreneurship, I don't really know anything about entrepreneurship, but I like the idea. Sure. I've maybe listened to you on Deep Dive with Ali Abdal and I'm like, oh, this Danny Priestley guy knows what he's talking about. I would like to engage his services as a coach. I know you don't really do one-on-one coaching anymore, but like how would we approach that conversation if I were, say,

working a full-time job as a junior doctor two years out of med school and I want to start a business but like I don't I don't really know what's next so I love a good framework and my framework for this would be chaos chaos stands for concept audience offer sales so concept

is we need to come up with something that is a good idea, a good concept. When people say, "Ali, what on earth are you doing? Why are you quitting your job to do this thing?" They're going to say, "What is it you're going to do? What are you going to start?" So the first thing is you've got to have a good answer to that. So you've got to have a concept. So let's talk about concept.

And I want to do this nice and quick, but do it justice. So the first thing that I want to do with the concept is I want to know, do you want a lifestyle business or a performance business? What are we building? What does that mean? So a lifestyle business is going to be

Are we keeping it small so that you can have fun, freedom, and flexibility? Is that the purpose? Do you want to just travel and work and have a little gang of people that are rebels and misfits and we keep it small and deliberately? The whole purpose is fun, freedom, flexibility, and especially we don't want debt or investors. So that would be a lifestyle business, lifestyle boutique. And

And the second thing would be a performance business, which is we're building something to sell it. We want to become big and valuable. We want to be 50 million, 100 million plus in valuation. We want 50 employees. We're happy to take on investors. We want investors. We want debt. We want to build something that's going to be valuable. So the first thing I'd want to know is do you want a lifestyle business or do you want a performance business? I think of it like a property developer with a block of land. Do you want to put your dream home on the block of land or do you want to build a 10-story building and sell it?

Like property development. Okay. I want to make, if I could make 3K a month, that will allow me to quit my job and then I'll be happy. So it sounds like a lifestyle, the beginnings of a lifestyle boutique, right? Sure. And this is not a bad place to start. Normally a performance business is something that you would do if you've got really good guidance and it might be your second time through.

So that would be the first thing. The next thing I'm looking at is what we call OMV, origin, story, mission, and vision. So what is your background? And we need to do something that lines up with your background. There's no point where we don't have any passions or any, you know, like when you talked about trading before, I see people, they watch some trading videos online and then they're like, oh, I'm going to be a trader. Why? Oh, because so-and-so said that I could end up with a helicopter. Yeah.

Okay, amazing. And it's like, what about your background says trading? Nothing. You know, you've never done, you're not analytical, you're not, you don't have any of the kind of background that a trading firm would want to see in a trader that they hire. None of that's there. You've just seen something that you think makes money. So there's no origin story.

Whereas, let's look at you. You became an amazing YouTuber, but your background was teaching people. You were helping Cambridge. You were talking to people about how to – you had one of your first businesses teaching people how to study for exams. So there is actually a background there. You also were passionate about media, and you were doing stuff in the media space. So you had a bit of origin story that was leading up to this. Ooh.

What would that look like for someone who maybe, like I've spoken to a lot of people who would say, oh, but I don't have anything I'm passionate about. Like I'm studying science.

insert generic degree at insert generic university. And in the evenings, I go home and watch Netflix and scroll social media and hang out with my friends. In that context, how do we approach talking to that person about this origin story? If I had time with that person, I would discover that around age 10, there were moments where there were the early moments of empowerment. Now, I've worked with enough entrepreneurs to discover that

always around age 10 to 13, there was a moment where you discovered that you were actually independently powerful separate to your parents. And you have a moment of like, wow, okay, wow.

you know what, I'm not just a dumb kid. I've actually, there's something going on here. So you might've stood up to a bully. You might have taken ownership of something. You might've, you know, put together a little play, something like that. So there's always clues in that. And psychologically, one thing I've found about entrepreneurs is that they're

At a very deep level, they're trying to get back to that feeling, that feeling of empowerment. And it started early. So let me ask you the question. Around age 10 to 13, do you remember a particular early memory where it was like, I had a moment of empowerment? I had a moment that feels like, wow, I'm...

I'm on my own and I'm actually a powerful individual. Yeah, it was when I started to learn to code. Coding. Yeah. And when I started making websites and the joy, I can't believe I'm kind of getting emotional for like even just talking about it, just the joy of creating something without my mom's permission and like just making the thing.

Yeah. And then started like advertising my services on a freelancer website back in the day. So there's some elements here of technology and there's some elements of putting stuff out to the world. Like you're actually creating something and putting it out to the world. And there's elements of like no permission, right? Now, if we go and fast forward to YouTube, it's a no permission platform. You're creating something for the world and you're putting it out there in the world. Mm-hmm.

world. So there's all these kind of echoes of that early memory. So what happens is that this ingrains in us pretty early and everyone's got one, right? So we all have a moment. Sometimes it's a negative experience. So sometimes like...

A silly example, the origin story for Batman is he's a victim of crime. His parents are killed and he realizes that he is on his own. He has to figure it out real fast on his own that he's now a 10-year-old kid who's orphaned. So that's his origin story. And he has to wake up one day and say, I'm going to work with this situation that I'm in. So that is his moment of empowerment. I know it's a fictional story, but it resonates and it's a story that stood the test of time, but it's a good origin story example that everyone relates to. So sometimes it's negative.

As in like something bad happens and you have to just face it. And in many cases, it's very positive. I had one, I was 10 years old and I hosted my own garage sale. So we had some stuff in the house that was damaged. We had a little kitchen fire and it damaged some stuff. And I decided to clean it and sell it. And one of the things was a microwave. And this guy comes up to me at the garage sale and he says, how much for the microwave? And I say, $20.

He says, can I talk to your dad? I say, oh, okay, I must have done something wrong. So I go and get dad and dad comes out and he says, what's the problem? And he says, well, your son says the microwave's $20, but will you take $15? And dad looks at him and he says, well, it's his business. You'll have to negotiate with him. Hmm.

And I just in that moment just went, whoa, it's my business. You'll have to negotiate with me. So here's this adult and he looks at me like embarrassed and he says, oh, can I give you 15? And I'm like, no, it's 20.

So in that moment, I'm feeling incredibly empowered and I heard this word called business and it's my business and I started an entrepreneurial venture. I took something that was a negative, which was a little house fire or something got damaged. I cleaned it. I fixed it. I sold it. I made money. I ended up with a green...

bicycle and Sega Master System. So for me, this was like, whoa, you can take bad situations and through this thing called business, you can make it into good things. So that was my moment of empowerment. And it's no surprise that I ended up as a serial entrepreneur. And so we're saying that the concept for your business should ideally be linked to some sort of origin story. When you try and do things purely to make money,

Money is a part of it. Money is a big part of it. When you try and do things purely to make money, it never works. It just doesn't work.

Everyone who makes money, whether it's Warren Buffett or some amazing hedge fund manager, my goodness, it runs deep in their veins. There's something about it. They're not just trying to make money. They're trying to get back to a certain feeling. There's something in there that needs to be unpacked. So what would you say for someone who's listening to this and thinking, damn, 10 to 13, I don't really have anything. I was just hanging out with my friends, TBH. You might be an NPC. LAUGHTER

Look, honestly, if you're really that stuck, entrepreneurship is an advanced strategy. You need to go and work for an entrepreneur. You need to go and do six months with this company, six months with this company. You need to go fishing around. This is not like entrepreneurship is not some ticket to riches. Entrepreneurship is a really good ticket to be stressed all the time, to sit up late thinking about your business, to get really freaked out about whether customers like stuff or not.

Entrepreneurship is an advanced move. It's something that you should do. You should actually be an entrepreneur begrudgingly. You should go, there's this thing that has to happen in the world. No one's doing it. I'm going to do it. But it's a bumpy road that ends smooth. It's not a smooth road. It's not for everyone. It's not for everyone. And there are 6 million businesses already in the UK. There's 30 million plus in the USA. Go join one. Go

Go and join a team. Stop trying to get a job at Goldman Sachs where you're going to be shoved in a corner and you're not going to know how that business runs or who makes the decisions or where things come from. Go work with a team of eight people.

Find out how they make the sales. Get to know how they generate leads. Get to know what you do when a customer is upset about you. How do you handle a customer complaint? Go and work in a small business. Start working side by side with entrepreneurs. And if you can work for an entrepreneur for six months to two years and you go, actually, I could do this and I've got an idea, that's the thing. So

I'm not going to try and tell someone, if you're struggling with this, just keep pushing through. Maybe you're just not ready. This episode is very kindly brought to you by Huel. I've been using Huel. I've been a paying customer of Huel since 2017, since my fifth year of medical school when I first discovered it. And basically what it is, if you haven't heard of it, is that it is a meal in a shake. It's got the perfect balance of carbs and fiber and proteins and fat, and it contains 26 different vitamins and minerals. All you do is add water or milk to the powder. Usually I use water. You can shake it up or you can blend it. A

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It's available on iPhone and Android, and you can check it out by typing in Trading212 into your respective app store. So thank you so much, Trading212, for sponsoring this episode. Okay, so let's say my origin story was age 10 to 13. I made a few quid playing guitar, busking on the street, and people give me money. And then I recorded a CD of cover songs, and I sold it for five pounds here and there. And

age 13 to 16, I was playing gigs in local bars and stuff and making a few quid there. Is that a potential origin for a potentially entrepreneurial journey? It's certainly an origin story. There are literal elements to that. There are also just emotional elements to that story. So there's performing in front of people, being the star of the show. There's

creating a physical product and being out there selling it. So there's those elements that can also play a role. It doesn't literally have to be that you have to be a musician, but it could be that you want to work in that space. What we're trying to do, and we're really early on, right? So we're just having a look at, basically, we're just having a look at origin, mission, and vision. So origin is what's your background. Vision is what would you love to see happen in the future? What do you see happening like

lifestyle or performance business. Do you see yourself selling this business? What is the exciting element? What do you want to do for the world? So all that's in the vision. And mission is what is the most high value thing that you can do right now?

So mission is like in World War II, the vision was to defeat the fascists and the mission was to storm the beaches. So you can see that there's a big vision. This is the end result that we're looking for. And today, this is what has to be done or this is the thing that is most important. So in business, a vision is where do we want to get to and a mission is what is our high value thing?

So for me, my mission is develop entrepreneurs who stand out, scale up and make positive impacts in the world. And if I wake up and do that mission, then there's a pretty good chance I'm delivering high value. So we start with those basics. Let's make it more practical. It's all philosophical at this point. So practically, you then want to ideate. You want to come up with 10 concepts.

You want to look at what problems can you solve and who's willing to pay the most for those problems. So it's really important that we combine those other elements. A lot of people are very hung up on passion, but there's two other elements of a good concept, and that is that you're solving a problem in the world and that people are paying for that problem. So here's the unfortunate truth.

When it comes to any problem in the world, there are people who throw their time at the problem in order to solve it. And there are people who've got loads of money and they want to throw money at the problem to solve it. And if you want to run a great business, you need to talk to people who've got money to throw at the problem.

Yeah. This is the issue I often find with students in that the only market they know is students and students famously do not enjoy throwing money at a problem. They throw time at problems. Yeah. And then they're like, oh, why is my business struggling? Yeah. It's like because you're trying to appeal to students. Yeah, exactly. That's tricky. Exactly. You're trying to appeal to a market that loves to spend time on stuff. They've got no money to throw at it. Right. Whereas if you simply had...

three clients who are multimillionaires and you were solving some sort of problem for them, you'd make loads of money. How does one go about finding ideas? Is it a case of you lock yourself in a room with you and your buddies and you think of some business ideas or what's the... You come up with 10 ideas and you pick the best three. Okay.

Yep. And then you test them and you test them as fast and as cheap as you possibly can. So you're looking for an idea where you push the door and people respond. Push the door and it opens. You're not trying... I hate how people think entrepreneurship's really hard. It is really hard, but it's hard. The good types of businesses are hard because there's too much to do and not enough time.

So like the hard problem that you want to have is there's too many people who want this and I can't keep up with them. You know, I've got 40 people to call back today and I don't have time to call back all 40 people. That's the problem you want. That's a good kind of hard. Yes. You don't want to have a problem that's like, oh, this is like no one's interested. Yeah. So I remember when I was in my third year of uni, I was the president of the Pakistan Society.

And we had a ball, like a charity ball every year. And it was such an absolute nightmare trying to sell tickets for this ball because we were selling £35 tickets to students who did not have any money. £35 is a lot. It was a lot of money. I was really like, oh, like...

It felt so like hard because it's like there was no demand for this. And it was like having to message Facebook message people that I knew at other universities to be like, guys, you're going to love this event. It's really fun. And like in the back of my mind, I knew that like,

It's a lot of money. These guys don't have money. It's not going to be that good objectively. But like having to be a sort of snake oil salesman in that context, I hope no one from the PaxOx days is listening to this, but I really felt like I was a snake oil salesman. And that gave me a real sense of when it came to trying to sell that.

Whereas when we opened the door for our YouTuber Academy, suddenly, oh crap, we've got more demand than we even know what to do with. Yeah, one of the great questions is like, does this product deliver someone a return? Like what's the return on investment for them? And if there's like a 10 to 1, if you can think about a 10 to 1 return, it normally is going to be a good...

People are going to pay for it. So YouTuber Academy clearly is worth 10 to 1. If I start a YouTube channel and it succeeds, I'm going to earn money. I've got sponsorship opportunities. I'm going to build a personal brand. It's going to create digital assets that last forever. There's all these positives that could easily be defined as a 10 to 1 ratio. So whatever I spend, there's a great return. And it's nice and clear that there's a nice return.

So a lot of good products, you can actually explain how it returns. What is the return on this product? And there's quite a clear imbalance. Okay.

So coming back to our idea thing, generating 10 ideas. So what does an idea look like at this stage? Is it like a A3 business plan or is it like a tweet or like what makes a business idea a concept? So yeah, it's probably a page of notes about the idea in the early stages. So we're going to talk about what's the product going to look like, who might it be for, those sorts of things. But then pretty quickly, we want to test it.

So I've got three ways that I like to test ideas. I like to run an intro event, which is purely and simply just an introduction to Blank. I like to run a quiz, which is, are you ready to Blank answer 10 questions and find out on Score app? Sure. And I like to do a WhatsApp group. WhatsApp group? Yeah, WhatsApp group is like...

So WhatsApp group is like, for example, if I was going to do the Pakistan ball, I would say we're thinking about doing a Pakistan ball. All the tickets will be released in this WhatsApp group. Would you like to join the free WhatsApp group and get early access to tickets? So it's like just purely and simply, if I can get people to join the WhatsApp group, then

I'll give you a real life example. A friend of mine, Max, he wanted to create a product for what's called a family office. A family office is a very high net worth family who employs people to manage their money full time. Yeah, exactly. The people who've got so much money, they need to have a full time money manager. So he wanted to put together a group of people who do that, who are family office managers.

And what he did is he started a WhatsApp group and he basically said, I'm putting together a WhatsApp group for people whose families, family office managers, hundreds of millions. And it's a place for you to talk to other people who run family offices. So he put together a WhatsApp group and immediately he got about 19 people joined. And that was the beginning of a very successful business.

How did he know these 19 people? He reached out to them. Oh, he just messaged them. Yeah, messaged them on LinkedIn. I'm launching a family office group. I've got this company who have already agreed to come and join. Would you like access to my group?

And people, sure, because here's the thing. It's like, well, I can always leave. Like it's a WhatsApp group, so who cares? But it's a really good first test. I know someone who did a clinic, a fertility clinic, and they created a pop-up WhatsApp group, Five Days to Better Fertility Awareness. And it was basically a five-day pop-up group where

joined the group and it's basically looking at research and um uh what's called minor and macro markers or something like that um and it basically helps people to have five days to better fertility understanding and fertility awareness and i think four or five hundred people joined it so yeah so quizzes whatsapp groups and events okay zoom events free events online things

So let's say my business idea was I want to, I really enjoy making burgers. I want to make one of those burger vans and go into Cambridge town center and sell my burgers. Okay. For starters, please don't do food. Oh, okay. It's one of those capital intensive, hard to scale businesses. It's normally a recipe to lose money. Okay. So burger not good. Well, if you want to use it as an example, we can use it as an example, but I would almost instantly rule it out because it's

It's capital intensive. Okay, I'm going to throw some more examples at you. Perishable. You're dealing with a perishable product. Allergies, food safety requirements. And also it doesn't really scale. Like if you want to serve twice as many people, you need twice as much employees and stock and...

floor space and everything has to be twice as much. So like software, if I build software and I want to serve 10 times as many people, I just onboard them. They have a username and a password. If I want to have a thousand times more people, I just have a username and a password and they just get access to the software. So that is a very different business to a burger. Okay. Business idea. I want to make the ultimate productivity app

Notion and Things and Todoist, they're all a bit like, they're not quite right. I think me as a 26-year-old junior doctor with a vague background in coding, you know what? I want to build the best productivity app in the world. So don't do a productivity app. Yeah.

Because there's a J curve. You're going to have to raise a bunch of money. It's going to be a performance business, but you're going to have to raise a bunch of money. You'll lose money before you make money. Anyway, here's how you start it. You would start by doing a first up. You would do a little event, and it would be an introduction to productivity hacks. And it would be 30 people on a Zoom call. And you would present four or five productivity hacks and see if you can get 30 people.

And that's test number one. Test number two is, are you ready to be more productive? Take the scorecard. Answer 10 questions and find out if you could be improving your productivity, right? So a three-minute productivity assessment, how's your personal productivity? Answer the ScoreApp scorecard, boom. Now, what happens then is if you can get 150 people to fill that in, that's a good sign. Doesn't cost you much to set that up. So now you're actually getting validation.

And then the third test is Productivity Hacks WhatsApp group. I'm going to be doing a lot of research into productivity improvements. Would you like to join the productivity WhatsApp group? Every day there'll be a productivity idea and there'll be other people sharing their ideas and you can share your ideas as well. That sounds pretty good, to be honest. Those three things cost you nothing, right? A Zoom account...

free or almost free. A WhatsApp group is free and a score app account, you can have a free 30-day trial and then it's like £29 a month. So we haven't spent £100 yet and we've hopefully tested the idea to see whether people are engaging. We're going to reach out to people on Instagram. We're going to reach out to people on LinkedIn. We're going to

drop in on some communities that we're already part of. We're going to tell some people that we already know. We're going to kind of reach out to friends and friends of friends and just see if they want to engage with this thing.

Okay, two things. First one, you mentioned J-Curve. For people who may not have gotten halfway through our previous episode, what is a J-Curve business and why would you advise against doing this? The J stands for the shape of the cash flow. So it stands for losing money, losing money, losing money, or not losing so much, not losing so much. Oh, we're making money, we're making money, we're making a lot of money, right? So that's the J.

So there are certain businesses that are sales businesses that are not J curves and then there are businesses that are volume businesses that are typically J curves. Okay. Sales versus volume. What does that mean? So if it's a sales business, it's normally making a sale of over a thousand pounds or over a thousand dollars at a time.

So, for example, if I pick up the phone and talk to you and say, "Ali, I do studio setups and we actually come in and we do all the microphones and we do all the setup and we actually set you up a whole podcast studio and video production studio and we have a studio management service and it's $7,000 to do all of this stuff for you."

you say yes, you sign an agreement, yes, I want that, and then I go away and actually bring all the stuff and I get all the things that I promised you. And I can literally take that agreement and then go off and get the microphones and all that stuff that I need after you've signed. So I'm making a sale and then I'm fulfilling the sale. And each sale is more than $1,000. Why more than $1,000? Because the time and effort that it takes to make a sale is...

And then the time and effort to look after a client, it needs to be over $1,000. Oh, okay. Because this is where I definitely would have gone wrong back in the day when I was trying to build businesses in school and at university. I could not have even remotely imagined paying £1,000 for anything. Yeah. Except maybe like a MacBook. And I would have gone for the student discount MacBook Air base version for 800 quid so as to not have to pay the £1,000.

And therefore, all of my business ideas were around like, okay, if I could do this thing for a tenner, this thing for 50 quid, this thing for 100 quid, this thing for 120, like I'm sort of stuck in that pricing zone. Well, here's the thing. If you were to go get a job as a doctor, you'd be selling a package called

year of employment for 40,000 pounds. So you were selling something for 40,000 pounds. But it was I have one client, the NHS, and I allocate my entire stock, my time, to this one client. So if you were to have 20 clients who you do some sort of health intervention with, and they all pay two grand each,

Well, now you've got 40 grand, but it's split between 20 clients. So ideally, when we want to do a non-J curve business, we've got to be selling something that's meaty. We've got to be normally selling B2B, as in business to business,

So we're normally making some sort of a sale and it's typically a solution sale. We're packaging up products, services, outcomes, and we're selling that to a business that wants all those things. They're going to sign up for it. They're going to sign a little agreement and then you're going to go ahead and do all of that and it's going to add up to at least a thousand. And mind you, this could go all the way up to tens of thousands or millions.

So you could actually sell lots of stuff. So those are sales businesses. I'll give you some examples. A financial planner normally sells financial planning and then delivers it. An accountant normally sells an accounting package, an accounts management. Bookkeepers sell a year's worth of bookkeeping as a rolling contract. Business coaches might sell a business coaching package or a life coaching package.

So all of those would be examples of businesses where you're not

in a J curve. You're selling something up front and then you know how much you're going to earn and the sale comes first. Interesting. And then the other type is volume businesses. Yeah, J curve businesses. This is where you have to invest a lot of money into something that you're going to sell little bits at a time. Like a productivity app. Yeah, like a productivity app. So if the productivity app is six pounds a month, you're going to have to build, let's be real, if you're going to build an app

At the very basic, it's going to be 20 or 30 grand.

Yeah. Yeah. Like super basic. And then most people I know who built apps, they've ended up paying like loads more. Yeah. So most software projects end up being hundreds of thousands to millions, especially if they take off. But granted, I do see people who start little businesses, software businesses, and them and a couple of people, they work on it and they build something for a few thousand, right? So fair enough. But you're building something that's a few thousand and then you're trying to sell it for like six bucks a month and you're

You need, you know, well, you need like a thousand people hanging $6 a month and you've got 6,000 a month. And if there's two of you working on it, that's only three grand a month. You might as well have jobs. So you've got to get a lot of people. And the reality of getting thousands of people to sign up to this is it's probably a six or seven person team to manage thousands of people signing up.

So, you're perpetually in this kind of J-curve where you're trying to get enough people to subscribe to this thing or pay for this thing. And it's even, by the way, it's even worse if it's not subscription, if it's not recurring revenue. Like I see people saying, oh, I'm going to sell cupcakes. It's a one-off sale.

of $15 for a thing of cupcakes. And it's not repeat business. It's not on auto renew. So somehow you have to make hundreds of sales every month just to simply keep your kitchen cooking. Okay. So this is a big, I think this is a big firmware update for me as well, because I've never really thought of it in this way. And therefore I suspect people listening to this haven't thought of it in this way.

I've been in the entrepreneurship game for like ages now, but like still when I think of a business, what I imagine is a productivity app or a cupcake store or a laundromat or a restaurant or a coffee shop or a, I enjoy making burgers. Let me go and set up a food van. And 100% of these things that come to my mind when I think business are volume-based JCO businesses where I'm selling a low ticket item and trying to sell lots of it. Whereas when the things you were describing, financial planning and like, whatever,

That guy, it wouldn't even cross my mind. Those are businesses? Much better businesses. Yeah. Yeah, much better businesses. Like if you have a $5,000 package and you can make four signups per week, that's a million dollars a year. And all you have to do is make four signups a week. So to make four signups a week, you might only need to talk to 20.

And a million dollars a year pays for quite a few staff. So let's say you've got this $5,000 package and you have a salesperson and you've got a little ads budget. And the goal is we talk to 20 people per week and we make out of 20 presentations, we make four sales. Great. You've just made 20 grand a week times 50 weeks of the year. You've got a million dollars.

I've started having similar conversations with, you know, there are various people I know now, either sort of former team members of mine or people who used to be interns here in our team who I've gone away and they're like, all right, cool. I want to make it as a freelancer. And I'm like, all right, cool. What's the goal? Like,

They're like, oh man, if I could make 2K a month, I'd be absolutely, I'd be flying. And I'm like, all right, cool. And they'll start off selling that time, like offering YouTube video editing as a service for like $100 per video. And it's like, cool, I need to do 20 videos a month to get my 2K. And I'm like, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. Like imagine you were able to charge 2K a month for something. How many clients did you need to make your 2K? Just the one. Just one client. So way easier to deal with one client.

Imagine you want to go 10K a month. Five clients. Five clients at 2K a month gets you to 10K a month. How would that feel? And also, imagine you didn't sell them you. Imagine you sold them your team so that it's scalable. So you just run around signing up the clients and then you've got an amazing team. Yeah. Yeah, I think the whole high ticket, low volume thing. One of our friends was over yesterday and he was trying to make like 5K a month.

and was selling his product for 40 and that's a lot of sales that's a lot of sales yeah and i was like that's j curve that's exactly it's a j curve business and he was kind of happy because he was like yeah i'm getting a sale every few days through my twitter and this kind of stuff and i was like okay you know imagine i mean he's doing higher ticket consulting stuff which is which which takes up his time but i was challenging him like what if you could sell a 300 product how many sales of a 300 product would you need to be financially free as it were yeah from from your rent and he was like shit just

If I could get 10 sales a month, I'd be like, oh my God, wow. Here's the other thing too. It's unfortunate, but a very small number of people have a lot of money and they are massively underserved in most cases. So if you look at wealth...

The top 10% of people over 55 have three quarters of the economy in wealth. So it's a very small percentage of older people who have all the wealth, basically, like three quarters of it, 65%, is the top 10% of baby boomers. So it's all locked in that cookie jar. So you need to go to that cookie jar if you want to go and do something that involves proper money. And then if you want to go to income...

The top 1% of income earners earn £163,000 in the UK, £163,000 plus per year. And then once you get in there, the average earnings of a top 1% are is £360,000 a year. So they're on about a grand a day, 360 days a year. So you don't need many of those people and they've got no time. And everything that they do is benchmarked against what they do to create that

income. Let's say they're a surgeon. Anytime they're not being a surgeon, like mowing their lawns or dropping kids at school or any of that sort of stuff, they're losing money because they can be earning a lot of money in the thing that they're earning a lot of money at. If you can figure out how do I sell to people who've got that kind of money, that's helpful.

So a really good idea is to just start by thinking, who has the highest return on investment? Is a Ferrari an expensive car?

Yes. Depends who's asking. It depends who's looking at it. So to an average income earning person, a Ferrari is a very expensive car. To a billionaire, it's just a toy. It's no big deal. To an influencer who makes their money influencing young men and that's their, like it's just their marketing budget, right? It's just part of marketing. To someone who owns a luxury car company that rents the Ferrari out, it's capex. It's just a capital expense. So a Ferrari...

It may or may not be an expensive car depending on who's buying it. So when you say what's expensive, it really only comes down to who's buying it. If I said...

setting up a home podcasting studio is that expensive for 10 grand well if i'm selling it to a kid yes if i'm selling it to a famous youtuber who can easily like leverage it then it's probably not so it's actually really down to who's buying so you've got to get good at figuring out who has the most to get to most to gain from what you can do

By the way, we're still at the really beginning. I love doing it, but we've got a long way to go to get to a million. Yeah, we might have to do part three of the podcast. Okay, hang on. So would it be fair to say that the non-JCO businesses, the ones that make for better business ideas for a beginner,

tend to be service businesses and the J curve tend to be product businesses? Yeah. So the real J curve has set up costs, big set up costs. Restaurants have big set up costs, software, big set up costs.

Courses, not so much, but you're in competition with everyone else who's got a course. So you've got to have a big brand to make sure that it gets cut through. Yeah, I mean, I had the set-up cost of three years of building a YouTube channel before we made any money from courses. That was the J. Yeah. So, yeah, so there's those. I mean, if you're selling something like these, you need a whole professional kitchen, right?

So this would involve a commercial kitchen contract. They probably wouldn't even take you on as a client without a minimum 300, 400 grand worth of commitment orders. So anything that is a physical product is probably a J-curve business. Anything that you've got to do an initial order of tens of thousands and then try and move that, they're all J-curves.

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So we're trying to think, narrowing the focus down, I want to come up with a business idea that I can charge more than a thousand pounds or a thousand dollars for, ideally where the person I'm targeting has a lot of money. Yeah. Where a thousand bucks is not a lot of money. And where probably it's some kind of service that I will do for them. Yep. It's something that they are frustrated. It takes up their time and their time is more valuable or whoever's looking after them isn't doing a reliable job. But

Ah, okay. So that really narrows things down because when I was thinking, oh, you know, I used to play guitar back in my youth, I was like, okay, can I start a business as a guitar teacher? Dot, dot, dot. Yes, you can, but it's not going to be a massive, you're not going to sell that for, you know, you might sell some courses. You could...

These are not the kind of businesses I get excited about. These are hobby businesses. Do you want to talk about hobbies or proper businesses? I think let's go with proper businesses. So proper businesses, we want to get to $10,000 a month. Here's what my rule would be, five sales of $2,000. Is it feasible that we can do five sales of $2,000? So if we're going to do guitar lessons and we're not,

It would have to be that we're signing up people for a commitment of 200 a month times 12 months, and we're doing like family guitar lessons, and we come around and we have a guitar teacher who comes into your house and does the thing, and it's 200 a month, and it's a minimum 12 month commitment. Okay, fine. Now we're in two grand packages. Can we make five sales of that per month? Then delivering on that. Well, then, yeah, we need guitar teachers, right? It's not very scalable.

We could be. I don't know how many guitar teachers are out there, but maybe. But that would be the only way that it would meet my criteria. I have to see that I can make a good 10 grand a month. There has to be a clear model, a back of a napkin spreadsheet that just says, yeah, if we make this many sales, it's sensible that we could get to 10 grand a month.

Pretty quickly with like one or two people. Like me and a friend, we could get to 10 grand a month. Yeah. Damn. Okay. And it's good to be damn. It's good to go, oh, that rules a bunch of stuff out. Yes, it does. That rules out like 99.9% of what I would consider a Bitcoin business idea. Fantastic. Fantastic. Because it's not going to lead anywhere.

Yeah, because remember, you started this. We want to get to hundreds a month, hundreds of thousands a month. I mean, yeah, absolutely. Millions a month, we said we were going to get to in this podcast. My gosh. Okay, fine. So concept. Concept. We're in the chaos model. What is the chaos model? Okay, then we're doing audience, right? Concept audience. So we said the WhatsApp group and the event and the quiz. The next thing is offer. So the offer is constructing an offer that is a couple of grand. And the fourth thing is sales. So we kind of covered it.

So it's concept audience offer sales. The offer is where we present people with either a slide deck or a brochure or sometimes a web page, but I really love to present it physically to people. I love to be sitting eyeball to eyeball when I present this because I want to see how they actually react. Oh, wait, so you're saying I have to actually talk to people and sell them this thing? Yes. Nah, come on. That's not my idea of what a business is. I thought I'd just sit in my bedroom and make something and then suddenly become a...

Become a millionaire. You eventually do. But when you're starting a business, you want to get close enough to lick their face. You want to be right up close to your customers. You want to see exactly how they interact. Isn't that such an old school way of like thinking about business? Surely the world has changed. Surely I can just like make an app or something. Yeah. The best tech entrepreneurs I know, they love to get hands on.

hand really hand on with a client with a with a potential client so in the early days we're talking about going in stages and stage one we just want to see how does the person react when I tell people this is what we've created for you would you like to sign up and they go hmm does it come in blue yeah we can make it in blue oh could I get it in extra large yeah we could do it in extra large I

I need it to be spaced out over six payments. Can we do six payments? Yeah, we can do six payments. Okay, cool. Yeah, I will sign up if it's blue and extra large and six payments. Fantastic. So that's what we need to do. And they won't do that online. They won't drop you an email and say, well, if it was this and this and this, then I would have done it. They'll just go, no, not for me. So you have to do at least 30 sales meetings to get any –

You know, because you did statistics and science research

Statistical analysis, you need 30 samples as like the basics of statistical significance. 150 is like a next level up. So I'm a big fan that you don't judge your product or service until you've sat down with 30 customers and see how 30 people respond. Damn. Okay. I'm feeling my mind being blown right now. And even though I've done this business thing for a while, but like, yeah, I just never thought

Yeah. So like when I launched ScoreApp, I literally sat down with people, like lots of people. I booked out a boardroom and I just had appointment after appointment after appointment after appointment. I spent an hour with each person

sitting down and saying, we're going to create a scorecard. Here's what we need to do. Here's how we do it. This is the kind of process and the framework. What would it be? And I wanted to see how they would interact with it. And we would also get on the phone and say, hey, we're launching these scorecards. They're two grand each. Would you like to buy one? Oh, well, what does it do? How does it work? Well, here's what it does and here's how it works. And we can build these. And in the early days, I actually sold them at two grand a pop.

because I wanted to just see if people would pay a couple of grand for them. And I had my team building them on WordPress. So we were sitting down with customers after customers after customers and we refined it and refined it like a blacksmith sharpening and sharpening and sharpening. We were sharpening our pitch and we were sharpening our sales process and we were sharpening what the product looked like and we were just going...

Right? So I did not judge until I had 30 pages of notes. After every single one-to-one, take lots of notes. What did they like? What did they not like? What did they see of value? What did they not see of value? What did they get? What did they not get? So like all of that. Nice. What did they want to do with it? What were they excited? You know, what outcomes were they excited by? So all of that. Okay, nice. Okay, so let's say...

I'm going to make up a random offer. So let's say I lose everything on my YouTube channel. I get canceled 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. Yeah.

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 raw 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

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, all 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. Yeah.

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. 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 do? 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'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... You're just imagining it. Yeah, I've been imagining it 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. Yeah. And the Apple genius came up and asked you, like, what are you going to use it for? And, you know, what, like, what do you do? And all that sort of stuff. Here's what I recommend. Yeah. 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?

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.

And I suspect 90% of people listening to this were previously like, oh, I want to be an entrepreneur. It sounds easy. And now they're like, you know what? You've turned me off. You know what? The day job sounds pretty compelling. Let me be honest with you. The other day I was on the train. I bumped into a friend of mine who works in a big job, big corporate. And he's sitting on the train reading fiction, reading a fiction book. And I'm looking at this and I'm going...

Wow. Like if I've got spare time, I am not reading a fiction book. I'm like trying to, you know, do some self-improvement or I'm trying to read a book about business, but just the casual, you know, the casual relaxed, I'm reading a fiction book and I'm like, that must be what it, that's what it must feel like to have a job, like to have certainty that, that level of certainty. It's lovely. What a delight.

For your kids, would you feel a bit disappointed if they got a, quote, real job? Not if they loved it. No, not at all. Provided they're enjoying it, they're adding value. Like entrepreneurship is, as I say, it's something you do reluctantly. You do it because you spot something in the world that you want to bring to life. You want to do this thing. It's like you go in eyes wide open. But...

Look, I will say this. The upside with entrepreneurship is wild if you get it right. So $10,000 a month is where you're on par with a basic job because you're going to have a few overheads. So if you take a basic job and you say, okay, $4,000 or $5,000 a month, like NHS doctor, would they be on about $5,000 a month? Yeah, $4,000 or $5,000-ish.

So, you know, depending on what level. Yeah. So essentially that 10 grand a month of sales minus an assistant minus some costs of doing business is going to leave you with about four or five grand a month. So if you can do that, you're on par with a job, but you've got extra work, extra stress. And if you stop, the whole thing stops.

So you're kind of like just benchmarking. You know those games where there's like a shadow person and you're trying to keep up with that shadow person? So at 10 grand a month, you're kind of like neck and neck with your employed shadow person at that stage. Nice. Any final tips or resources for the zero to 10K a month bracket before we move beyond 10K a month? Final tips or resources. So concept audience offer, sales, marketing,

I would just say, just stay curious. Embrace the critics. When someone says they don't like it, just ask why. If someone says, "No, I'm not at all interested in that." Oh, that's really curious. I'm so surprised because I imagined you would be interested in this.

So just don't take anything personally. You're a scientist conducting experiments and it's like, whoa, that worked. That didn't work. But don't be emotionally invested in it. You have to start, the process has to begin with curiosity of this probably won't work. Let's see if it does. You know, a bunch of this, I think I've got a bunch of this right, but I've probably got a bunch wrong. Got it. And then final thing on this front, like

This sort of thing, and I still have residual bits of this myself, sort of emotional feelings about money and about how like selling something is kind of evil or bad or you're a bad person. And I've still got these residual narratives in my mind and in my heart. And I know rationally that like...

Yeah, I imagine a lot of people are having this. Capitalism and money is the most pure and brilliant transaction. It's the most incredible system. The marginal utility of a cup of coffee for a coffee shop owner is really low. They don't want that cup of coffee, right? The marginal utility of the coffee for the person who doesn't have a cup of coffee is high, and the marginal utility of their £2.50 or $3 is

So everyone wins. Isn't that incredible? Like think about that just for a moment. The coffee shop owner is so happy that you gave them $3 for the coffee. You're so happy that they have this coffee shop and that they're

they were just willing to give you this delicious coffee for $3. And you're like, I didn't want the $3. I didn't care. There's my $3. Yay, hot cup of coffee. Fantastic. And then they're like, yay, I got $3. I didn't need that extra cup of coffee. So this is the beauty of business that you essentially have two people who are super happy, super stoked. So this is what every transaction involves. Every single transaction that happens in the economy is two people who felt that they won't.

Two people felt that they walked away going, that is so great. I paid for something that I was, I'm getting a great deal. And the person who sold it is like, yay, I made a sale. I love it. This is capitalism. And it's so amazing. It's the most incredible system. It sounds so obvious when you put it like that. But even hearing you say that, like, has sort of triggered some kind of surprise in me. I was like, oh, yeah, I've just never considered that. I just sort of like...

float around thinking, oh, people just buy and sell stuff. But if I'm selling something that's bad, and if someone's buying from me, then like, oh, like I better make sure like I'm like not selling them snake oil. And it's all over the palpitation start. Yeah. So of course, there's a couple of things. Snake oil doesn't work. And that's the problem with it. So like, for example, trading courses, they don't work. You're not going to beat the traders. You're not going to beat the professionals. So it is snake oil because it doesn't work.

If you sold a trading course to a professional trader to make them go from good to great, then it wouldn't be snake oil. If you sell a Ferrari to someone who can afford a Ferrari, if someone sells their company for $100 million and they've always wanted a Ferrari and it's their childhood dream to have a Ferrari and they've got loads of money and for them it's just a great thing and they've always wanted it, that's not a thing.

If I pressured someone into getting a Ferrari and they couldn't really afford it and I signed them up to a payment plan that they couldn't really afford, that's a horrible thing. It's actually not the product that is the problem. It's...

picking who you're going to sell to, making sure that they actually feel good about it. You know, anything can be missold. Anything can be really well sold to the right people. And if you're worried about it, then you're the type of person who's only going to sell to the right people anyway. The only people who are bad in the economy are the ones who don't care. So by virtue of the fact that you're worried about this means you're one of the good actors. Hmm.

At this point, our hypothetical business is doing 10K a month. What does our team look like at this point? And then how do we go to 100K a month? Because that seems like bloody hell a million. Yeah, exactly. You're either two to four people at this point. So 10 grand a month is normally a two person, three or four people. So two to four people, typically. You normally would have a salesperson. You would have someone who's like customer service or fulfillment. Maybe you've got a bookkeeper or an administrator or an assistant.

So when I started, I arrived in 2006, 2007 to London. First thing I did is I hired an executive assistant and a salesperson and a event manager because we were running events. So fulfillment. So I literally week two had three people on the team. How did you find these people? Uh,

How did I find them? Or how would one find people these days? Literally, I'm launching a business and I'm looking for some people who can help. Does anyone know anyone who's looking for something? Asking friends and family and stuff. Just asking around. Most people know someone who's looking for a job. You're looking for rebels and misfits. You're looking for the wrong people, not the right people. What do you mean?

like the neighbor's kid or some, you know, you go to McDonald's and you see this like happy, cheerful person who's like wiping down tables and they're like in a good mood and they're like wiping the tables down and you go, awesome. Like what a positive attitude. Like you're awesome.

Or you might, you know, just someone might try and knock on your door and say, hey, we're in the neighborhood and we're, you know, cleaning cars. Hey, actually, why don't you come and work with me? So you're looking for the wrong people, not the right people. There's no good people who are going to quit their job at Microsoft and join your company.

random startup. Yeah. Uni students, mums who like have little kids and they're in daycare and they've got a few hours or dads. You could have someone who's got a disability and just doesn't fit within a corporate environment, needs flexibility. Yeah. People who've got a really thick accent and they always get judged because their accents like too thick, hard to understand, but they're actually really smart and great people.

So someone who's got BO, like really bad body odor, they really smell. Rebels and misfits. Okay. I'm actually serious, by the way. There are amazing people. I hired this one guy once when I was launching a business back in early days, and he was a very, very spotty 19-year-old, and he did have really bad BO. He was stinky, and he was amazing. He was absolutely awesome.

Like so great. Damn. Okay. Um, how, why do you think he didn't have a job? Because he was smelly and spotty. Yeah. So he was a rebel and a misfit. Yeah.

Okay. Remote versus in person. I don't care. I care about team vibes. So team vibes is like, do we have a Monday morning meeting? Do we natter? Right. Nattering is like where we're like, can't stop talking. So if you look at my Slack channel today, everyone's nattering. Oh, hey, we just did this. We just did that. Oh, by the way, did you hear that this happened? Oh, we just had this problem come in. We solved it like this. Like Giphy's flying around WhatsApp thing.

you know voice note hey I just had an idea oh yeah what if we did it like this hey what if we like created like a corporate version that does this thing right so that's nattering and it's the excitement that's happening there's chemistry for me yeah and you can have that remotely as well you can have that remotely of course yeah

Yeah. I mean, as a score app doesn't have actually offices. We have quarterly meetings where we get the whole team together and we have zoom calls where we get everyone together and we have Slack channels and WhatsApp groups and like nattering and all that sort of stuff. We go out to dinners together to build chemistry, but we are a multimillion pound business and we don't have offices and never have.

And would you sort of freelancer part-time, full-time? Whatever fits the business, so long as they're passionate. So long as they're in it, they're in on it. They're in on the joke. They get it. Hey, we're doing this thing. Yeah.

And how do you pitch them the job? Like, who's going to be like, hell yeah, I want to sell financial planning services for 2K a pop. Well, normally it's someone who, for them, it's a step up. In the early days, you're getting rebels and misfits. So it's a step up for them. It's like...

wow, really? You want me to quit my job at Starbucks and come and work with you? That would be amazing. You know, oh, I'm a pub manager and I'm getting like no money and I have to work right through till one o'clock in the morning and you want me to work just normal hours? That would be amazing. Okay, yeah. And like, are you assessing for certain skills or like, is it mostly vibes or like, what's your philosophy here? They can breathe. In the early days, genuinely, I'm just looking for anyone I can rope in.

Okay. Right. Now, mind you, I'm now an experienced entrepreneur with a lot behind me, so I can rope in some pretty good people. Um, so my, the standard, you might see me roping in pretty amazing, talented, incredible people, but I've built up to that. But in the early days, it's literally anyone I can rope in. Can I rope in the neighbor's neighbor's kid? Can I, like as in teenager, um,

Not like a seven-year-old. Not like a seven-year-old, no. Lick those stamps. Send out that thing. No, I'm talking about can I like, you know, the neighbor's kid's 17 years old and doesn't have a job. Can I get them to do stuff on weekends? Like I'm just trying to rope some people in in the early days. Cool. Right. So 10K a month, 10K to 100. Yeah.

At this point, surely we've got to stay high level. But what's the philosophy here? The philosophy is you must establish yourself as a key person of influence. People have to fall in love with you as a personal brand. So you've got to be this key person of influence. You need a team. Normally, you're building up to about eight people at this stage. And you have to have a front person. So this is...

Because that's what gets cut through. That's what gets you from 10 grand a month to 100 grand a month, having cut through. So the issue is that from 10 grand to 100 grand a month, you can't really do one-to-one sales. You have to start engaging groups.

Now, you could engage groups through ads. You could engage groups through affiliates or referrals or running events or one-to-many presentations on podcasts or something like that. But you've got to start going to groups. To do groups, you need a front person. So if we think about like...

If we think about a consulting firm that takes off, it's because the head consultant is freaking amazing in some way. So this is where you are standing out as a key person of influence. So if we look at Richard Branson, millions of followers...

Virgin only has like quarter of a million followers, quarter of a million to 400,000, depending on which platform. Branson is like orders of magnitude more followed than Virgin. He's been directing us to Virgin for decades. We don't care. We like Branson. Cristiano Ronaldo, 500 million followers on Instagram. Every single football club combined, less than 200 million. Now, these are 100-year-old institutions, and one player has double the follower count.

I was just in Dubai.

They're like a big billboard saying we're opening a restaurant and it's going to be Gordon Ramsay and Heston Blumenthal. And it's like all these like super chefs. Now, they're not talking about the building. They're not talking about the food. They're not talking about the fit out. They're talking about the person, the key person of influence. You're going to book this restaurant because Gordon Ramsay. So this is how humans work. We buy into people. People love people. And here's a thought experiment.

if you had this little business and, um, well actually a great thought experiment. If you with your millions of followers joined any business, what would happen? It would blow up. Yeah. Yeah. I guess it was sensible. Yeah. Like, you know, like take, like take a yoga studio. If you said, I'm now the face of the yoga studio and I'm going to direct everyone to that yoga studio. Yeah. Right. Well, it would probably double in size very rapidly. Um,

If you like a clothing, a little clothing apparel brand that was just a business, just like a thing, boom, it would blow up. Damn, I should do that. I should start buying from like Lululemon. They don't need me. Yeah. Well, you should do a deal with them.

They should at least be sending you boxes of clothes. Really? Yes. I buy 50-quid T-shirts every few weeks. Well, anyone who's at Lulu, get in touch. If someone works at Lulu, let me know. Or anyone who's at Gymshark, you might want to swoop on in. So this is the personal brand experiment. You could take any restaurant on the street. If Jamie Oliver suddenly said, that's my restaurant, it would double in size straight away. So what happens is that the key person of influence is

And by the way, if you go back to the origin story of most really well-known brands, they have a key person of influence. Ferrari. Like it's Mr. Ferrari. And he drove it for the first 50 years based on his personal brand. Yeah.

Fender Stratocaster guitars. Mr. Fender was the guy driving that for those years. Now, they end up as faceless brands, but not at the beginning. So Walt Disney drove Disney, and he was like Mr. Walt Disney, and he was the personal brand. Steve Jobs carried Apple. He competed with IBM. He competed with everyone, and everyone knew who he was. Bill Gates did the same for Microsoft. So these personal brands, that's what people want.

So you have to establish yourself as a key person of influence. So what does that mean? Number one, you're the one on stage pitching. You're the one doing group work. You're the one making differentiation for the business. Number two is publishing. You've got to publish content, videos, articles, podcasts, blogs, social media content. So you've got to publish stuff. Perfect scenario is a book. Putting a book out is a really good key person of influence move.

And giving away 1,000 copies of the book away per year is a really great strategy for a key person of influence. Not something you do at the beginning because it's too soon. Something you do once you're growing, once you're already going. Now you're a six- to seven-figure business. You start giving away 1,000 copies of the book, and that will actually scale you into all sorts of platforms. So, yeah, so that happens.

Products, this is where the key person of influence expands the product range. So you need to go from a product to several products. Yeah? Yep.

There's four, by the way, there's four types, four types of products. There's gifts, things you give away for free, product for prospects, things that are designed to start the relationship, core offerings, which is the main thing you do, and product for clients, which is the ongoing journey. So those are the four types of products that you need to build. And a key person of influence will build out the product ecosystem. So if we think of our YouTuber Academy, I'm obviously the key person of influence behind this YouTube channel.

Bit of a JCO business in that it took like two years to really get going. But then in year three, when we launched our YouTube course, boom, we suddenly did like exactly 1.2 million revenue that year, which is 100K a month. Yep.

And now our offerings are free is YouTube videos, how to grow a YouTube channel. Product for prospect is our $1 course. Yep. Or our scorecard. Yep. The core offering is our $1,000 course. Yep. And our product for clients is our 5K a year service. Yeah, I would call that actually the same core offering. So the $1,000 is an entry level. It's kind of like a BMW. You've got a three series or two series for entry, and then you've got an X5 or a seven series. Yeah.

But then the product for clients would be the ongoing journey after you've taken this. So for example, if you had a productivity app, right, or if you had an ongoing support service, it's normally a subscription. So think Peloton bike, then Peloton monthly subscription. Think iPhone and then O2 selling you the minutes or Vodafone selling you the minutes. Yeah.

So the core product tends to be like a transformation. It's like something changed. And then the product for clients is like maintenance or improvement. I buy a BMW and then I get servicing, I get finance, I get insurance. That's the product for clients. So if we think of our web design agency, for example, and so to go from where we're at 10K a month by doing five clients at 2K pop, life is good. And then me as the web designer,

As the entrepreneur behind the web design agency, I need to become a key person of influence in the web design world. So now you're standing up on stages and you're saying, hey, look, we are specialists in working with dentists and we sponsor all the dental practices and we're on all the dental podcasts.

And we do web strategy for dentists. Okay. Or I could do just like web strategy for doctors because previous origin story. I used to be a doctor. I decided web design was my thing. There you go. Okay. So we do online personal branding and web strategy for doctors. And you speak at conferences, you're on podcasts, you become a guest, you get out there and you evangelize this idea that every doctor needs a digital presence, a digital footprint. You put out a book called DigiDentist.

Doctor Digital, Digital Doctor. And suddenly you give away a thousand copies of Digital Doctor and everyone's like, oh, that's a great strategy. Why didn't I think of that? As a doctor, I should have a personal brand. That's what I need to have. So now they're like, yeah, that's great, Ali. I love that. I love the book that you did, right? Yeah. And that differentiates me from every other web design agency

in the world everyone's coming to you for the web design so you have a package maybe it's five grand um because doctors can afford four or five grand and then maybe the next thing is hosting or um uh content management maintenance and that is 150 a month so you spend five grand uh to get a digital footprint digital presence and then 150 200 a month to maintain that or grow that or scale that

over time and now you build out your little team and now it's five grand plus the recurring revenue is starting to stack up. You're now making 10 sales a month, 20 sales a month. So you do say four sales a week, 16 sales times five grand. So now it's 80 grand a month. That's 12 months. That's a million. Okay. So let's say I'm doing my 5k web design packages.

At that point, the temptation would be, you know what? We're really good at doing web design for doctors. Why don't we also do web design for dentists and start targeting the dentists? You could pivot. Yeah. You could expand into an additional market.

So this is just campaigning. You're now campaigning for bigger markets. So this is exactly what Nike did with its shoes. Day one, they were blue ribbon shoes and they only did track and field. And they had a key person of influence called Bill Bowerman. Bill Bowerman was the co-founder of Nike. So effectively, Phil Knight was the COO. Bill Bowerman was the visionary who wrote a book

uh, that sold a million copies called jogging. Oh, and he kicked off the jogging revolution and he was the co-founder of Nike. And basically you read the book called jogging and then you went to the blue ribbon shoes website. Oh no, they didn't have a website. What am I talking about? Yeah. You then heard about blue ribbon shoes and you bought the blue ribbon shoes. Yeah. They probably hadn't mail order in the book. Yeah. And, um,

And they actually turned up to all these track and field events and they did all of that. Now, when they wanted to grow the business, they said, hey, what else could we do? We could do basketball. Who's like capturing people's attention with basketball? We need a key person of influence for that. Michael Jordan. So they said, let's sign this guy up. And then they said tennis. Oh, this guy called Andre Agassi. Let's sign him up. So they basically campaigned for different verticals. And each vertical's got a key person of influence, a face,

What's the balance? Okay, so let's make it concrete with our YouTuber Academy, for example. What's the balance between let me stay in my lane and just keep on making more products for my existing market of people wanting to start a YouTube channel versus you know what, I'm kind of known for productivity. Let me start a productivity app.

So people are willing to go on a journey with you, provided it's okay to have a product ecosystem. So I want you to think about yourself. I know this all sounds strange. Imagine you're like the Eiffel Tower. Okay. But how does the Eiffel Tower make money? Actually, the real money is made in all the things around the Eiffel Tower. So when people go to hotels, restaurants, cafes, restaurants,

museums, galleries, that's all stuff that's around the Eiffel Tower. So people are attracted to the Eiffel Tower, but there's all the things around the Eiffel Tower that make all the money. Like very few people go to Paris and drop all their money on like a trip up to the Eiffel Tower and back. That's like, yeah, 15 quid or something. No, they like to be around it. They like to see it. They don't actually expect to spend all that much money on it. But this is what a personal brand should be like. A key person of influence should be the Eiffel Tower

And they should have a product ecosystem around them. Me personally, so I've got the books out and I give talks and I'm on a podcast, but I actually have a publishing company called Rethink Press. I've got an awards business and a PR business called August. I've got a business that does capital fundraising. I've got an accelerator business called Dent.

Um, so there's all these businesses that I've got. Um, I've got software business called score app, and these are all the things that are, you know, kind of selling. Each one has its own product ecosystem, all these products, you know, they, they, if I'm out there talking, people are going, Hey, what do you, what do you do? Um, let's get involved in it. Does every business have some kind of key person of influence? No, most businesses don't, which is why they don't take off.

It's only a very narrow set of businesses that take off. There's actually millions of businesses in the UK and there's tens of thousands that are really profitable. So like the local laundromat does not have a key person of influence behind it? No.

Local coffee shop probably doesn't. Unless it's James Hoffman's coffee shop, because he's like the most famous coffee guy in the world from his YouTube channel. And now he's really rich. Yeah. And his products are really good. Yeah. And he's building a roastery. He's got his coffee brand. He's got his gear. He's got his... Totally. Okay. Yeah. He's a key person of influence in coffee. He's a key person of influence and everything's booming around him. Yeah.

Okay, so if Mr. Who's the Boss was to start a company, tech companies. Mr. Who's the Boss could have a dozen products and they could all boom and he's got 15 million followers. So literally that is thousands of businesses that could do millions of dollars. You're talking a massive empire if he wants to.

Because like, you know, think about this. A center court at Wimbledon holds 16,000 people.

It's quite a lot. You've got four and a half million. 16,000 is a rounding error. Yeah. You know, like this is such a big following that you could have multiple businesses. Like you only need a few thousand customers to do a million, a seven-figure business. So if you're a key person of influence for many millions of people, you can have multiple businesses. I mean, I only have tens of thousands of followers and I've got multiple seven-figure businesses. Yeah.

Okay. So you could play much bigger. Mr. Beast, he's like turned down a billion dollars. He's like, I'm going to be much bigger than that. He's figuring it out, but he knows that he has the capacity to build a multi-billion dollar empire off the back of the Mr. Beast brand. Okay. So my web design agency, I'm becoming a key person of influence. Yep.

Am I? But because I'm doing web design for doctors, I'm not bothering going to the web design conferences. I'm going to the doctor conferences. No, you're going to the customers. You're going to the market and you're speaking in front of them and you discover that there's a little podcast they're all listening to. So you become a guest on there and talk about digital strategy for doctors. But I'm not speaking and plugging my product.

Well, you're the Eiffel Tower. So you're basically saying, hey, I wrote the book called Dr. Digital and I'm a big believer in digital products for doctors or digital brands for doctors or personal brands for doctors. And you're talking about this and then they're saying, oh, like how do we get this done? You say, well, I actually have an agency. You can get in touch with my agency manager who's going to talk to you about that.

Okay. Yeah, go talk to Eric. Eric is going to have a chat with you and you can have this great chat and Eric will tell you what to do next. Okay, nice. So think about it a bit like this. You know in American football, the quarterback throws the ball to the other players and then they score the goals. But the quarterback is like the star of the show, even though they're not actually scoring the goals. So the key person of influence has a team and

And they're out there speaking. They're out there engaging with the marketplace, being a key person of influence. They're seeing opportunities and they go, take that one team, have that one team, have that one team. So they're just throwing the opportunities like a combine harvester. And all of these opportunities are going into the businesses and then the businesses are thriving as a result.

How does the key person of influence have time to run all these businesses if they're going out doing all this? They don't run the businesses. The key person of influence has someone who runs the businesses. So here's something you should keep in mind. Have you ever been in a Starbucks? Yes. A Starbucks is a multi-million dollar business. It's typically run by someone who's 24 years old.

As in the individual Starbucks shop? Yeah. Yeah, okay. And they're on like $35,000 a year. Really? Yeah, they're on like $3,000 a month. Oh, wow. So it's not that hard to find someone who can run your business. So running a business, it's not Microsoft. You're not running Google. You don't need a chief operating officer. You just need someone who's able to run a bank branch or a call centre or a McDonald's or a...

Here's the thing. Anyone who can run a pub can run your business because a pub has drunk people and people like hooking up and having relationships. A pub is like got razor thin margins. You just do not need to be running your business. That's not what you're good at as a key person of influence. You should be out there doing the thing that only you can do and that is stirring up the beehive.

getting people interested, getting people excited, building a marketplace, connecting with your customers. The actual running of the business should be done by someone who can run a business and anyone who can run a pub can run your business. So I'm running the business myself from zero to 10K and then at that point I'm like, right, I need to be spending my time doing more interesting things. As you're at a hundred grand a month, you definitely want to have a manager.

And when I say, like, I just don't want to overstate, like a manager can be an executive assistant who pretty much runs the business. A manager can be just a general manager who, like, ex-person who did HR, right?

What are the skills needed to run a business? What does it involve? So here's what I like to think of. Monday morning meeting, getting the whole team together. Everyone's got a job to do. Everyone declares their three things to six things that they're going to do for the week, as in the most important things. Not micromanaging, but what are the three to six big things you're going to do for the week? Yeah.

And then on Friday, we talk about what did we get done? What didn't we get done? We keep a dashboard. So we have a dashboard of like, did we make sales? Were there any customer complaints? Did we need to solve any problems? So those kinds of things happen.

And then essentially a general manager is like doing all the little problem solving along the way. So for example, loading up payments and then the payments go out and collections or there's a customer who didn't pay and they needed an email saying you need to pay. So that's a bit of financial control. Later on, you might have a financial controller who just does that. General manager can do that. Scheduling, hiring, everything.

if we need to hire someone new, if someone wants to go on holiday, who's going to cover for them, like all that stuff. Yeah, that's basically what Angus does. Yeah, and most importantly, they know that their job is to keep you out on the front line. You have to be out there with customers. When I'm away at a conference, the whole team is happy. Oh, yeah. No, big time. Totally. Because you didn't do a lot of – how long were you a doctor? Like two years. Two years.

It's a bit different because there's not an owner. But, like, was there ever a big boss? Is there a big, like, hospital general manager or hospital... It was like the hospital CEO, but, like, the doctors don't really interact with the management structure of the organisation. Yeah, they're the technicians. Is there anyone, like, who represents, like, the big, scary regional manager or someone who... No. Point is, is that...

Normally, that's not your best day at work when that person's buzzing around. I had an experience for me personally where I worked at McDonald's as a teenager. And when the big boss was in town and when the big boss was in the store, we all froze and we didn't work very well. And I also worked around some people who were very well known. And when they were around, everyone froze. No one worked really well. Yeah.

Less is more. When you hit a certain point, you're far better off just being out there, being the key person of influence, doing deals, raising profile, doing partnerships, finding opportunities, all of that stuff, being in contact and connection with your customers in your marketplace, pitching, publishing, product creation, writing a book, all of that, doing a podcast. That is like your high-value superstar stuff. And then the team...

You just need to check in with them. Like me personally, I kind of check in with my teams now every like 90 days. I keep an eye on the dashboard, like genuinely. There was a business I just sold for quite a lot of money, like millions. I owned it for about four or five years. And I probably spoke to the managing director six times in that whole time. Oh, hell. Yeah. Like, and never visited.

Like, didn't go on site. I own several businesses that I've never been to. Like, genuinely, I've never been there. As in they have an office. I've never been. How the hell does that work? I bought the business and we met down the road here at this local place down the road. And we did a deal and I let them get on with it. Why would you buy that business? Because I can grow it.

And you grow it by virtue of? By being a key person of influence. Because you're the Eiffel Tower. Yeah. So you can be the combine harvester, throwing opportunities their way. Throwing opportunities their way. But I don't need to know, provided I know the person who's running that business can handle the opportunities and can run the business, I don't need to know what happens beyond that point.

I can see it on the dashboards. I can see the P&L and the balance sheet. I can see the weekly meetings are happening. We can do quarterly. I can attend a quarterly alignment session if I want to. But so long as I have trust in my team, I don't need to be there very often. I just need to be out and about trying to drum up opportunity. Because this idea of like, you know, you own multiple businesses, right?

Feels like a stressful place to be. It's really not. Okay. It's actually really not. In fact, I think it's easier to own multiple businesses than having just one. Because if you've got one, you obsess over it.

And if you've got multiple businesses, you only deal with the stuff that needs to be done. Yeah, I obsess over my one business. Yeah. So if you actually have multiple businesses, then the team, you only have, when you have multiple businesses, you only have one opportunity, which is to hire great people and let them get on with it. Yeah. Because if you're working on several different businesses at once...

The other thing too is don't forget a bigger business is multiple businesses. So when you think about Google, it sounds like one thing from the outside, but it's like loads of things. Amazon is like loads of things. I mean, there's hundreds of businesses in Amazon. There's the film production business, like doing Amazon Prime. There's like the AWS business. There's different regions and territories. There's the in-house product team. There's an

external engagement team. There's like the B2B thing. There's the fresh delivery grocery services. So they're all product teams. So this is multiple, multiple businesses that are within a business.

a much bigger business. So when I own multiple businesses, it's just essentially, it's just a group, a group of companies. And yeah, like each team is its own team. It's almost like if you had multiple properties and the rent is coming in, you're just keeping an eye on the thing, on the numbers, making sure nothing seriously is going wrong. Pretty much. And then you don't need to worry about it too much. Yeah. And if you only have one business, you'll solve every problem by throwing your own time at it. And you'll be ending up like doing things that are not your main thing that you do.

And if you have multiple businesses, you're like, okay. I mean, the cool thing is when you get multiple businesses is you can actually say it would be easier for me to buy another business than fix this one. So guys, guys, sort it out. Like sort out the issue because... And then are you not worried that if something goes wrong that it will reflect badly on your brand?

Yeah, to a degree I am worried about that. I do want to make sure that the businesses succeed for that reason. Yeah, that's definitely a consideration. And that's probably my primary worry, like reputation management, if a business didn't succeed. I want to make sure that they do succeed for that reason, yeah. Sounds pretty fun. It is fun. Well, it has its moments. If multiple things go wrong at the same time, you can have a stressful couple of weeks. Yeah.

I feel like this is not where I want to be right now, but I can imagine...

At some point. At some point, I'll be like, you know what? I want to be more of a coach to businesses and just own multiple businesses. Well, when you have multiple businesses, you are a coach to your own business. That is very much what you do. You're the brand and you're the coach. Here's what very much could happen for you. You've got such a big brand. You could have multiple businesses that you are an equity stakeholder in and you play the key person of influence role. So literally look at this table. You could contact this person.

drinks company and say, hey, I'll be the key person of influence with this in exchange for some equity and shares in the business. Hey, we'll help promote these in exchange for some equity shares in the business. So you could have a portfolio of businesses that you become a shareholder in.

and that you evangelize those businesses, you open up opportunities while you're roaming around having adventures, you're saying, hey, I just met someone in Dubai who's looking for a kombucha drinks company to launch in the region. Let me connect you both. So you could actually very easily because you've got such a great brand going, you could actually have multiple businesses like next month.

And if anyone would like that, please contact me as Ali's agent. Okay. So we talked about zero to 10K. We've talked about sort of 10 to 100. At what point does the team grow to an unmanageable level?

And like what's going on? 12 people. 12. 13 people. So 12 is manageable, 13 is not. 13, 13 is... How do you land on that? It's the last supper. Oddly specific. There's always, you know, there's always this issue with...

Somehow, magically, up to 12 people can just hold together. Everyone can just be having one conversation. The 13th person splits it in two or three teams. Suddenly, you've got the sales team and you've got the ops team and you've got the finance team. The 13th person just goes...

breaks it all into three teams. So up until 12, you're just one team. We're just one family. It's the original crew. And then the 13th person is ruining things for everyone. It doesn't get good again until you're about 40 people plus. So when you're about 40 people, you've got what's called an executive team. An executive team is a CEO, chief executive officer, COO, chief operations officer, CFO, finance officer,

CMO marketing and CTO technology. So you've got those as your typical five roles for running a bigger business. On top of that, you'll have a non-executive board member, non-executive director board member, and you'll probably have a coach, right? Who's kind of getting, or a chairperson, right? So that'll be your almost seven people

who are running the business. Because that's such a big, heavy, weighty team, you need 35, 40 people all performing with great assets and great technology and great intellectual property and all of that stuff

to to warrant that team so the reason that you should stop at about 12 is because once you go past 12 you need leaders and managers and debt and investment and this and that and there's j curves are unescapable and like all these all like you're you're now into a grown-up proper business yeah um

And then it's not going to be viable until you get about 40, 50 people. Oh, okay. Yeah. We're at 15, including me. Yeah. With a bunch of freelancers that are like some semi-full-time, semi-part-time. Out of curiosity, have you noticed that the team's starting to fracture off into like sub-teams? Yeah. Yeah. So it probably happened around the 13th person. Oh.

So like some people have got their little gang over here and they're doing their thing. Yeah, we've got like a money team. We've got our YouTube plus two editors team. Yeah, and I bet they have their own little meetings. Yeah, they do, yeah. So you're just on the verge. Now it'll be masked in your organization because you're very profitable. You've got a huge IP and media going on. I've seen your videos where you disclose how much revenues and profits you do. So you've got Buffer.

Most businesses don't have that kind of buffer. You're leveraging media out of this world. But if you are slightly less revenue, it would actually start to be noticeable that, wait a second, the overheads are high and the profit's going down and the teams aren't coordinating themselves very well. And this team is running off on this direction and this one's running east and this one's running west. Yeah. Yeah. We have to do in-person full week-long meetings every six weeks to stay

Stay connected and aligned. And do you remember back in like eight, nine, 10 people where it just self-organized? Like it just, like we didn't have to do any of this stuff and everyone, like we had a problem. So what did we do? We ordered Chinese food and everyone sat around a table and we solved the problem by the time we finished dinner. Yeah, ish. I remember it was like that at three people when we were in person, but then when we went to six and it became remote and different time zones and yeah,

I didn't know anything about running a business. So it's just like, yeah. So even at about six or seven, I bet there were times where you just got on a Zoom call. Everyone jumped on the Zoom call. An hour later, you'd solved the problem and everyone was like aware of it. And I bet it's really hard to do that now. Yeah, it's really hard to do that now. Yeah. So you've just entered this like too big to be small, too small to be big. We call this crossing the desert. It's like you're just in this like really frustrating time where you're not a big business, you're not a small business. So...

realistically, you can probably get away with it because you've got lots of IP media to leverage. For most people, the smart decision would be just to pull it back to 12 people and just recognize that we're going to grow the assets, we're going to grow the media, we're going to keep doing what we're really great at, we're going to say no to some stuff, but ultimately, we're a 12-person business. Or...

you go, you know what? We're going to build a massive business. We're going to get five major YouTubers, each with millions of followers. We're going to create a YouTube cluster, a constellation of YouTube stars. And we're going to have a management, executive management team. And we're going to bring together a whole bunch of

products and all of the YouTubers are going to pick the products that they want to represent and we're going to build out these businesses and it's going to be like 40-50 person team who hit the phones and create opportunities and the YouTubers create the media cloud cover and then we've got the sales team

I cannot imagine anything worse than that. I'm totally excited by it, right? So I would have my like executive team and our sales team and our marketing team. And we would basically say, all right, we've now got a collective 20 million followers on socials. And now we're like, we've got a dozen products and we're going to have our product teams and our sales teams. And we're going to really kind of coordinate this thing into a like a 10 to $100 million business.

Yeah, screw that. That's not the one. Yeah, because it is. It's grown up, right? And it's boards. It's private equity backing. It's outside influence. It's outside companies that have to buy in and stay bought in. That's the problem. The problem is like right now you can say no to stuff if you want to say no to stuff. Once you get to a certain size,

You have investors, you have debt, you have partners, joint venture partners. So you've got all these outside influences and you have to manage expectations. And if you screw that up, they just leave. And then you've got 50 people overheads and your business starts to spiral down. So yeah, you have to basically be up for that.

So if I'm not up for that, keep it small and manageable. You mentioned assets. What do you mean by assets? So a business ultimately, you know, you talk a lot about productivity. So productivity often is thought about the way humans behave. But actually a huge amount of productivity is actually the underlying assets. Okay. Like a tractor. Yeah.

Yeah, like a tractor, like a chainsaw. A tractor is an asset that boosts your productivity. Yeah, so if I've got a big lumberjack who's got a little axe and I've got a 17-year-old with a chainsaw, who cuts down the tree faster, right? So...

The modern day assets are digital assets. They're either intellectual property, media or software typically. And they are things that make everything run really, really well. Now, as a thought experiment, if I had two real estate salespeople

And both of them, like, optimize their diary and they're, like, working super hard and they're, like, get up and do their cold plunge in the morning. And, like, you know, they've got, like, their gadgets and all of that sort of stuff. They have a stand-up walking desk each, right? All of that stuff is super optimized. Yeah. But one of them is working in Mayfair and one of them is working in Blackpool. Yeah.

Okay, yeah. Do you get what I mean? Yeah. So who's more productive? It's going to look like the Mayfair salesperson sells hundreds of millions of dollars worth of real estate each year. And the Blackpool salesperson is lucky to make a couple of million worth of sales each year because ultimately the underlying assets are very vastly different.

So this is the same with any business. The assets of the business really do most of the work. It's mostly the product. The productivity of the business is mostly media, intellectual property, and software. Media, IP, and software. Yeah. Okay, nice. Yeah. There's other assets too, but those are the big ones these days. Data. They're intangibles. And this is the thing. Most people don't even know what they are now. Here's a thought experiment. A consulting firm,

is going along for 15 years and then the top consultant writes a best-selling book. It becomes the top of the business charts and they start speaking on four major conferences per year.

what happens to the consulting firm? Boom. Boom. Yeah. Right. So it was the book and the consultant, like the book and the thing restaurant going along for 15 years wins a Michelin star. Yeah. Bang. Bang. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So it's an intangible new asset that has just been awarded. So these are, these are the actual, like the really big productivity boosters are assets. It's the underlying assets, IP, media, and tech. Okay. So we have a problem right now because our 5k a year offering is,

is quite heavy on customer support because it's like a 12 months of worth of customer support. And we are finding that like, if we wanted to add more clients to that, we would have to increase capacity. And the way we increase capacity is broadly by, we're attempting to do it by hiring a bunch of freelancers who are not technically part of the core team that are part of like the wider team. And we're trying really hard on your advice to avoid this desert territory where it's like, we're creeping into...

But it sounds like if I were to take this model seriously, I'd be thinking... Intellectual property is a method of doing things. Normally it looks like a poster or it could be data. It could be a step-by-step recipe. Media is we record the videos on how to do it. And software is they just punch in the things and then the AI does it and the software does it and it all gets done. And then if you can't solve it with IP media and tech...

You have to solve it with people. Yeah. Okay. So our $1,000 product, which is a purely video course, is a media plus IP asset. Yep. And that's great. We can sell unlimited copies of that and literally make $100 million off the back of that based on demand without having to hire any more people. Very scalable. Yeah. For every X number of people we add to our accelerator package, which is a 5K offering, we have to add more people, whether it's a freelancer or someone on the team. There's different ways you could structure it. So you could have a reservoir of coaches. Yeah.

who are all signed up and vetted. And then you have a software system that people pay the five grand and it includes a certain number of credits. And then the software, when they're ready for a coaching session one-to-one, they select their coach, they allocate the credit, and then they get automatically matched.

And that just works. That would then be scalable. You might then say, well, is there enough coaches available? Probably. I mean, there's probably lots of people who have a 10,000 to... If you knew that the person who's coaching you at least had 10,000 subscribers, great. There's probably plenty of people who have gotten to 10,000 and they can coach people who are under 10,000.

They only have to be a few steps ahead. Yeah. And if they're using your IP media. Yeah, my method. So that would be there. You could create an opportunity which is to sign up as a YouTuber coach. So you actually become a certified licensed coach. Yeah. But you have to have more than 10,000 subscribers in order to be qualified, certified. And then that way they've already got that background and

And then they train up in your methodology, your IP, and then you just matchmake. So that would be another way to solve it. Yeah, I've been feeling a bit like about this because when I'm...

People. Yeah. Whenever I have to work for money or hire for money, I'm like, there's got to be a better way of like building an asset that makes money while I sleep kind of thing. Like this 5k product does not make money while I sleep. The 1k product does. And that's like really nice. Even though the 5k product is like five times much. It's like, oh, we really should have a higher priced offering. Or maybe it's 10 grand. Yeah. True. Supply and demand. Yeah. And also maybe,

And depending on who it is, 10 grand is not a lot. 10 grand is not a lot to certain people. If you've already got a half a million pound business, a half a million dollar business, 10 grand is okay. Yeah, we can do that. Can we do it in two payments? Yeah, sure. Great. Fine. Done. Also, you can have one person on your team who's responsible for training and that's their whole job is making sure that each of those clients gets a trainer.

So that you, your core team still is 12, but one person's job is to manage these 30 people. Yeah. Yeah. That's currently sort of the model we have with that one person is managing or like six other people. Yeah. But recognize that the real value is the IP, media and tech. Yeah. The people are always very, it's very hard to make money off people. You essentially, you've got to arbitrage people and it's hard to arbitrage people.

So what I mean by that is you've got to pay them less than you charge them out. Yeah. So that is hard because eventually people kind of figure out what they're worth and they go and do that. So the real upside is actually IP, media, and tech in most businesses. Nice.

So how does one philosophically get from 100K to 1 million a month? We're not yet. We're somewhere in between that threshold. Yeah, so this is where you go into this bigger business. You've now got an executive team and you've got teams of teams. So it'll be hard to do that with our team of 12, 13. You might be able to do it. Unless we really sweat the media assets. You are an edge case. And the reason you're an edge case is millions of followers. So that puts you in a distinguished category category.

that yes, you possibly could with 12 people get to a million a month. For most businesses, the well-worn path is that you would have about 40 or 50 people at that stage. So you would have teams of teams. You'd either have functions, territories, products, or markets. So functions is like sales, ops, finance. Markets is like entrepreneurs, government, corporate, education.

education, right? Territories, Germany, France, Spain, and then products would be iPad, iPhone. So you basically end up breaking your company into products, territories, functions, or markets, and you have teams of teams. So for example,

Let's say you had a city-based model that could do $2 million per city with whatever it is you do. You open up five cities. Now you've got $10 million. Let's say you have a $2 million a year product. You kind of hit a ceiling with that product. You launch a second, third, fourth product.

So now you have web development for dentists, web development for doctors, web development for physiotherapists, web development for chiropractors. So now you're like... So you're now breaking into... Yeah. One thing that continues to surprise me is that...

It seems like regardless of the business model, these numbers still sort of hold true. Like it's not, you know, it's not that hard to go to 10K a month.

And it's easy enough to chart the path there. And then the process to 100K a month is also like, and it seems like each of these different thresholds, there's like new things that need to happen, regardless of whether you have a coffee shop or whether you have an app or whether you have a YouTube channel, whether you have like a consulting business. Yes. Almost. Yes.

Yes, there are businesses that are easier to scale. So, for example, ScoreApp is an incredibly easy business to scale because we have hit a threshold where the technology is amazing. It's plugged in with AI and it does incredible things. Everyone who sees it has a jaw-dropping experience. They're like, wow. I mean, you saw it before and you're like, that's cool. Yeah.

We now at a position where we just need to go into new markets and territories. So we essentially just open up channels. If you wanted to onboard 10,000 new clients tomorrow, we could do it. You know, we just need usernames and passwords for them all. That's not true for coffee shops.

So unfortunately, you know, we talked about the burger bar. So you now need to have lots of – unfortunately, there are businesses that scale exponentially and the costs stay relatively small. The costs don't scale exponentially. And then there are businesses that scale and the costs scale with the scale. And that is – like every few years there's someone who goes into childcare centres

There's always some entrepreneur who goes into childcare centers and then goes bust. And it happens repeatedly again and again and again and again. I've seen it like four times in my career, someone who gets 80 childcare centers and then goes bust. And why? Because it's highly regulated.

It's every three children needs a carer or four children needs a carer and you need a certain amount of space per child. So there's all these regulations. So there is no economy of scale. If you want to have 80 childcare centers, the costs associated are almost 80 times what one is. So it's impossible to get ahead. Software, on the other hand, you spend half a million building software and then it scales and you have 10,000 clients, 50,000 clients, blah.

But it's not good as a first business because of the J-code. It's a hard business to get off the ground. Oh, okay. It's a hard first business, yeah. It's a bit of a black belt move, but worth it in the end. If you can end up in software, media, and tech, those are the big kind of scalable ones. Yeah. Yeah.

Like we're sort of in the process of building a productivity app at the moment. And also finance scales. So doing- You can become an investment firm or- Yeah, raising a $10 million fund is not that much harder than raising a $100 million fund. And raising a billion dollar fund is not that much harder than raising a $100 million fund.

So, you know, there are private equity firms that have 12 people that have a billion dollars worth of assets under management, you know. So finance scales, software scales, IP scales, media scales. So in a perfect world, there are things that scale much better than others. Okay. Yeah.

So if you were me and we've got this team, 15 people, we don't really want to go much more than that. And you're kind of fairly familiar with essentially the only product we sell is this YouTuber themed one. And I've got my productivity themed book coming out six months from now. What would you be thinking? What sort of chess moves would you be thinking in this board? I would be going with the Ventures model. So the Ventures model would be that you have a portfolio approach. So you have a YouTuber Academy for income and that pays everyone's bills.

And that's great and it's like a good P&L model, profit and loss model. But then the real upside scalability is the partnerships. So you do partnerships with ventures. So for example, you find a company that's currently doing 20 million and you apply your brand and your contacts and your connections and then they go up to 100 million and then you exit. So an influence for equity model would be amazing.

you're extremely well-connected. You've got millions of followers. They trust your judgment. So it depends upon you having good judgment. You have to be really looking at 30 opportunities before you pick one. So that's your job to pick who you partner with. You need to be really protective of your audience and say, hey, look, I'm not going to send you a product if it's no good. Like if I recommend this drink, then trust me, it's a great drink. Or if I recommend this app,

It's a great app. So this would be the private equity portfolio approach where you put a value on that partnership. Let's say you value that partnership at half a million and you say, okay, our goal is to do three of those deals per year and we end up with a portfolio of equity. Over the coming four or five years, we end up with a portfolio of 30 companies and as they mature and exit,

you know, that's another deal done. And now you end up, if you want to advance that, you could actually have people who would invest alongside you. So you raise a deal by deal finance or investment team. So you have your high net worth investors who come in and you have a half a million worth of influence and a half a million worth of capital invested

And now you take a good, really substantial chunk with your investors. You charge your investors a 2 and 20 ride along. So 2% of their money plus 20% of their upside. So for them to ride along with you, you do something like that. Anyway, that's where I would take it.

That sounds like a nightmare as well. Well, I guess it's just because I explained it fast. Yeah. I mean, so I was speaking to, um, uh, Seidel bloom, who you might be familiar with. Um, he came out, he came over for dinner and a podcast episode of like last month.

And he's running this model and he's also buying up businesses and taking equity shares and stuff. And it's his background in investment banking and private equity. It's just a no brainer. He's like, yeah, of course I'm going to buy this business and get an operator to run it. And like, you know, just get them to report dashboards to me. And I'm like, bloody hell, that sounds like a lot of work. But if someone comes to me with him, yeah, we're working on it. We have, we have an agency that's launching. Yeah. Yeah. Um,

But if someone comes to me and says, oh, Ali, you know, I really want to make an online course and it's really hard. And I'm like, it's easy. Just like bang, bang, bang. Because I've done that. Yeah, exactly. Everything's easy after you've done it. For me, having multiple business, I remember what it was like having one business. And I had this friend, Jeremy, Jeremy Harbour, who's amazing. And he wrote a great book called Go Do Deals. Jeremy had multiple businesses. He had 13 companies at that time. And he had like a jet and, you know, like houses around the world and all this sort of stuff.

I just, how is it you have multiple companies? And he's like, honestly, it's easier than having one. I'm like, that makes no sense. And now I'm that dude. Yeah.

So, yeah, you would be the same. I imagine after you've done a few deals and you're like, actually, this totally, I'm an investor in this company, you know, and here's how it works and here's the dashboards. I'm copied in on quarterly updates. Awesome. And I bet you like do three or four of these and you're like, we could do 30 of these. It would be super scalable. And the whole investments alongside, if you would really only need one billionaire friend, right?

right? You probably got a billionaire friend and you would just need that one person to say, yeah, I'll like allocate, you know, 10 million worth of capital towards these deals on a deal by deal. And I'm happy with the two and 20 deal. So, cause that's the standard deal. So yeah, I'll ride along. Yeah. Great. And, and it's, it's, it'd be hard to structure it the first time and then it would be easy to replicate. Yeah.

Damn. That's one avenue. That's one avenue you could go down. Interesting. Okay. So, yeah, we got there. We actually got there to millions a month. Yeah. Yeah, because you would actually have millions a month flying through the businesses. And if you wanted to, you could also build up to millions a month, but you don't want to. So you consciously choose to stop. But if you had a portfolio, you'd be up to millions a month. So we actually went through the journey. Yeah.

And the journey is not going anywhere, really. I mean, right now, we'll just keep, well, no, you know, we'll just keep building our assets. Building the assets is fun. Writing books is fun. Making courses is fun. Making courses that require ongoing customer support is less fun right now because we haven't figured out a way to scale that in a way that doesn't add more people to our team. But certainly making courses and then having them on autopilot, making passive income while asleep is really fun.

And just keep doing that. And then, yeah, we've slowly started dabbling with the whole equity. Yeah. Let me just sell you on the equity thing. One last thing. Yeah. When a business sells, it normally sells for multiples of like years worth of profit or years worth of revenue. Right. So if it's possible to build a course that does millions. Yeah.

then theoretically it's possible to partner with a business that does millions. And then when that business sells, it sells for like a very low value exit, might be seven years or eight years worth of profit in one transaction. And if it's a software company, it's probably going to sell for seven to 10 times the revenue. So if you could build a 2 million a year SaaS business, you might sell that for like 10 to 14, 15 million.

maybe 20 million. So like these things scale up a lot faster than courses. That's true. If you look on the rich... I'm blinkered to courses because that's what I know. If you look at the rich list, there's not a lot of course creators. No. But there's a lot of people who buy and sell companies. Yeah. So yeah, keep an open mind to it. You've got plenty of time up your sleeve. Yeah. Maybe that's the next game, buying and selling companies. We'll see.

That's what Cody Sanchez was trying to sell me on as well. She's done like 26 different companies. Yeah, she is doing that. And yeah, I mean, it's worth watching and seeing how... And Alex Hamosi is doing that. Oh, yeah. What do you think about that whole journey? And does it actually start sounding predictable? Because at the beginning, it's like, hey, is this actually predictable? Does it sound like a predictable set of steps? Because I'm so close to it, to me. Yeah.

It's weird because this YouTube thing that I've built, I feel isn't a real business. Or it doesn't have the same characteristics that one of these... I've literally never in my life done a sales call. Yeah. What do you think a real business is? Well, I don't know. Someone that does a real thing. You do a real thing. No, but I guess...

given that I've never done a sales call in my life, to me, the idea of a sales call feels like, Oh, that feels hard. You're doing the key person of influence role. You're creating the opportunity. Someone's doing that. That key person of influence role feels really easy. I'm just like, yeah, easy. Someone's doing the sales call. Yeah. So what you're doing is creating the space for those sales calls to happen. Yeah. It's,

Look, if you go to KPMG, there's someone called a partner and the partner opens up big relationships and then passes them down to the analysts and all that sort of stuff. And it's the same deal. Yeah.

and do the thing. You are the key person of influence who creates a wake of opportunity and you've got a team who know how to monetize that opportunity. That's the relationship. That's the real business.

So you're doing the right thing. This is working. Yeah, it's working. And you do have a team. You've got a company. You've got like- We pay tax. You pay tax. I look at our management accounts every month. You generate media, intellectual property, technology. Yeah. Yeah. Like all of these things are proper business things. Yeah.

But I think breaking it down like this definitely does make it seem more predictable. It also makes it feel like, oh, okay, like, you know, that realization I had at the start was that was like, oh, it's not as, it's not like an easy thing of just like, oh, just learn to code and build a software in your pajamas in your bedroom and suddenly you're making 10K a month. Yeah, it's hard. The whole thing is hard. Yeah. But that's, but like the payback is huge. Yeah. Like millions, millions and millions. You sell a, if you sell a company...

You earn what most people earn in their entire career in one hit. So like if you take someone who's on 50 grand times...

40 years, what's that, 2 million? Yeah. So, yeah, and they pay tax. Like that's a career and you don't have to sell it. Like a 2 million exit is not a big exit. Yeah. So the entrepreneurship game has upside, but the downside is stress. The downside is complexity. The downside is you see someone reading fiction and you think, wow, I wish I could read. You know, you have bigger carrots and bigger sticks as an entrepreneur.

You know what I mean? Like everything that motivates humans is carrot and stick. Yeah. And the sticks are bigger and the carrots are bigger. So, you know, that's the path. And it typically is that rough roads end smooth and smooth roads end rough. So people who have a really nice, easy life typically struggle towards the end. And people who put in the grit at the beginning typically get a breakthrough and then upside scalability. Yeah.

So, you know, you've got to pick which hard you want. Why don't you just read fiction? You've got enough money. Um...

Because of the carrots and the sticks, at the moment I've got a software business and the upside is 100 million plus. And I can't stop thinking about building a great company. I'm really excited by what we do. It's a huge opportunity as a business, but it's also a fun business. We're building quizzes, right? And we're using AI and we're doing data. And we've got this amazing team in

in Ukraine who, if it wasn't for us, they would be enrolled in the army and they'd be on the front line. And like, you know, it's amazing that we have this camaraderie with that team and we have like the hopes and dreams of our like team and, and like, it's a game worth playing. So if I was a professional athlete, yeah, look, maybe I would,

Maybe Roger Federer reads fiction to get his mind off tennis as a deliberate strategy because he needs to rest his head. But most of the time it's like, how am I going to play better tennis? So when you become an entrepreneur, you just...

you know, there's always something to do. There's always like a problem to solve or an opportunity. There's a new channel to open. There's new territory to explore. So your life becomes fiction. Yeah.

Yeah. It's not about having enough money. Like this whole idea, like the whole idea of having enough money is something that you think would be like, if you don't have a lot of money, you really do think that it's about the money. Yeah. And very rapidly you realize like, it's just a game. And once you're good at the game, you want to play the game. Yeah. So like, why doesn't Roger Federer, why did Roger Federer quit tennis? Because of his knees. It's not because he had enough money.

Like he had sore knees and he was devastated. He was disappointed, you know, that he couldn't keep playing. Like why does Lewis Hamilton keep racing a car? Because he's a race car driver. That's what he is. That's what he does. Like he's got a jet and he's got hundreds and hundreds of millions, but he's a race car driver. He would like hate not being a race car driver. So-

You should interview him. He'd be a great interviewer. He'd be a great interviewer. So like for an entrepreneur, why do you keep running businesses? Because you're an entrepreneur. That's who you are. That's your identity. And, you know, it's like it's the game you're into. Interesting. You've got enough money. Why don't you stop doing YouTube videos and teaching people stuff?

Yeah, because I'd be depressed if I wasn't. Exactly, because it's not about the money. You're enjoying it. It's like a fun game worth playing. But at the same time, I do still want to make more money. That's the thing. Well, that's because it's the scoreboard. It's the scoreboard. It's how you get the validation that you're creating value in the world. Because like...

If you were just giving it away, you don't know that it's creating value. Like what's really creating value? Like obviously you give a lot away. You give a ton of videos away. I do as well. I give books away and all sorts of stuff. But the value of like the products, it's like is the product any good? People are paying for it. Yeah. Like it's crushing when I see someone cancel their subscription. Yeah.

And I'm like, oh, what did we do wrong? Yeah. Like I want to ring up the, I really do want to ring them up and say, what happened? Yeah. Why did, and I actually do. Sometimes people cancel their subscription and they're like, I did not get enough leads and I will go and have a look at what they created and I will like message them and say, you could have tried this headline and you could have done this because I want to play the game. Wow.

Final thing I wanted to ask you about. This is a bit of a personal challenge right now or personal struggle, struggle, challenge, something I'm thinking about. At some point, I want to get married and have some kids and stuff. But I know that one of my core values is freedom, autonomy, independence. I love kind of...

The fact that I can, if I want to, just travel anywhere in the world and go to whatever conference and just hang out with some YouTuber friends in Austin at the drop of a hat. And I know that getting married and having kids, I suspect, would be some sort of trade-off between freedom and commitment and investment and building something together and stuff. And everyone I know who is married and has kids says that it's great. It gives you lots of long-lasting fulfillment.

But it surely must come at the price of some sort of freedom. Totally. So what's the...

So why are we wired for anything? It's survival and reproduction. That's basically it, right? Humans are survive and reproduce creatures. In fact, not just humans, everything. A rabbit is a rabbit because it's really good at surviving and reproducing. So everything in your psychology, everything in your hardwiring, everything in your nervous system,

everything feels good if it helps you survive and reproduce. So eating a really good nutritious meal with lots of fat and, you know, like a juicy steak or something like that, it hits on a bunch of ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. That's good for survival. When you notice a good looking person walking past and you're like, Ooh, right. That's your survive and reproduce system. So there's something that is so deeply ingrained and fulfilling about having kids that,

That it's just like if you're completely not spiritual, but you're just like this is an entire section of your nervous system that you haven't explored yet. Your entire life up until this point has been survival. Yeah. Right? So you're just running around surviving. Yeah. Yeah.

And there's this whole other room in the house. Imagine you discover the house has got a whole other wing, and the whole other wing is the reproducer wing. And it's like there's so much of your entire nervous system that is wired for this is the greatest reason to live. This is the best thing. If you're a spiritual person, you really feel like you're passing the light on. You're passing on the torch of life. You're actually passing forward your legacy.

If you're an atheist, you might say, hey, my DNA goes right back to mitochondrial. I go right back to single-celled organisms and there is an unbroken chain and I'm going to not break that chain. I'm going to pass the life forth and it feels incredibly good. So there is this part of you that wants to reproduce and it feels great to reproduce it in the same way eating does or any of that sort of stuff.

So I wouldn't miss out on that. And getting on a plane is also cool, but it's not like biologically hardwired to feel that great. Yeah. Right. Now, with that said, life moves in chapters.

There's a chapter called Single, Totally Unencumbered. And then there's a chapter called This Couple Who Travel Together. And we're like a great sexy couple and we're gorgeous and traveling and free as a couple. And we're loving being a couple. And then there's like the Couple With Young Kids chapter. And then there's the Couple With Teenagers and the teenagers are off doing their own thing. And then there's the Couple With Kids Who Have Left chapter.

So there's these chapters that you go through and people who cling to the last chapter, they're miserable. Yeah. I hate to say it, like it's horrible to say, but there are people who just never move out of the chapter and

you know, I've got friends who are still stuck in the high school chapter. Like I literally have friends who are in the high school chapter, like people I went to high school with. And when I get together, they're still talking about stuff that happened 25 years ago in high school. It's like, dude, that really was a long time ago. It was five years, 25 years ago. It's like, who cares what happened? Um,

So you want to move through life in chapters. You want to say, hey, have I really enjoyed this chapter? Am I ready for the next chapter in this book? Am I ready for the next adventure? So, you know, you're still in your 20s. You can still enjoy this chapter for a few more years. Yeah.

But it comes to an end and the next chapter is great. Nice. Thank you. I think that's a good place to end this. Any final pieces of advice or recommended resources for anyone who's gotten to this point in the podcast? So if you've enjoyed this stuff,

The books that I've written are all about the entrepreneur journey. So there's the Key Personal Impliance book, there's Entrepreneur Revolution, there's Oversubscribe, there's How to Raise Entrepreneurial Kids, there's Scorecard Marketing, which is all about like just setting up your own lead generation campaigns. So I've written a whole body of work. Pick one of those books, have a read, would be great. Get in touch, get in touch with my team or myself and connect because I really feel...

We're spinning around this sun and we're on a little wet rock and we're sharing this journey and this experience together. And, you know, to me, that's not lost to me. Like it's a fun, amazing experience to be sharing this time and this space with, you know, with everyone. And I love going on the entrepreneur journey with everyone else. Nice. Thank you so much. Cheers.

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.

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