#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business

But yeah, it's interesting that some people coming out of the UK have sort of disproportionate results, especially given how poor the sort of entrepreneurial spirit is in the UK.

They tend to leave.

There's you, Jay Shetty.

There's now, well, Ali Abdal.

There's now Stephen Bartlett.

Yeah, what's going on?

What do you make of the state of the UK at the moment?

They're making every mistake.

The UK should be so fundamentally strong in terms of it's a great time zone.

It's got an incredible background,

amazing institutions,

English speaking,

fast internet.

There's so many great things about the UK.

Natural borders, like it's an island, great farming and farmland.

It's a very fertile place.

And through policy decisions,

everything is in collapse at the moment.

Everything's in decline.

They're overtaxing people, so people are leaving.

Only 1% of people pay 30% of the taxes.

So that basically

if a small group of people leave, it has a devastating impact on the finances.

They've just done this terrible thing to farmers.

And now farmers that have been farming for generations are getting out of their farm businesses.

Yeah, I mean, it's just really sad because, like, when I arrived...

20 years ago in London from Australia, London was the best place in the world.

Like it was the place to be.

It was the most entrepreneurial place in the world and all the money was there, all the talent was there, all the fun was there.

I mean, London is still fundamentally a great place.

And it's just like,

yeah, they're just ruining it.

How much is this top-down versus bottom-up?

Because the culture in the UK,

the approach that people have to risk, their preparedness to kind of break free from the trodden path, that also seems to contribute as well.

The issue with the UK is that if you're super ambitious outside of London, you go to London.

And if you're super ambitious, you go to the world.

Like the UK, you've got to remember, the UK took over the whole world.

So

some of the most ambitious people throughout the last couple of hundred years, you know, they started families in Australia, in Singapore, in parts of Africa, in parts of, well, in the USA.

So, you know, the British...

The British, I don't think, have any fundamental flaws.

It's just that the ambitious people tend to either go to London or leave.

And

is a bit of class warfare, but the Brits punch above their weight so well.

I was just sitting next to

a race car driver on the plane, and he drives to McLaren.

And he was talking about all these incredible car companies coming out of the UK that everyone wants.

It's like Rolls-Royce and McLaren and Aston Martin and Bentley and Range Rover and all of this.

And it's like, oh yeah, that's right.

We do, we do really good stuff.

Yeah, it's a weird one, dude.

You know,

I don't like always sort of crapping on the UK, seeming as if I'm some guy that got on the last lifeboat off the Titanic.

And that's not the case necessarily, but I don't know, the

future doesn't seem to be particularly bright for people that are entrepreneurially minded.

It's all policy driven, so it could change.

You know, it's not, it's not like there's some fundamental thing that makes like, for example, China has fundamental problems.

Fundamental problem with China is that it has 14 different borders on the land and sea.

So if it wants to go in any direction, it's basically bumping into its neighbors.

It also imports 40% of its calories.

So if the world goes to custard, it doesn't have the capacity to actually feed its own people without imports, exports flowing freely.

So that makes it a fundamentally difficult country to run.

The UK doesn't have any of these fundamental geopolitical issues.

It's just like literally sitting around shooting itself in the foot.

Yeah,

I wonder what the sort of near-term future has in store and whether or not policies are going to move in one direction or another.

What were your reflections after your discussion with Gary on Stephen's show?

What have you sort of come to realize after that?

Main reflection is that people are really hurting, and that's real.

I don't particularly get along with Gary.

I don't like his solution.

I don't like his way of putting his solution onto the world.

His whole thing about just tax the rich.

I'm always extremely skeptical of simple answers to complex problems.

And, you know, it's already playing out.

I mean, it's not even theory.

It's playing out that the rich are leaving.

And my big thing was, hey, I agree with you on the problem.

Like, I really agree with you on the problem, but your solution is going to damage the country even more.

You're going to literally make the people leave who we need to stay.

And, but what have I taken from it?

The pain is real.

A lot of people at the moment are incredibly upset about the fact that you can't get a house.

If you work a good job and you're a good person who follows the rules, you tend to get punished for it or you certainly don't get ahead.

It feels like the services that we depend upon are breaking down.

It feels like...

Just the basics of having a fun, enjoyable life have gone away.

A lot of people feel very lonely.

You know, relationship formation, having families, having kids, all of that sort of stuff.

For whatever reason, the world that we've now created is disrupting all of the kind of natural things that we used to do.

Yeah, the UK, I think, struggles.

The weather's not fantastic for most of the year.

Oh, and by the way, we're now going to make it dimmer.

I don't know if you've seen this in the news.

The UK government, for whatever reason, have decided to spend

50 million on cloud seeding, and they've decided that they need to make it darker.

That's the one thing that the UK needs more of.

Rain.

Yeah.

Rain, there's not, there's insufficient.

They've just spent 20 billion on solar panels, and now they're going to put more clouds in the the air and it's like what's the justification for this they're just they're high i just think they're smokers

that's that's that's the only logical explanation that's the only marijuana yeah they're just there's something's going on so strange i you know the first time i ever even knew that we could geoengineer clouds was dubai when i was in dubai i didn't when they accidentally did a little too much uh well they did it sort of gently and then yeah they can i guess you can there was that massive flood and it was like oh sorry, guys.

Yeah, push the button.

That was us.

We lifted on too long.

Yeah, crazy.

But the idea of doing that in the UK seems absolutely wild to me.

But yeah, you know, weather's not particularly fantastic.

There isn't just that many exciting things to do from a lifestyle perspective.

So if you are someone that's managed to reach a bit of escape velocity with having some disposable income, where do you put it?

I'm going to get a bigger TV to watch more Netflix.

You know, there just isn't the same level of adventure, and it's a small country.

There's not that much going going on.

Yeah, well, I like the proximity.

You know, I, I snowboard.

So, you know, it's great to just duck over to the Alps and go snowboarding.

You know, you know, it's great to go down south of France or Spain,

you know, head down to one of the islands.

You know, so I love the proximity to Europe and European culture.

London still is a great city.

You know, there's a lot, there's a, there's obviously parts of London that are terrible, that's terrible, but it's a, like, ultimately, it's a pretty amazing city.

Why do you think Gary's message is resonating so much at the moment?

It seems to be very popular online.

It's getting lots of plays.

It says people can't get ahead.

So like, if you want to get into, like, like, so here's my thesis.

My thesis is this.

The Industrial Revolution lasted a couple of hundred years, and we had this rise of the Industrial Revolution through the 1800s.

Then we had like the peak Industrial Revolution through the 1900s.

And then we invented digital.

We invented two things.

We invented finance and digital technology.

And with those two inventions, we just completely have crashed the Industrial Revolution system.

And we have a new system that's in ascension, which is the digital system.

And what's now happening is that you have people like myself who have digital businesses and living the best life ever.

I can live and work from anywhere.

I've got technology.

I can, you know, run a pretty fun and affluent life.

I would not trade places.

for any other time in history.

This is like the best time ever because I'm surfing the wave of this digital ascension.

And then you've got people who followed the rules, went to school, went to university, they became skilled labor, and now they're trying to sell skilled labor into the workforce, and that doesn't pay off.

And you can't get a house, and you can't start a family, and everything's overcrowded, and

you know, nothing works.

So, the industrial revolution system, the moment that we are in time right now, is the industrial revolution system is in decline, and the digital revolution is in ascension.

And some people, or a lot of people, 80, 90% of people are on this downward spiral, and a small group of people are on this upward spiral.

And

we're just living through a time of transition.

This is not the first time this happened.

In the late 1700s, we invented the steam engines.

And in the UK, right, Silicon Valley of the 1700s was York.

So we invented steam engines and we invented pumps and we invented tractors and plows and all this sort of stuff.

and factories and we created the factory production method.

And there was this time of about 50 years from the late 1700s to the early 1800s where huge numbers of people were displaced from their jobs.

Charles Dickens writes about kids on the streets, Oliver Twist.

There's the tale of two cities, revolutions, French revolution comes along.

So essentially this industrial technology, you had 80, 90% of people who were living and working on farmland and had agricultural related jobs.

And then machines came along and did those agricultural jobs.

They got massively displaced.

They went to the cities, they bred, and they were like described like rats.

In the UK, they put them on boats and sent them to Australia.

This is where I'm from.

And they end up trying to

get rid of people out of the country.

There's too many people and they're not productive and we need to get rid of them.

So a lot of

people were displaced because of technology.

And it took 50 years, they call it the Engels pause, 50 years for the economy to start to sink back up again, like two generations.

Basically, you have the industrialists and all those working in factories and running factories and running technology and they're making tons of money.

They become wildly successful.

And then the people, the peasants who are displaced and they, you know, abject poverty and outbreak of disease and all this sort of stuff.

But it took 50 years to start normalizing that again.

So you

structurally, the changing nature of work is creating inequality.

Yeah, my belief is that this is all tech driven.

It's technology driven.

Everything we're seeing in the world right now is a mismatch of the world we were brought up for in the schooling system and the technology that we now have available.

And essentially, we were prepared for a world that no longer exists.

Our world got disrupted by technology.

I mean, to use an example that we could all relate to, if there was a hundred of us out on a field plowing a field and we expected to take a month and then two guys rock up with the tractor and they plow it in two days.

And now we wonder, well, what does 98 of us do?

Like,

what are we going to do?

So we can see it in the past because it's so clear, but we're not as clear because it's happening to us now.

But what's happening is

You know,

the value of jobs is going through the floor because of technology.

Technology automates things where you don't have to do the job, but it also simplifies things where anyone can do the job.

It outsources things where people can do the job from anywhere.

So those three superpowers of technology means that an individual who used to have a pretty good, decent job and it was valuable in the economy, if that job is now simple or outsourceable or replaceable,

you know, that person is devalued.

And it's due to no fault of their own.

They're not a bad person.

It's just that that in the economy is not very valuable anymore.

And a message talking about how this is unfair, this is a game of inequality is going to resonate because it does reflect what's happening sort of structurally.

Yeah.

And the game is, well, hey, these people have got all the all the money.

We just need to take it back off them.

But the flaw in that thinking is that we live in a world where you can live and work from anywhere.

So this digital technology that is causing this problem also gives extreme mobility.

You could run this from anywhere in the world and you do run it from anywhere in the world.

If for some reason the UK, the US said, hey, we're not having podcasters anymore or we're taxing podcasters 80%.

Yeah, my nightmare.

Right.

Well, you'd be like, oh, that's an inconvenience, but I'm going to just go to Dubai or I'll go to Switzerland or I'll go to Italy or, you know, I'll go somewhere else.

And it would be.

inconvenient, but like mildly inconvenient.

It's not wildly inconvenient.

It's not like picking up a factory and putting it somewhere else.

Everything's virtual.

One of my companies is a tech company.

We have 35 full-time employees and we have no office.

Like, we've never had an office.

Everyone works from all over the world.

We're a wildly successful company, one of the fastest growing in the UK.

And yeah, we don't have physical offices.

You know, we can literally just pick up and rehome the business anywhere.

So if you push people too much, you're going to get brain drain.

The talent is going to go elsewhere.

It's going to go to Bali.

It's going to go to Thailand.

It's going to go to Italy, which has got

Portugal had tons and tons of incentives.

And Italy does now.

So Italy, you can pay, I think, a flat tax of 200,000 euros.

And that's it.

You're done for tax.

So if you're the type of person earning a million a year, 200 grand, pretty good deal.

Especially if your current country is charging you, you know, 400 or 500 grand.

In the 1970s,

they did high taxes or the taxes got really up there in the UK.

And we lost all the British artists.

We lost the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and and the Who and the Kinks.

They all rehomed their catalogues in Amsterdam, which had a 1% tax on intellectual property rights.

And basically, the response was all this incredible intellectual property that British artists had produced didn't generate any taxes for the UK.

But you've got it now.

Yeah.

I wonder whether, and I know I have a bunch of friends who have also left the UK.

Jack Butcher, who's over here from Visualized Value, George Mack, who literally landed here yesterday.

He was in Dubai for the last four and a half years.

Now he's in the US.

I'm tempted.

Man.

And I know it's

one of those things where you don't want to feel like you're dancing on the sort of smoldering remains of some place.

And that's not to say that the UK is doomed.

But I do get the sense that it wouldn't surprise me if...

Gary and Jimmy the Giant, you know, both of whom have consumed a good bit of their content and I find interesting,

I don't know whether I'm not smart enough or know enough about economics to work out the veracity or successfulness of their proposals, but I can see the popularity of them.

And I think, okay, well, are you going to end up moving further and further toward a more socialist style

construction when it comes to the way that the country is going to be put together financially?

Yeah, and we know how that ends.

Socialism always ends the same way in collapse.

It just happens over and over and over again.

There's a few exceptions to the rule, you know, social democratic socialist countries like the Swedes and Norway, and there's some reasons why they haven't collapsed under the weight of a big government.

But the vast, vast, vast majority of countries that try this experiment collapse.

The UK has to make a decision post-Brexit.

What does it want to be?

Does it want to be the USA's

51st state?

Does it want to...

be in lockstep?

Does it want to be

the fifth Nordic country and become a social democratic socialist country.

Does it want to be Entrepreneur Island, the Switzerland or the Singapore of Europe?

It's got to pick a lane and go for it.

Problem is, you've got all the people in London who want to be Entrepreneur Island

and turn the place into an amazing sort of

vibrant place for entrepreneurs to come and set up companies.

But you've got all the people outside of London who want it to be essentially the Nordic, fifth Nordic country, want it to be Sweden 2.0 or whatever.

Yeah, it's interesting coming from the northeast of the UK, you know, very blue-collar that there was not much, by the way, of entrepreneurialism.

Maybe someone would own a window cleaning business.

Which kind of sucks because the northeast of the UK was the heart of the industrial age.

That was literally.

Stockman on Tees was where the first steam engine was actually constructed and it went to York.

And that was the quantum computer of the day.

Like a steam engine, can you imagine like seeing a steam engine in like when it was first rolled out?

It's like,

it's magic it's like us seeing chat gbt for the first time it's like what the hell have they created i guess it just shows how

these little phases you know you talk about empires falling and but you have little microcosms of industries falling and uh bubbles falling as well and you know currently sf is still kind of it for tech but if you keep pushing people into like stupid stuff the living standards if you don't clean up the street i walked through downtown san francisco and san Francisco is this wonderful blend of fruity and homeless.

Like those are the two ends of the spectrum, like super, super liberal and really, really sketchy.

It's a snapshot into the future because imagine that the world is dividing into dirt and cloud.

And the cloud is your digital environment.

That is where you live in the digital space.

And in the cloud, anyone anywhere could be your customer.

So it doesn't matter if someone is in Brazil or Brisbane or Bangalore or Budapest, right?

They can be your customer.

If they can, you know, click a link, they're a good customer.

In the dirt,

in the world of geography, you can only do business with people who are local.

So you have local customers.

And what's happening is that all of these businesses that are local geography limited are losing out to all the businesses that are international, global, digital.

So you can even see examples of like a little local grocery store and they're scratching their head going, or every in the UK, we have this thing called the high street and the high street is like the main shopping street in every little small town.

And they're all closing down and they're sitting there going, well, what's going on?

Well, we all know what's going on.

People are ordering on Amazon.

You know, they're getting their groceries delivered and they're buying their products and services on Amazon with a click.

So one big American company is able to look after all the geographies for all the things all at once, all the time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Why am I going to walk down into this little local high street and go into

a shop and see if they've got something when I can just do it in a click?

So

this is this world dividing.

And it's a little bit like for hundreds of years, we've all been running a marathon race.

And then some people get given bicycles.

and some people get given cars.

And then everyone's angry as hell because the bicycles and and the cars are getting wildly different times compared to the people who run.

And why is that happening?

Because a bicycle is technology and a car is technology.

And it's essentially, once you see it, you see it everywhere.

You see that essentially the world is dividing between those who know how to leverage technology and those who are not leveraging a lot of technology.

Is that the fundamental changing nature of work, in your opinion?

That's it.

That's it.

It's all clouds and dirt.

It's basically, are you running your entire life in this new economy, this digital economy, or are you essentially stuck in the industrial age model of going to a, like if you go to a office, that's old technology.

If you have a start time and a finish time, and you essentially measure your, if you're selling time for money, that's old technology.

It's a really old way of doing things.

If you are limited in any way by geography to who you can sell to, that's old technology.

So all these things that are just like the most normal things in the world

essentially have just been superseded over the last five years since COVID, which accelerated the whole thing.

And

now the world has divided between those who get it and those who are stuck in the old system.

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A lot of the time I think people are pretty disparaging of working for anybody else.

There's sort of two camps on the internet and one of them doesn't talk at all.

And that's the one that most people fall into where they have a job, where they work for somebody.

And the only one that anybody else ever talks about is, well, you should solopreneur your way to your first 10K a month and so on and so forth.

How do you come to think about the

relative usefulness of working for versus owning?

Well, look, you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Entrepreneurship is a team sport and it's entrepreneurial teams that that make things happen.

So we need to have a bit of nuance that it's not just the founders who start a new company that are in this new world.

It's the founder and their core team.

And

also it's a way of working.

So there are plenty of people who are part of a small growth company and they can live and work from anywhere.

They're getting great pay.

They get bonuses.

They might get stock options.

They might get bonuses for hitting outcomes and targets as opposed to staying and doing overtime.

So that way of working is a great way to work.

And it's great to be, it's exciting to be part of that kind of a team.

And then you've got drudgery.

And, you know, drudgery is like,

you know, I clock in and I clock out.

I have to wait essentially five years to get a promotion because there's another person who's in line for a promotion before me.

I get paid for time and really it doesn't matter what I do.

It's just time spent, you know, in the office.

So,

you know, we have to kind of have this nuance that I like, I'm not against at all.

Like, I mean, I have 100-plus employees, so I don't have any issue with, with the, like, there's nothing wrong with being part of an entrepreneurial team, but you don't want to be doing drudgery.

If it feels like you're just drudging on, if it feels like this isn't going anywhere, this thing's in decline, there's no electricity flowing through this, that's the time to reconsider.

But,

you know, you talk a lot about agency and entrepreneurship is just a way of expressing agency.

It's just a way to have an effect on the world.

It's a way to get your ideas out in the world world in a commercially successful manner.

There are many other ways that you could do that as well.

But

if you were high agency in Japan a couple hundred years ago, you'd be a samurai.

You'd roam around with your samurai swords.

If you're high agency in this modern economy, you'd probably be an entrepreneur or be part of an entrepreneurial team.

Yeah, you've taken a ton of businesses from $0 a month to a million dollars a month.

Where do you start with that?

Is it always the same process?

Yeah.

So, yeah, for anyone who hasn't hasn't not familiar with my background i've had seven startups that went zero to a million in their first 12 months and i've had three that have gone 10 million plus i've run an entrepreneur accelerator for five and a half thousand companies where we've gone through a growth journey i've written six books on entrepreneurship so basically i'm saying that not to try and impress anyone but to say i spend a lot of time thinking about entrepreneurship um

yeah there's there's a very predictable set of steps so entrepreneurship is a lot like getting a plane off the runway you need to follow a set of processes and a set of steps.

And it's extremely dangerous to fly a plane, except if you follow a set of steps.

And then it's extremely safe.

So there's a narrow straight path for getting a plane off the runway.

There's aerodynamic principles and there's like pre-flight checklists.

So it's the same with entrepreneurship.

Should I go through it?

Or like,

yeah.

Well, the first, the first one, the first step is to work for an entrepreneur.

So like being a number two for an entrepreneur is a really great first step.

So I never recommend people just like quit their job and go start a business.

I would always say quit your job in a large faceless company and go work for a company that has less than 12 people on the team so that you can just see what it's like and just have an experience.

Do two years working for an inspiring entrepreneurial little team.

And really, it doesn't matter if it is totally aligned.

Like if you don't necessarily love the product product or the service, but just be there for the team, be there to see how it works.

You know, when you work for Goldman Sachs, they shove you in a corner and they tell you, go do these spreadsheets.

You have no idea why.

You just do it.

And you don't know who the client is or how much they're paying or any of that sort of stuff.

When you work for a small business, you know everything.

You know the revenues and the profits and the growth and what's working, what's not working.

So you want to like step one is just go work for an entrepreneur for two years.

Step two is

do some side hustles.

So 90-day open and shut side hustles.

So just like see if you can come up with something just to kind of

test your strength.

How old were you when you did nightclub parties?

I started at 18.

The first ever

seminar that I sat in at uni, I sat next to what would be my future business partner for a decade and a half.

It was very serendipitous.

It was really weird.

So like I was 18 doing nightclub parties and those were those were side hustles.

So

you and I can totally relate to what it's like.

You book a venue and

it's 90 days out.

And then you have this job to try and fill it and make it cool and get everyone to turn up all at once and make sure it's a really great party.

And then there's that moment where you collect all the cash at the door and put it in the belt around your tummy and take it home and count it.

And it's like super exciting.

And it's open and shut.

It basically, at the end of that night, at the end of that party, you can stop.

But man, I learned a lot from nightclub parties.

I don't know about you.

Dude, I mean, it was the baptism of fire.

But my

flag, I'm aware that I have a lot of motivated reasoning here, not least that one of my best friends and ex-business partners still runs his in Newcastle.

But if you're an 18, 19, 20-year-old kid going off to university in the UK or the US or something.

Go work for a club promo company.

You'll see everything that you need to.

You will see B2B, you'll see B2C.

You'll see hiring, firing, accounts, marketing, advertising, social media, tech.

You'll learn how to organize logistics, operations, supply chain stuff.

You'll have to deal with different vendors.

You'll have to be able to

urgency and cash.

Everything is on a very, very, very tight timeline.

Everything, because the event's happening on Thursday.

There is no, oh, well, we'll do the event on Friday because it's not ready.

It's fucking happening on Thursday, whether it's an absolute car crash.

Get on your phone and text 500 people right now.

Yes, correct.

Where am I going to get the night?

Just figure it out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Exactly.

Go out on the street, stop people and see if they're going to be able to do it.

not.

But it's very solutions-focused, and a lot of businesses are problems-focused.

It's weird that actually a lot of entrepreneurs I've come across did nightclub party promotions.

Well, that says one of two things: either that nightclub partying is a good training ground, or that lots of people that are successful entrepreneurs used to be degenerates.

It's one or both.

It's one of the two.

Yeah, exactly.

But I mean, look,

one of the main lessons that I took away from running nightclubs, and I still see this, I think, in no matter how big the business gets.

There were two types of people.

One were people who loved to party and realized that, holy shit, I can get paid to do what I like.

I can get paid to do what I would do for free and for fun.

And then the other side were people who had looked at it as a

particularly profitable vector that you could treat professionally and sort of crank a bit of leverage and operational efficiency into.

And this actually turns into a legitimate business.

And you still see this now.

You've got your idea of sort of lifestyle business versus profit maximizing business.

And I think that those two things largely kind of map onto that.

Map onto the nightclub party thing too.

Yeah.

I

mean, isn't it funny too?

You mentioned about how you learn so much through the process.

You told me before you're doing like a fundraise or you're involved in a fundraise.

It's the same stuff.

Like all the stuff that gets a party promoted and gets people to turn up at a nightclub.

It's the same stuff for raising a $20 million round.

Correct.

Scarcity, limited access.

I mean, I...

A bit of hustle.

You're right.

And we're doing this raise at the moment for Newtonic and it's very, very sort of private and we haven't listed it anywhere.

And it's just me texting a few people in my phone book and talking to people that I think, oh, they might be interested.

So I'm like, yo, Bartlett, like, got this thing.

Would you want to see the deck?

Like, yeah, sure.

I'm like, it really fired me up because it made me feel like I was 20 years old again.

Yeah, exactly.

But the difference is, you know, you're not asking for five pounds on the door.

You're asking for 25 grand checks.

Yeah.

And that, and that is, but that's why it's such a great training ground.

The other training ground that I had when I was a teenager is I worked at McDonald's.

And McDonald's was incredible for like we were 15, 16 year olds running a $2 million a year restaurant.

And it was like, it was wild.

You know,

at busy times, it was doing something like $4,000 every hour.

And

like the store manager was 23.

We were all 15, 16, 17.

And we were just smashing out.

$4,000 hours.

And like, we couldn't tidy our bedroom, but we could run a restaurant.

It was, It was epic.

Like I loved working at McDonald's.

How do you come to think about the way people go from an idea to a business launch, that process?

A lot of people got lots of ideas.

Very few people launch businesses.

So the first step is ideation, which is to come up with not one, but 10 ideas.

You must look at 10 different ideas.

Because when you come up with one idea, you become fixated on it and you become obsessed with it.

And when you say, I'm going to come up with 10 ideas and then I'm going to talk about it with a few people and see which are the best three that we think could go for.

And so you start with 10 ideas, and there's a few ways to approach an idea.

Number one is noticing a problem.

So it's like I've figured out something that's wrong in the world.

There's an unmet need.

There's a problem that's not solved.

There's something that's not as good as it could be.

So that's the problem window.

You can come through that.

The next one is passion.

So you could say, I just love this, right?

I'm massively into snowboarding.

So I want to do something snowboarding related.

And then the third one is payment, which is that I've noticed a bunch of money floating around X.

So ultimately the business needs all three of those things.

You need to solve a problem.

You need to stay passionate about it and you need to get paid.

But you tend to start by noticing from one of those three angles.

So you're going to sort of like kind of evaluate those 10 ideas based on how passionate, how big a problem is this, how much money could this make.

So you kind of go through those ones.

Then what you do is you pick your favorite three and you launch a one of two or three campaigns so campaign number one which is my favorite is a waiting list campaign so this is where you set up a landing page and you just say we're going to be doing x y and z if you want the information join the waiting list and essentially so like like all i need let's say i want to come in and compete with your brand here yep

I just need a graphic designer or chat GBT to mock up what this might look like and create a few basic designs.

I put that on a landing page and say, we're launching a new drink that is all about focus and mental clarity and blah, blah, blah.

If you're interested to know more, please join the waiting list.

Answer five questions to join the waiting list.

And go in the running to win $500 worth of product or something like that.

And you want to ask, you know, obviously their name and email address.

You want to ask, you know, about what they currently do in that particular space, what they're looking to achieve, what their biggest barriers are what their budget might be so you ask a few questions and then they join the waiting list my rule is if you can't get 150 people on a waiting list then it's game over that idea is dead

so 150 is the minimum that has to be on the waiting list and it shouldn't be like every waking hour to get those people it should just be i can dm some people i can drop this into a group on facebook um i can circulate it among some friends i can do a post on linkedin or twitter or whatever So it's like, yeah, pretty easy.

I've got my first 150 people on a waiting list.

This idea can progress.

Another way you could do this is a WhatsApp group.

So you just launch a WhatsApp group.

You say,

I'm going to be launching a new fitness challenge.

All the information will go into this WhatsApp group.

If you're interested in fitness, join the WhatsApp group.

Once again, you're trying to get 150 people into a WhatsApp group.

Or the third one is

an assessment, take the assessment, an online assessment.

Basically, it's just free to take an assessment.

So if I said I'm launching a new fitness business and I've created a fitness assessment, start with that.

Take the assessment to see if you need this fitness business.

So launching a quiz or an assessment, launching a WhatsApp group, launching a waiting list, these are the three first tests.

And we're conducting 150, can we get 150 people on?

Yeah.

What's the principle that's underlying that beyond I just need to test whether or not there's 150 people that are interested in this?

What's the dynamic that is sort of pulling people in and makes this an interesting structure?

Well, essentially, if this business has a place in the world, it shouldn't be too hard to get 150 people to do something that's free.

Just to say, I'm interested more and I'll give you my details.

If this business is just of no interest to people,

they you know, I mean, if you can't get 150 people to fill in a little form, you're not going to get 150 people to buy anything.

You know, it's game over.

You know, like this is a very low bar to clear.

So you just need, the reason I want 150 is because I want to next step be able to talk to 30.

And normally out of 150, you can get on a phone call or you can have a conversation or a text conversation with 30.

And,

you know, so there's this concept called statistical significance, which is basically when they do things like drug trials or when they do testing of products, you need to test enough people to get real feedback.

So there's 30 people is a statistically significant number and 150 is a statistically significant number.

So I'm just constantly, if it's an easy low bar, it's got to be 150.

If it involves talking to people, it's got to be 30.

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Just lingering on the idea point for a little bit longer.

What are the reliably best and worst areas that you see people focus on?

I imagine lots of people get seduced by the same dead ends.

And

what are those?

Yeah.

Well, anything high volume, low value is the biggest dead end for most people.

Look, you're different because you've got millions of followers.

So you can do a drink.

But anyone who doesn't have millions of followers, this is a business that relies upon

thousands and thousands and thousands of sales every day.

You know, lots and lots and lots of people.

This has to get into stores and those stores have to, like a lot has to happen.

But it's one of these seductive businesses because someone who looks at this and goes, oh, like it would be really cool to have a drinks company.

Anything that involves food or drink, nightmare.

You know, people who want to do cupcakes, coffee, restaurants, burger vans,

all terrible businesses.

Supply chain, perishable, tethered, can't ship worldwide.

Yeah, and it doesn't have scalability.

So if you want to sell more burgers, you need to open more burger restaurants.

So whereas software, if I want to sell more software, I just give more people usernames and passwords.

I can build software once and then I can just onboard new customers at scale.

Whereas, so anyway, high volume, low value businesses are notoriously hard because most people just don't have access to volume.

They just, you know, if you're an influencer and you've got a million followers, by all means, go for it.

The next one that is

notoriously good is B2B services.

So business to business services.

So for example, if you say, hey, I can help companies introduce their first chatbot.

We charge $3,500.

We come in and do a deep dive into

your business.

We find out what are the most common customer success questions that need answering, customer service questions.

And we're going to help you set up an AI chatbot to answer 70% of your customer service inquiries.

And the package starts at $3,500.

Or if you're a bigger business, it might be as much as $15,000.

And

in that kind of business, you only need four, five, six sales a month, and you're in the tens of thousands of dollars already

so b2b services is just notoriously great anything where you can make a sale and then the lights come on uh is a really good business as opposed to where you need setup costs and then you can make a sale

so like you know you you know we're in a building that has like i don't know dozens of businesses here if you could literally just walk around and say hey guys we're doing a cyber security uh thing for people in this area if you're interested in making sure you don't get hacked we can help you you with that.

And then you just make all the sales and you say, okay, cool,

we're going to be available next month to start this.

So you sell first and then build, or sell first, then deliver.

Great businesses.

Sell first, then build is a great principle.

Right.

Yeah, because you don't put any liability down before you actually have guarantees that people are going to want this thing.

Exactly.

So it's the waiting list with financial

commitment.

Yeah.

You're getting some commitment there.

Yeah.

Okay.

What gets you from zero to 10K a month?

Chaos.

Ah, yeah.

Yeah, I remember that.

Chaos is concept audience offer sales.

So

you got to have a good concept.

So

it's a concept that has a nice hook.

People understand it.

It's like, so for example, a drink that helps you to focus.

That's a great concept.

It's like, okay, this is, you know, this is going to do X, Y, and Z for you.

It's all on the side of the can.

It's great, right?

So,

or

AI chatbots for financial planners, customer success agents for financial planners.

Okay, cool.

That's a cool concept.

Okay.

Why would they need one?

Because of this, and it has to be regulated and it has to be there.

Okay, cool.

And you know how to do that?

Yep.

So we need a good concept.

Audience is getting in front of people.

So literally face-to-face or on the phone or on Zoom or, you know, getting their attention in some way.

So audience or attention.

Offer is constructing a gold, silver, bronze offer.

So a bottom-tier, mid-tier, high-tier offer,

and giving people the choice of being able to do one of those three, being able to make that offer visual.

So it's on a brochure or it's a landing page or it's a slide deck.

And then sales process, the ability to get into a little rhythm of generating leads, booking appointments, presenting your value and making the sale.

So we call that lapse.

So chaos laps.

So when we're getting our first 10 grand, it's chaos laps.

Concept, audience, offer, sales.

How good are those things?

How do we improve those four things?

And laps, leads, appointments, presentations, sales.

Are we able to smash out, you know, activity?

Now, I've never seen a business where they're focused on those four things and they're doing their weekly laps that doesn't rapidly hit 10 grand a month.

Like

just just those, just those simple focuses and you very rapidly either kill the idea or go to 10 grand a month.

Can you do this on your own?

I believe that entrepreneurship is a team sport.

I'm a big believer that it's teams that do really well.

And it doesn't mean that you need a co-founder, but I feel like you need someone who's helping and supporting.

I don't know.

When you started this, did you have anyone helping?

No.

Just all on your own?

Just me.

Aren't you a machine?

You're a savage.

Yeah, just a...

British desire for suffering, I think.

No, I got within 19 episodes.

I think it's episode 17 or episode 19.

Dean came and shot.

my video guy came and shot an episode because he was like, oh, I see you doing this podcast.

That's kind of cool.

Have you ever thought about shooting it in a little bit higher quality?

And maybe me and my friends have got, you know, fancy cameras and we understand how lighting works and framing.

Maybe we could come film one.

Oh, okay.

Well, if we're going to do this, I better.

come up with a big episode to do it.

So I did what it's really like to live on Love Island,

which was the first episode we ever did that hit 10K and it got us over 1,000 subs and did all the rest of this stuff.

And then I said, okay, well,

let's work together.

Let's do this.

See, I mean, that's the real story.

The real story is doing it on your own didn't work.

And then, as soon as some team members show up, you achieve more.

A team member.

Yeah.

A person.

As soon as that happens, then you achieve more in a week than you previously had in months.

Correct.

Yeah.

I think the interesting point there, and this is something I'm increasingly thinking about now, is

you may be able to grit your teeth and use the chip on your shoulder or the people that doubted you or the desire to prove that you should be validated by the world or whatever.

But it's way easier to just have some boys with you that are kind of cool to work with.

Yeah.

And you will get a lot more longevity, I think, out of your career by finding people that externalize that motivation and give you a bit of a sense of, yeah, you did it.

Like, dude, we did it.

And you're mattering and you're like planning and you're like 11 o'clock at night.

Hey, I've had an idea.

Can I run it past you?

It's so much more fun.

You know, starting a business is a bit like a bank robbery.

You watch all the bank robbery movies.

They don't do it on their own.

It's a bunch of guys who sit around with a pizza box and they've got like the little model car and the Legos and they're like, okay, the car, 11 a.m., it's going to go here.

And you let off the shotgun and I'll crack the safe.

Like they're figuring it out and they sit there in the car together watching the bank.

like writing everything down, talking about what's going to work and what's not going to work.

That's actually what a startup feels like.

It feels like a couple of people nattering, like thinking it out, thinking it through, figuring it out, you know, running little simulations um yeah all of that like i've started so many companies i've never started them really on my own i've i've been the founder but i've always had an assistant or a salesperson i've had co-founders um who's the first person that you should hire

so

the like teams develop two four eight thirty right so a two per and this is military this is how the military do it as well so the two person team is a scout team and a scout team is really looking at two questions.

Can we, can we sell it and can we build it?

Can we get a customer?

Can we look after a customer?

So on the scout team, you're just trying to have one person who's really focused on can we sell this?

And one person who's really focused on, can we create a happy customer?

And so

the first team is those two people answering that question.

Now, it could be that it's your business and you're really, let's say you're technically skilled at something.

Let's say you're an IT services company and you've got amazing IT skills.

You want to bring on a salesperson who says, can we sell this?

Or you might be really extroverted and really good at selling, but you're not quite sure if you can actually technically build the thing.

You want to bring on a technical person who's, can we actually look after customers if we get customers?

So you're essentially looking for your complementary opposite.

Are you going to be the salesperson running around figuring out whether we can sell this?

Or are you going to be the delivery person figuring out whether we can make customers happy.

So those are the first two.

Once you've figured those two questions out, you jump to a four-person, what we call fire start team.

So a fire starting team is

four people and you're going to have someone who we call a key person of influence.

You're going to have a salesperson, a delivery person, and what we call a Swiss Army knife.

Swiss Army knives can do 25 things, but badly.

And

that's what you want.

You want that

high-agency generalist.

Let's call them that.

High agency generalist.

Yep.

Yep.

And the Swiss Army Knife is a high agency general tool.

So you go to this four-person little team, and this is about launch campaign, getting your first sales, getting your first customers through the door,

you know, holding everything together with sticky tape and, you know, like just doing.

And then you're then jumping up to eight-person team.

And this is what I'd call a stable core team.

At this point, you've got a lifestyle boutique.

If you run this well, you can do one to three million pretty easily.

You can be highly profitable.

Have your weekly team meetings.

Everything runs really smoothly.

You've got eight people on the team.

You can actually just stay there for years making a ton of money.

Everyone's having a great time,

provided you don't go over 13, provided you never have the 13th person on the team.

So

you can go eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, but never 13.

Unlucky 13 unlucky 13 why disaster what happens at 13 the 13th person splits the team so uh 12 12 people is up up to 12 people is one team

the 13th person divides the team into two or three so as soon as you hire the 13th you now have a sales team an ops team a finance team right and now they don't talk the 13th person introduces just this we're too big to be small we're not too we're not big enough to be big um like it's just a world of awkwardness once you've got the 13th person.

Okay.

And then 30.

And then, yeah, if you go to 13, you might as well go to 30.

Yeah.

So at 30, it gets good again.

So from 13 to 30, it's too big to be small and too small to be big.

The business is not going to work on either.

It's going to work as a six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12 person team.

It's going to work as a 30 to 150 person team.

It's not going to work from 12 to 30 people, 13 to 30 people.

So, too big to be small, too small to be big.

You're not, you have this old original crew who are the family who got roped in.

And they were the ones who used to be there, you know, 11 o'clock at night, 5 o'clock in the morning.

We used to, we used to be friends, man.

16, 17, 18 people, two of them start sleeping together.

So you get these relationships and it gets awkward and weird.

Unfortunately, at around 17, 18, 19, 20 people,

one of the original crew who was like so useful, that was your Swiss Army knife in the beginning days.

This person held the company together.

They bleed the brand.

They are so loyal.

And then now they are so like a bottleneck and they're just not good enough.

And you have to.

Because you've hired people that are at a higher skill level than they are and they haven't been able to keep up.

And they, and they just don't fit anywhere.

And they're just like, they go through six months of like not being a fit and like they're just like feeling like an outcast.

And they keep keep pulling the whole i was there at the beginning man and you're like i know man but like i need you to either sell or this you know because the company's turning into specialists now so now you're going from generalist raise your game yeah you got to raise your game they may or may not have it in them like you might in the early days you might have just taken the neighbor's teenager and like brought them on board and they were amazing you know but they're just they're just not up to the game now

So there's like what tends to happen is there's like a great shakeup and the great shake-up is like, you know, you go from 21 people back down to 15 and, you know, it's a dark time.

But then if you can, if you can press through to 30, you end up with an executive team, a sales team, ops team, delivery, development.

You know, now you've got this really tight unit at 30 people.

You've got executives running teams of teams and now you are smashing it.

Now you're doing 10 million plus.

You've got a million of profit or more.

So eight figure revenue, seven figure profit, and now away you go.

Just going back down to the sort of twos and fours and eights, how do you come to think about finding, hiring, training,

retaining the best talent?

Yeah.

So in those early days, especially twos and fours, even eights, it's do they breathe?

Do they have a pulse?

Can they speak English?

You available on time.

Yeah.

It's just, I mean, even that's a good bonus, right?

It's literally anyone you can plausibly get to join your team.

Now, it changes over time.

Like, you could get some pretty amazing people.

If you launched a new company, you could rope in some pretty amazing people.

But I go back to my first company when I was 21.

So

I had to rope in a friend from school.

I roped in my girlfriend.

I roped in

this kind of spotty, funny teenager dude who I knew who came and slept in my basement for six months.

Okay.

Like basically I just pulled together who I could.

Later on, some guy tried to sell me a mobile phone package and was really like great talker.

And as he was selling, I said, hey, look, you're really good at this.

Do you want to quit your job and come work with me?

And so I pulled someone across there.

Called promo mentality.

Yeah.

I was in a I was in a cafe and someone was like wiping down the table with a big smile on their face and like super pumped and they're like happily wiping tables down.

I'm like, what a positive attitude.

So I'm like, do you want to quit your job and come work with me?

And they're like, what do you do?

And I'm like, let's have a, let's have a secret conversation.

After, what time do you get off work?

Right.

So I'm just literally in those early days.

People are like looking for the right people.

The right people are not going to work for you.

Like as a startup.

You're not going to get someone to quit their job at Google and come and join your little team.

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So what are you optimizing for?

Staying alive,

staying in the game, making sales.

What are you optimizing for when you look at, when you're assessing members of staff?

You're not going to have the level of expertise.

They're not going to have this illustrious history.

I'm just looking for,

are they...

like

to be honest, it's just are they willing to join the team?

Like, are they actually

when I'm talking to them about the idea of joining the team, does that raise their energy or lower their energy?

So the right people, I mean, the people I've always started business, well, the people I started businesses with in the early days, they're all ex-hospitality.

So pubs, restaurants, cafes, they're all ex-door-to-door salespeople or great communication,

savvy.

And working in shitty jobs where it's not a big risk.

to quit a shitty job to come and work for my shitty job.

Because at least my shitty job is like some cool new new thing that may or may not work but it's like for them it's not a big deal to then if it doesn't work

they can always go back

exactly yeah okay so like i'm just looking for people who are willing and what about when things get a little bit more sophisticated and you can be a little bit more discerning with talent with hiring assessing yeah it's really weird when that happens like the first hire who's good It really freaks the whole team out.

It's like, whoa, we have a proper grown-up in the team now.

Like, oh, wow, this person has a master's degree.

Wow, that's amazing.

This person used to have like a proper job.

They've got a BMW.

What?

Right.

So, um,

so you get like a couple of grown-ups around, uh, and suddenly the, suddenly this changes the dynamic because now you're into this is going to be a proper business.

This is going to be

we're going to hire proper salespeople.

We're going to hire proper people through a hiring process.

You know, so there comes a time where you get around around eight

or on the journey to eight, where you actually bring on a few people who are actually talented and specialized and trained.

And that's a big breakthrough moment.

What about 10K to 100K a month?

What's the difference there?

Okay, so 10K to 100 grand a month is where you go from one-to-one selling to group selling.

So in whatever form that looks like.

To get to 10 grand a month, you just talk to customers one at a time.

And you just go out.

You literally go out and talk to people.

So you might bang on doors.

You might drop emails.

You might have Zoom calls, you might have phone calls, but you're essentially just selling.

You're just doing like you're doing one-to-one sales.

To go to 100 grand a month, you need to somehow be selling to groups.

So you might be doing videos on YouTube.

You might be doing

live events or webinars or workshops.

You might

be doing marketing campaigns where you're sending out marketing materials or you're running ads.

So you're now like hitting groups at a time.

In order for that to work, you need to establish one person who is the face of the business.

And that's going to be your front man.

That's going to be the front person of the band.

And we call that person the key person of influence.

They're the talker.

They are.

Always a founder.

It tends to be that it tends to be the founder.

It's either the founder or one of the top salespeople, but it tends to work best as the founder.

Better story, more heritage.

Great buy-in.

Exactly.

People, and it, well, there's another reason too, which is a bit selfish.

anyone who gets good at it leaves and starts their own company so even if you could put someone else in that role it's only a matter of six to twelve months before they go wait a second i'm bringing in all the business yeah um you work i'm gonna take this platform and now use it yeah myself you work for me not like like i'm i'm feeding you you're not feeding me so um it flips pretty quickly

just to interject there we saw this problem with within nightlife that if

you as the owner of an events company made any of the event managers too independent when it came to managing looking after the front door uh caching the till dealing with the manager of the venue the venue the gm um if you ever did that for too long and again this is

i'm not i always felt weird it's so funny i we had this uh really sort of unique set of principles and algorithms that we went through when it came to nightlife and i was always so hesitant about ever talking about them on the podcast because i felt like that was the playbook that my old business partner darren was still using.

I actually think he's become more sophisticated now.

So this is like archaic, dusty shit that Indiana Jones would have to go and get.

But one of the, one of the main rules was you never let anybody except for you cache the till because if someone else starts cashing the till, they're in the office with the GM at 2 in the morning, 2.30 in the morning.

So where's Darren?

Where's Chris?

It's like, oh, they're at home.

What would you mean?

They're at home.

Oh, okay.

Well, who looks after most of the stuff?

So, well, you know, I'm the point of contact.

So who pays the DJs?

Oh, well, you know, like, it's usually me or one of the boys that will do that.

And after a while, the GM goes, hey, we can fucking cut voodoo events out.

Like, they're on an 80-20 or they're on a one-grand flat fee.

I reckon we can do a dry hire a little bit more expensive, give it to this new kid.

He seems to know everyone in any case.

And that guy's like, well, I'm cashing the till.

I'm the one that's up until 2:30 in the morning.

I deserve this.

And you're like, dude, you're fucking 21 years old.

And the only reason that this gig exists is because of what we did.

But certainly that level of

not compartmentalization, but to a degree,

that sense of, look, people have your best interests at heart, the business's best interests at heart, until the offer becomes too good to say no to.

Water finds its level.

So if someone has the ability to generate the business,

like create the product, manage all the relationships and all that sort of stuff.

Unfortunately, like the value just starts flowing to them.

Every single time that someone did that, every single time you stopped seeing an events company owner on the front door of one of their events, and it was just the event managers, they had, it was like a ticking clock between six and 12 months before that kid left and started his company.

That's why I can do this on my own.

Yeah, low barrier to entry, low mode.

Correct.

So,

so yeah, so that's why you should do it as the founder, right?

So, as the founder, you should be the key person of influence.

Um, so what is your job now?

Your job as the founder is to be the person who does the pitching.

Uh, you do it on the videos, you do it on the stage, you do it on the screen, uh, you write the main marketing content, or you sign off on the main marketing content.

So, essentially, you're setting the tone with the pitch.

Um, the pitch is like the positioning of the business, it's who we are, what we do, who we do it for.

And, you know, it's the ability to initiate relationships.

So it's that important pitching role.

So you're in, you're the one doing the big important pitching, whether it's directly or indirectly.

That's the first one.

Published content.

You are.

publishing stuff on all the social media platforms.

You're putting out content.

You're doing videos.

You're doing posts.

And it's all like it's centered on your personal brand.

Building out the product ecosystem.

So, what you want to do as the founder, as the key person of influence, is introduce the new products.

All businesses that succeed have a group of products.

It can never just be one product.

If you want a successful business, you need to have several products and services that act as a bit of an ecosystem.

So, you've got to-so, like, I'll give you a big example and then we'll go small examples.

So, big example would be BMW.

The cars make 3% margin.

The finance and insurance and servicing makes 30% margin.

No way.

Yeah.

3% margin on the car.

Tiny, tiny margins.

Presumably the absolute top, top, top end stuff is a little bit bigger.

Probably.

Yeah, but not by much.

But ultimately, the car business isn't wildly profitable because there's so many costs involved in being open and available and having cars.

Crazy.

But once someone signs up on the car,

then selling the finance and insurance and all of that, then those are recurring revenue products.

If you take the big chefs like Gordon Ramsey, they will always have a product ecosystem of books, restaurants, cooking ingredients, pots and pans, all the different things that go around a celebrity chef.

And you then go, oh, okay, so the chef just shows up and does one thing, but then there's all these things that monetize.

You know, Stephen Bartlett, great example.

He's now built a product ecosystem around him that all he has to do is just show up and do the podcast and all these other businesses light up.

If you just take a small business like a consulting business, the consultants who make a lot of money, they have a signature talk where they give a talk in front of an audience and that's called a keynote.

They have maybe a YouTube channel or a podcast channel.

They might have a book.

A lot of consultants have a book and that is a like an entry-level product.

And then they have their main consulting package.

And then they might have licensable materials or they might have a membership

annual retreat.

So it's the combination of these.

I've given all of these a name.

There's a gift, which is a free thing, a product for prospects, which is an entry-level thing, a core offering, which is the main thing, and a product for clients, which is an ongoing thing.

So you need one of each of those four.

And you ladder people along.

You ladder people along.

So the gift gets attention.

The product for prospects builds trust.

The core offering delivers a transformation.

And the product for clients maintains a standard over time.

Imagine that you were

a musician.

I'm trying to think about people that are sort of a little bit more spit and sore dust to stuff like this.

So I spent, I've just come back from New York and I was around a bunch of musicians there.

So a lot of them do weddings, they do brunches, you know, someone's a percussionist, but then they also have a manager.

So they've got a member of staff in that regard that's handling this.

But maybe they have a little bit of merch too that's on the side.

And they do

gigs, but they put music out too.

So okay, so I'm putting music out and I've got a page and you can see my content.

but then they also if they're unable to do a gig because they're already booked they start booking other people and then they take a little bit off the top yeah and they go well actually i mean i can just put the whole gig together and then maybe i can book myself i don't yeah you know the manager actually becomes an administrative assistant as opposed to a gatekeeper that's in between me and the clients

and you start to sort of build this out the same thing presumably would be for comedy it would be if you organize uh dances in nightclubs if you can do pop-ups for for different coffee shops and stuff like that oh i can get you the the events you can go go out and make this happen.

You go and look at anyone who's actually making money and they've got an ecosystem of stuff.

It's never just a thing.

Like it's an ecosystem of things.

So you take the musicians or the DJs, the most successful of them, they've got music licensing deals, they've got party promotions, they've got merch, they've got live gigs, they've got streaming rights.

So there's this whole ecosystem of products and services that they're making.

Maybe they're doing tutorials online that is on.

They could be doing that.

Yeah, Kajabi or teachable or something like that could be doing private high-end parties so there's all sorts of things that they have on their menu of things so you have to have at least four things um that that that do it um you know i've i've worked with consultants where they've struggled along as a consulting business maybe doing 150 grand a year several years in a row and then we just get them to write a book and we go get your best consulting ideas into a book And now you've got a book.

I want you to give away a thousand copies a year as a gift.

And they go from 150 to 750

in like.

And the cost is writing a book and giving 1,000 copies away.

Giving 1,000 copies away.

And now they do an extra, you know, 600,000 a year.

And it's just because they just created a gift product.

And, you know, and then you add in a speaking tour and a speaking tour and a book.

And the consulting goes through the roof.

And now they're doing a million plus and they need to.

Yeah, interesting.

So lots of people would look at something like a speaking tour, doing B2B or doing events in that regard as, well, that's the money owner.

It's like, no, that's the front end of the funnel.

Yeah.

To get people, or in your case, the back end.

Yes.

So you created all these like followers on YouTube and then you did a speaking tour.

Correct.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, and that in reverse.

And that makes money because it's on the back end of the YouTube channel.

So the YouTube channel is the gift.

And then the product for clients, the product, you know, the back

end is go see Chris Live.

How did you go with the speaking tour?

Was it great?

Fucking epic, dude.

I mean, I went to your home country of birth, my ex-country of ownership, and

it was fucking sick, dude.

I wanted to do a land acknowledgement.

I wanted to say that we were on stolen land, precisely stolen from the British.

Oh, you're a comedian now.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm trying.

No, it was great.

It was great, man.

You've been hanging around Jagarga.

One of the problems that you have, and, you know, being a degenerate internet entrepreneur where you can work from anywhere on the planet and you can have a team and you don't need an office and all the rest of it, that sounds great, but it becomes a very sterile way of running business.

And

to have immediate feedback for an audience, to be able to do something that gets that, you know, dopamine firing is really important.

You know, I've got, I'm about to announce, in fact, we may have already announced it by the time this comes out.

I'm doing the U.S.

and Canada.

We're doing 12 dates around the US and Canada.

It's a proper domestic style tour.

So I'm on the road every weekend for like three months.

Yeah.

Right.

I'm back and forth here to wherever.

I can't say the dates yet because I don't know whether it's vital.

It's awesome.

And I get to bring my boys with me and we get to record content and we have an adventure

and real feedback with real people.

100%.

And, you know, I think, at least in my experience, I'd be interested to know if this is the same for you.

People's sort of business lives occur in sort of

between five to nine year epochs or eras.

And

typically around about every seven years or so, something starts to pivot a little bit.

I noticed this in nightlife for me.

I got to about 29, having started the weeklies at 22.

I was like,

I'm just feeling a little like excited.

Seven, seven years, yeah.

Crab hitting up against its shell.

And with the podcast, it's a little bit like that now, which is for so long it was me and Video Guy Dean.

How long have you been doing the podcast?

Seven years.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

So this is

the last episode.

This is your eight.

It could be.

No.

So look, it's mostly around this.

It's the way that I'm thinking about structuring the business.

I still love what I do, but the way that it's put together needs to change.

It changes.

Yeah, I found that too.

And it's actually quite true with life.

So zero to seven is like infancy to childhood.

And then seven to 14 is like child to adolescence.

And 14 to 21 is, you know, adolescence into adulthood.

So there's these kind of seven year cycles in life.

I, you know, my, as I, in my 20s, I had one company which morphed into another company, which morphed into another company.

morphed into countries.

Yeah, I find that type of thing.

The big thing that's actually going to happen is with the advent of AI, people are going to have extremely high velocity, fast-paced careers that last three years and then dissipate and then a new one.

And like

the ability, the AI superpower is,

it's not going to be rare anymore to meet someone who's simultaneously writing a book, doing a tour, running a podcast, starting a drinks company.

They've got way more leverage.

There's huge amounts of leverage.

It's like having a team of free employees.

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What aspects of business should we be outsourcing to AI right now?

So anything that you would outsource to the Philippines can now be outsourced outsourced to an AI agent.

There's some big breakthroughs in AI.

So there's something called Agents, which is essentially

an AI that can grab your credit card details.

So I was with Stephen Bartlett the other day, and all he did was told an AI agent to get us three bottles of water.

And it looked online, found a local DoorDash facility, ordered three bottles of water, got his credit card details, punched in the credit card details, ordered the three bottles of water to come to this address.

And then in walks a dude with the bottles of water.

Yeah.

And all he had done is asked an AI to go and organize the three bottles of water.

And it just magically happened.

Like, so that's the ultimate Amazon one click.

It is, but this is for everything.

You could say, go and build me a list of 150 potential clients.

Just go through websites of people who might want this and find their contact details.

Use LinkedIn if needed.

Right.

So boom.

go go and you could go do that.

There's also something called vibe coding.

Vibe coding is the ability to build applications by just talking about them.

So I had a go at vibe coding the other night and I said I want an application to run the pocket money in my household.

I've got three kids.

We've got about 10 chores per year, per week that we want to do.

There's a certain amount per chore.

I want an application that can manage all of that.

And it just codes it up and it's an amazingly cool application.

It even gave it a name and a brand, Cash Kids or something like that, Kids Cash with K's.

And then it

like you could add kids, you could add chores.

It had a little mini database, payout system, and it like took 15 minutes and it just coded it up itself.

So we are now living in a new world.

Like this is the tractor has plowed the field for the first time.

So yeah, you can outsource.

Every single person on your team now has superpowers.

One area that I think a lot of people find is a sticking point is pricing, increasing the price specifically.

How do you know when to increase the price?

Price is always a factor of demand and supply tension.

So demand and supply tension is that you have so many people who want something and a bunch of them can't get it and they miss out.

And ultimately,

people just randomly put up prices.

But you have to start with demand and supply tension.

So for example, when you launch a waiting list with 100 people and there's only 10 spots available, that pushes the price up of those 10 spots, especially if there's any what's called transparency of demand and supply tension.

So transparency is where the market can actually see that you're in demand.

Queue outside of your nightclub.

Yeah.

There's a queue out the front of the nightclub.

And when people are worried about will they get in or not.

So that's that is.

transparency of demand and supply tension and that pushes prices up.

So any opportunity to create that transparency.

What are the best ways to create transparency?

Waiting lists,

social media followings, live events events or events where people can see that other people are either at the event or on the Zoom call,

launches,

pre-registration lists for drops.

You can even just tell people, like, for example, one of our businesses, we launched a product or service and to get that, you had to do an online assessment.

So we just told people, well, 7,000 people took the online assessment.

We can only take 350 clients.

So we want to, we're going to select who we want to work with.

If you get selected, then

that's good for for you.

So that was just telling people and showing them, like, you know,

they know they filled in the online assessment.

And we were completely truthful.

In fact, we can screenshot the actual how many people filled it in.

So we can actually put that on an email and say, look, 7,000 people filled this in.

We can only take 350.

Glastonbury Music Festival does this beautifully.

For 364 days of the year, you can't buy a ticket.

You can only pre-register.

Then they tell you how many people are pre-registered.

They say 1.2 million people have pre-registered for tickets.

We only have 136,000 tickets available.

They go live tomorrow morning at 5 a.m.

Don't miss out.

And people just get up at 5 o'clock in the morning and buy a Glasto ticket.

So that's transparency of demand and supply.

There's one other trick, which is being very selective about what you call an ICP.

ICP stands for ideal customer persona.

So an ideal customer persona is where you select a type of customer who gets extraordinary value from what you do and you become exclusive for them.

So for example, you may, have you had Esther Perella on the show?

No.

So you know who she is though, right?

So she's a married couples therapy therapist, but she's exclusively for billionaires.

Like you have to be a billionaire to sign up for her marriage therapy.

Now, because her ICP

gets so much value, like think about it like this.

If you're a married couples therapist, a 22-year-old who's single sees zero value in you.

A 31-year-old who's in a new relationship and it's honeymoon period sees little value in you.

And a 52-year-old billionaire who's about to go through a divorce that will cost 40 million in, you know, in capital destruction and 8 million in fees sees an extremely high value in a marriage therapist, couples therapist, if they can

fix the thing.

So when

a billionaire has trouble with their marriage, they go to Esther Perel, they pay quarter of a million bucks and they want serious dedicated service and she's exclusive for that market and she's positioned herself for the market.

So in every single audience, there's three categories within the audience.

So there is what's called the mass market.

They're just interested in price shopping.

There's the niche market or niche market, which is interested in passion, community, story,

experience.

So they're interested in value, whatever that constitutes for them.

They'll pay more for value.

And then there's the luxury market.

And the luxury market is the ultra-high end.

They're interested in pedigree, exclusivity, those kind of things.

So

one of the best ways to push prices up is to become exclusive for either a niche or a luxury market.

As far as spending power goes, inside an audience, 1% of people have 15% of the budget.

9% of people have 45% of the budget.

And 90% of the people have 40% of the budget.

So the top 10% have 60%,

and the bottom 90% have 40%.

So basically, what most businesses do is they target the mass market because there's lots of them, but they don't realize that the 90% of people only have 40% of the budget.

And it's the top 10% who've got all the money.

So if you can reposition yourself as a key person of influence for these passionate people up here and be exclusive for them,

you're going to end up earning a lot more money.

How do you overcome the discomfort of increasing the price?

That's something I think a lot of people, this is what I used to charge.

It's a very similar product.

Maybe it's the same product.

I'm in more demand.

There is just this, especially if you come from a more sort of blue-collar background and you're now trying to sort of climb up that entrepreneurial ladder.

Maybe again, you're in direct contact with whoever the client is.

A lot of the time, it's you, it's you that they're getting some sort of service.

Maybe high ticket, could be high ticket.

But it's like, I used to charge 500 bucks and I like I have work coming out of my ears.

Yeah.

This needs to be more 750.

It's like, dude, this needs to be $3,000.

How do you help people get past those blocks?

It's a great problem to have.

A lot of people don't believe that's a problem, but it's so a problem.

Like I've experienced it.

You've experienced it.

I mean,

yeah.

So

there's a couple of the best way is to create free content that's for everybody so that if you're priced out of the market for someone, you can just recommend something for free.

Right.

So it's a low entry equivalent.

A no entry.

So like someone says, hey, you know, Chris, I really need your help with X, Y, and Z.

And you say, let me send you through the episode that talks about that.

You know, look, I'm really sorry.

I can't, I'm spread too thin.

And I've always used that terminology.

I'm really sorry.

I'm just spread too thin right now.

And that's kind of like a people kind of acknowledge, okay, fair enough.

He is spread too thin.

So that.

phraseology has worked for me.

I'm a little bit spread too thin right now.

Can I send you a free copy of a book?

Can I send you, I know a book that would be really great for that.

Or I know a coach, I know a supplier, I know a company that's a good person.

You've got someone else that can do it.

You can't get me, but you can get them.

Yeah.

And I've said, I've actually said to people, hey, look, this other person I'm going to recommend is better than I am, but just not as well known.

So like, you're going to get the solution you're looking for.

I can't do it.

You know, so having free content, having a gift you can send out, having an alternative supplier.

So just putting a little bit of thought into, you know, people tend tends to be that people want to solve a problem.

They want something that solves the problem.

They don't actually want you, they just see you as the path of least resistance for getting what they want.

And they're just kind of like viewing you as the only one who could offer a path.

And you can just say, Hey, look, there's another path.

You know, you can get what you want, you know, without spending 50 grand.

Okay, so we've talked about pricing, hiring.

What about firing?

How do you know when to let people go?

I hate this.

I hate firing.

Look, you know,

here's my answer.

My honest answer to this is that I have brought on amazing ops people to run my businesses.

And by the time we get to the point where we need firing,

I have an ops person who does firing.

Now, I can't have that conversation.

I hate it.

It makes my gut turn.

And I've got a script and I know how to do it, especially in the UK.

Here's what sucks, right?

What sucks in the UK, as soon as you're in a firing situation, there's all these rules you have to follow and you can't actually just have a sensible conversation.

You can't actually just say, hey, look, here's what's really going on.

You did this.

We can't do it.

You can't have this.

Like as soon as you go talk to a HR lawyer, who because most companies have insurance for HR and in order to be insured, you have to follow their scripts.

So what really sucks is that you may want to say,

look,

here's what you're, you know, here's this, here's the issue, right?

Here's the actual thing and here's what might work.

I mean, and in certain situations, you know that someone's going to get fired and you're going through the process that the HR is giving you and you're just like mentally going, like, resign.

Like you want to resign.

So I will give you a massive like written

positive thing, but we can't, we can't keep you.

You know, we're going through a process.

This is the time that you should resign rather than be fired.

But you're not allowed to say that.

It's constructive dismissal.

It's all these kind of things.

Constructive dismissal.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So if you suggest that someone resigns, that's constructive dismissal.

You've contravened something.

If you've done something that, if your performance is at a point where, like, you might really like the person, but the performance is just not there.

And unfortunately, you just can't go on any longer.

So you now have to either make the role redundant or you have to performance

manage them out of the business.

What sucks is they may have been great for like three years, but now they're just the lowest performer in the business.

For the business to move on, you'd need to performance manage them out of the business.

And

to stay on the right side of your insurance, your HR insurance, you now have to go through the scripts.

So this is meeting one.

We're assessing the performance.

We're going to be going through a process over the next two weeks to just assess where you are with your performance.

And if we discover that the performance is an issue, then we may need to look at disciplinary issues and blah, blah, blah.

So you have to follow the script.

And you're sitting there going like, the decision's been made.

You know, like, seriously, just get out.

Dancing through this weird sequence that we both have to keep on doing.

Yeah.

And I got sued once.

I had...

One of my co-founders was not getting along with one of the long-term employees and they were really locking horns all the time.

And she came to me and she said, look, I'm just fighting with this guy all the time and it sucks and I'm really frustrated and blah, blah, blah.

And like, I'm, I'd just gotten off of a long flight from Australia back to the UK.

So I was so tired.

And I said to her,

look, here's the problem.

This is a co-founder, a director of the company.

If you really object to working alongside him,

I hate to say it, but you probably need to find somewhere else.

If you're unhappy, you should find somewhere that makes you happy.

And we can support you as long as that takes.

We can help you find the right thing.

But if you're unhappy here because you cannot you know work alongside this guy unfortunately he owns the company and he's a director of the company right he like he's not going to go um you you need to find something that is your next move so i just said this uh 18 000 pounds uh so i settled that for 18 grand because it was constructive dismissal yeah that's a painful business call Okay, so your best advice is to have a prophylactic in between you and the hiring, the firing process.

Yeah, so I have a, I get to the point of having an ops person.

And a a good ops person, that's just what they do.

No emotion.

They're just, they've just done it.

Like, let's say they've used to run a Starbucks or a pub or a McDonald's or they used to run a travel agency or something.

They've done this a hundred times or dozens of times before.

That's why you hired them because they know how to run the business.

So, you know, they typically they come to you and they say, hey, look, so-and-so is not performing.

You know, they're not performing.

Why are you keeping them around?

Oh, because they were there at the beginning.

You kind of like have to have this kind of, oh, I'm sorry.

And they go, look, unfortunately, this is like, we need to get someone in that role who can perform because they're not, they're dropping balls.

Okay, well, what do you want to do?

Like, I want to performance manage them out.

I want them out.

I want to get someone proper in.

Okay, fair enough.

And then they go and do it.

Okay, so you've got a hired gun.

What about selling the business?

We've got all the way through the different processes and then the final point of, I'm going to exit this thing.

Have you sold a business?

I exited my events company, which involved

impossibly trying to work out what it was worth, where there's zero assets beyond the brand equity, the contacts.

And I was a key person of influence within that.

And I was taking that.

How big was that business?

We would have been doing probably somewhere in the region of a quarter of a mil GBP.

Yeah.

So look, that's not going to be a life-changing exit.

It's very common that that is a slow handover type deal.

So what you do is you vendor finance for that one and you say, look, the business is worth one times revenue.

And you go, so you're going to pay quarter of a million and it's going to be over five years, 50 grand a year for five years.

And I'm going to help hand over over the next 12 months.

And then if you can't pay the 50 grand a year for five years, then I get to take the business back in whatever form it's in.

So it's secured against the business.

So that's kind of a, these are these micro exits.

Mind you, you can be on the right side.

You can be on the other side of that.

You can buy a business like that.

And it's epic.

Like you can buy a business that's doing a few million by just vendor financing it in and almost nothing down and the business can afford it um there's a lot of people now who want to retire and um and you can buy their business for for nothing down

so that's totally a thing once you get to a certain size especially when you hit seven figures of profit um

And then again, if you hit 5 million US dollars of profit, you then get proper exits.

And proper exits, what they're looking for is three things.

They're looking for a core team of people who won't leave when you leave.

So normally that's 30 people.

And they know that four or five or six might leave when you leave, but it's not the whole business isn't going to fall over.

So it's not founder dependent.

So you want to have 30 people on a team.

They're looking for what's called recurring revenues.

They really want contracts in place for recurring revenues.

So subscriptions, memberships, service level agreements, those sorts of things.

And the final one is called proprietary assets.

So it could be the brand, the database, it could be intellectual property, it could be

channels to market, you know, those types of things.

And when you can present that and you can present a document that shows these are our proprietary assets, you can present a forecast of this is our forward-looking

revenue that is contracted.

And this is our org chart of our 30 plus people who are going to stick around after I leave, then you get wildly high um

uh valuation and it's life-changing so it's a life-changing amount of money all in one hit you typically can earn more than most people earn in their entire career in one sale um

and and mind you we hear about the billionaire ones we hear about the you know mark zuckerberg sold a company or whatever but they're like every day of the week non-newsworthy there are people who sell a company for 12 million or you know 6 million or 22 million you know these ones don't even make the news um so you can have these kind of events where you sell the business for a multiple of revenue

um you know one of one of my businesses we just turned down an offer for 35 times profit um and we turned it down um

so you know if you do why do you turn it down

uh because the business is going like that right um and we set expectations around a certain level that we would sell the business so like there's an actual number that we want to hit which is slight we're slightly off

um and because i've been on a journey with these investors and we don't i don't need to sell the business but keep riding it yeah keep writing it and just hit that number and then we'll probably do the deal

but but imagine getting 35 years worth of profit in one year like in one go like it's life-changing so um

so you can have you can have these kind of exits um that are

you know, profound.

And all you have to do is prove that the team won't leave.

Here's the org chart, that the finance, the contracted revenue is going to keep contracted, and that you have proprietary assets.

And if you've got those three things, you then can basically put those into a set of documents.

And once again, going back to the 30, the 30 people, you pitch that business 30 times and you're going to sell it for a life-changing amount of money at that point.

So, yeah, it's pretty, pretty cool.

It's pretty wild.

Is there a difference between building a business to sell and building a business to generate cash flow?

Yeah.

So a lifestyle business, a lifestyle boutique is normally built around the brand of the founder, the key person of influence.

The revenue, you want to keep the team at about 8 to 12,

never 13.

It's geared towards fun, freedom, flexibility, and cash flow.

And

it tends to be that it's never worth selling.

And the reason I say that is because when someone crunches the numbers, they go, well, it is founder dependent.

Like it's largely built on you.

The proprietary assets are mostly linked to you.

And then they give you a price of what, and they give you like a transition, 18-month transition plan.

And when you kind of look at the price and the transition plan, you go, meh, I'll just keep it.

So you go down the, you keep kind of dancing up against, oh, I could sell it to, it's not worth it.

I think it was public information, but Stephen Bartlett got offered 100 million.

But it was just too, it just wasn't a good enough deal.

So it's like, okay, I can do this on my own.

So anyway, these are lifestyle businesses.

Then there are performance businesses, minimum 30 people, minimum 10 million of revenue,

and subscription revenue

and proprietary assets.

And these are the ones that do sell.

So I would say 90% of people should build a lifestyle business and only a small percentage of people should build a performance business because a performance business is hard.

It's a black belt move.

You're going to have a, you're having this experience, right?

So, your experience is Modern Wisdom is a lifestyle business.

Newtonic.

And this one is going to be a performance business.

Fast forward two years from now, you're going to have a board of directors.

You'll have someone who's like ex-Pepsi on the board or whatever,

some Coca-Cola guy will join the board.

You'll have 30-plus employees.

You'll have recurring revenue contracts with all your distribution chain.

You'll have all these proprietary assets online.

And then along will come Coca-Cola or

Pepsi, and they'll offer you an amount of money that will completely change your life and blow your mind.

And that will be

like a moment.

It's interesting with stuff like this.

I don't know whether it's growing up as a business person.

I don't know whether it's

being a little bit less personally associated with the brand.

I wonder whether it's being less personally involved with the day-to-day operations.

But, you know, if you ask a lot of people about, you know, would you sell this business?

And I think they'd struggle because their identity is very much wrapped up in that thing.

Modern Wisdom, for instance,

there's no amount of money.

Yeah, well, that is so personal.

It's an extension of you.

Of course.

But I think in the past, something like this might have felt like that too.

And I'm trying to work out, I'm trying to decipher what it is about certain projects that allow people to treat them more rationally with a little bit more objectivity and what it is about other ones that has a, you know, a real sense of personal belonging to it.

The,

well, once you've had one exit, you realize how quickly you get over it.

So if you've had, if you've sold a business, you realize that, oh my goodness, what was once deeply personal extension of myself, what was once my baby gets sold.

And the deal is done.

And then I move on with my life and I'm really happy I sold it.

And you go, oh, okay.

Like, I get that I can actually have separation.

When you have real kids, when you actually have kids, it changes the game completely because you no longer place that level of attachment to a business.

You just, you completely, you have these other entities in your life that have real paternal energy wrapped up in them.

And then businesses can never even get close to that.

So

you can never feel that way about a business once you've had kids.

A business is just a way of.

Do you think people, I talk a lot on the show about

slow life strategy, sort of extended adolescence, as it's known, people

moving into houses more slowly, people getting into relationships, starting families more slowly, lower birth rates, stuff like that.

Do you think that

businesses are surrogate families for a lot of people in that regard?

There's definitely misplaced maternity and paternity energy on all sorts of things.

So you see people who, the way they treat their dogs and the way they treat their career, the way they treat their business, that is the same sort of biological drive that would normally go into kids.

And you see that a lot these days.

So it's, you know,

it's funny because when as a father, I look at a lot of that stuff and I can immediately say that's misplaced paternity.

Like you literally, you're treating that like you should be treating kids.

So yeah, definitely.

We've hacked our normal biorhythms with technology.

Like it's not normal that someone in their 20s could travel the world and go to all the different countries and see all the different people and have access to all the different things straight away, straight out of the gate, and that the brain has access to all of that stuff.

And it's totally natural as a response to go, why would I just ruin that with children and a mortgage and like all these kind of life markers that used to be meaningful 50 years ago?

Why would I do that?

I'm going to push that down the pipes.

So that's a normal reaction to having amazing opportunities available.

And then we go, oh, wait a second.

Now I do want to tick off those boxes.

I need to rush and get it done, right?

So who's available?

Does anyone want kids?

Anyone want to have a few?

So then you then kind of have to juggle it.

But like, it's only this stuff is only happening because of technology, you know, this weird life that we're now in.

How do you ensure that running a business is fun?

How do you ensure that you enjoy the process?

Because I imagine that you've worked with people and seen people and maybe at some points been that person yourself where you have reached a string of miserable successes

and in retrospect you think well I got the outcome but the actual process of getting there was

kind of sucked a bit and then you think well I've got the money but like does that compensate for the amount of time that wasn't enjoyable what what are the things that predict running a business is an enjoyable experience yeah there's type one and type two fun so type one fun is enjoyable in the moment and type two fun is enjoyable when you look back on it.

So, um, and you need both.

So like type one fun is being at a party.

Uh type

two fun

is

doing six to nine months work on a particular difficult thing and then getting it done and achieving a launch or achieving an exit, for example, might be horrible to like selling a company might be six months of really difficult conversations and difficult decisions.

And then you look back on it and go, that That was such an amazing, life-changing thing.

So it's good to recognize there's type one and type two.

So you say, Well, which one am I lacking?

Am I doing something that's meaningful that I will look back on and be really proud?

In which case, I need more type one fun in my life.

So then build in type one fun.

So take the team out often, have slow starts to the morning, incorporate

travel into what you do.

You know, take the team to comedy clubs.

Just

do those sorts of things.

Allow yourself the gift of, well, allow yourself a bit of love language.

Like, for example, the other day I spoke to an entrepreneur who he's been working in his business for three years.

He's never taken more than $2,500 a month out.

The business is like climbing up into the 500 grand sort of a year territory.

And I said to him, I said, did you play Nintendo as a kid?

And he said, yeah.

And I said, can you imagine imagine what it would be like if you started Mario and you have to play 15 levels before you discover one box that has a coin in it?

Like, you're not going to stick with that.

Like,

Mario works because all the way along, ding, ding, ding, ding.

It's like you've just starved yourself of dopamine.

I said to him, you know, what's something that you want?

to like, what's something that for you symbolizes success?

He said, oh, this particular watch.

I said, well, how much is the watch?

And he's like, $150,000.

I said, well, that's ridiculous.

That's a sell-the-company watch.

I said, let me look at the watch.

And he showed me this picture of the watch.

I said, okay, it looks a bit similar to this IWC watch, which is similar.

And we had a look at that one.

And I said, this one's four grand.

Right.

I said, what kind of watch do you have now?

He's like, no watches.

I'm like, so you've created a game where you only feel like you win when you get to the point where $150,000 watch is doable.

So let's make the game more fun where you get a four grand watch along the way it's and it's very similar to the one you want.

And as soon as he was like, oh, cool.

And he says to me, well, what do I have to do for the watch?

I say, well, let's do these five things, which you can do in the next like five weeks.

And if you, if you do this, this, and this, if you sign that up, then you get to buy the watch.

And he's like, oh, this is great.

So suddenly it was amazing to watch the lights come back on.

Like he went from,

like not

like like being really down in the dumps.

And I'm like, well, you've put yourself here because you've created a game that feels unwinnable let's create a game where you get a win in a few weeks from now um

so so like his love language was obviously a gifts but it could be that your love language is getting a massage or it could be that your love language is doing some travel um you know so you've got to figure out what would keep you in the game um so that would be type one enjoyment um or the opposite could be true Your business might be giving you a lot of type one enjoyment.

You're a nightclub party promoter, but you don't think you're going to look back and be proud of yourself.

There's a lot of hangovers going on.

So then you go, okay, I need to link this to a charity.

I need to raise money for a cause.

I need to use my influence to do something of great meaning.

I want to partner up with a foundation.

I want to,

you know, use some of the money that we've got to do a fundraiser or, you know, this, this sort of thing.

And then you start saying, okay, in what ways could I bring in type two fun?

Like where I feel like I'm playing a more meaningful game.

I'm making a dent in the universe.

I'm doing something of great importance, something that I'll look back when I'm 80 and say, I'm really glad I did that.

That was, I'm really proud of that.

Yeah.

I wonder

where most people's problems lie.

I wonder whether most people are bereft of type 1 or type 2 fun.

Kids is a getting back to kids.

Kids immediately gives you a diminishment of type one fun in the early days, but it gives you a lot of type two.

Suddenly you have the most meaningful thing in the world.

You no longer have any quest for meaning.

You now have a meaning.

When you think about where you're going to be at 80, you're going to be talking to your kids and your grandkids and, you know, and all of that sort of stuff.

When you think about what...

what you want like want more than anything else it's to see that they do well in life and that you know that those things happen so you suddenly get this new arc of vision for your life and the importance of different things.

And you're every single day doing something that feels incredibly meaningful, raising kids.

So if you've got kids, you need to bring type one fun in because you've already automatically kind of got a type two

thing.

And,

you know, if you don't, you need to look at legacy stuff.

So it's like, can I use my business as a force for good in the world?

Can I partner up with a charity?

Can I launch my my own foundation?

You know,

is there a message I want to see in the world spread?

So it's, it's, yeah.

What

has been your experience watching founders and watching yourself?

I think a lot of people that are career-driven,

they have big aspirations monetarily, commercially, in terms of their status, they look at the prospect of starting a family as a governor, a speed limiter, they're going to put on their capacity to do that stuff.

What's been your experience?

Total opposite.

Total opposite.

My marriage and my kids are rocket fuel.

Like, you know, that my life really took off when I had kids because, well, look, for very practical reasons, when you've got kids, you can just say no to whatever you want to say no to because you can.

It's a great excuse.

It's a great excuse.

And you can just say, look, I'm so sorry.

I'd love to come to your party, but I've got issues going on with the kids at home and blah, blah, blah.

Oh, fair enough.

So you can just say no to the stuff you

don't want to do.

You also just have like a biological inbuilt meaning system that has lasted the test of time.

So like all decisions go through the filter of is this building,

is this, is this actually putting roof overhead?

Is this actually building long-term success for the family?

Is this, am I, am I acting in a way that I'd be proud if my kids saw, you know, these decisions that I'm making now?

If there was a video camera in the room, would I be proud of

the decisions that I'm making?

So

you're no longer thinking short term, you think in long term.

The data is pretty clear on this as well.

I think

the average high net worth person has got three kids.

It's very correlated.

There's not this huge number of people who didn't have kids who are now massively successful because of that.

It's actually incredibly rare to find wildly successful people who don't have a family.

I wonder whether that's a bit of ballast against the

tides, the buffeting that you're going to end up having.

Time will tell, but it's incredibly stabilizing.

Look, here's an interesting thing for me from my point of view.

I just flew out from the UK to LA and then here in Austin.

And so I'm away from my family for three weeks

because I'm going

on a little mini tour and whatnot.

God, it's incredibly fucking lonely.

Like, it's really weird.

It's quiet.

It's like you, as a dad, I imagine, oh, this is what I want.

I want a quiet room and I just have some time to myself.

Man, that gets old real quick.

It's damn, this is scarily lonely.

I don't like this at all.

This feels, this feels like, you know, like I feel

a little bit at a loss.

I'm at a loose end here.

You know, so

yeah,

I find that this is a really good little wake-up call as to how much it's it's an orientation towards,

you know, there's something that orientates me towards the bigger goals in life.

How do you think about

developing your mindset or the kind of mindsets that are useful in as much as resilience against difficulty, insults from running a business, from, you know, having your self-worth tied to this commercial enterprise, you know, people, I imagine lots of people will get kicked out of the game by going bankrupt, running out of liquid capital, you know, starting a business that was never going to be profitable in the first place.

But some non-insignificant number of people, too, will end up leaving the game because they just can't take it.

Yeah.

Um, I think the US is uh celebrates a bit of failure, which I love about US culture.

You know, they love that, they love someone who just tried.

Um, whereas Britain, British is a little bit more like, ha,

we'll never let you forget that.

Right.

Yeah.

So

what I have, what I've discovered from having friends who have had businesses that have failed is

I've got this friend of mine called Jeremy who has had multiple businesses.

He's now getting close to being a billionaire, but he had a business failure when he was in his 20s.

And he fought it and fought it and fought it.

And then his business went bankrupt.

I think it went insolvent insolvent or whether bankrupt or something like that.

And he said that it was the weirdest thing in the world.

He woke up the next day and he felt relief.

And he said, you know what?

He said, it was like I was balancing on a tightrope and then the tightrope was only six inches off the ground.

He said, when I actually fell, there was nowhere to fall.

It was fine.

Like it was like, oh, okay, I'm fine.

The business is now closed.

I can go do another business or I can join another team or I can get on with it.

And he says, you know, no one, no one actually is thinking that much about you and your life.

For a week, someone might go, oh, did you hear Chris shut down that business?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, it didn't work out.

Oh, yeah, what happened?

Oh, apparently they couldn't sign up enough customers.

Oh, that sucks.

Anyway.

Like, you know, so that's the metaphor that I really like to share with people, which is Jeremy's metaphor.

You're standing on a tightrope, but the tightrope's only six inches off the ground.

Our grandparents, your grandparents, my grandparents, or great-grandparents, I mean, they fought wars.

You know, failure to them was getting shoved to the front lines.

You know,

my grandfather was a Palestinian policeman in World War II, at the end of World War II, and he was in right police.

And like, he literally was driving through this particular area, swapped driving positions, and then was sitting down.

And the other guy was like driving and 15 minutes later got shot in the head.

And it's like, had he not switched driving positions, he would have been shot.

And

I wouldn't be here.

And, you know, like we've become a little bit detached from the fact that our ancestors fought proper problems.

You know, here we are a little bit worried about, oh, I launched a YouTube channel and it didn't, you know, it didn't get a thousand views on that video.

you know, or I tried to launch a product and, you know, I wanted to get 150 on the waiting list and I only got 147.

Dan said it had to be 150, so I had to shut it down.

And it's like, you're not getting shot at.

You know, you like, let's keep this in perspective.

A great perspective is this idea of how many, what percentage of your ancestors would trade places with you in a heartbeat?

All of them.

The answer is 100%.

Every ancestor you have, if they could see your opportunities in your life and

even if they saw your difficult, most difficult day, they'd be like, let me in, tap out, let me, let me swap.

You come back here and fight tuberculosis.

Yeah, it's funny.

You know, we often hear about

it's the objectively the best time to ever be alive, but it's funny to couch it in your own lineage to think about, oh, yeah, but what about your

great-great-grandparents?

What would they think about it?

Not some random

caveman from 10,000 years ago.

Like, what would they think specifically about this situation?

Yeah, I often think about that

and how far things change.

One thought I have, which is weird, is the idea of trying to explain to my grandfather what a personal trainer is.

So, because I have a personal trainer.

It's like, well, grandpa, I don't actually want to go to the gym.

So I have to pay a guy to meet me there.

And then he counts how many times I lift a heavy thing.

And then he tells me I've done a good job.

And then he tells me what to lift next and tells me if I'm lifting it correctly.

And then I pay him a lot of money and then I go home.

And he's like, what are you talking about?

What on earth is this?

Why would you do that?

Yep.

You know?

Yeah,

it's funny, man, you know, trying to have a little bit of perspective on the luxury or opulence that you have, even as, you know, someone that's still on the ladder or the climb, wherever it is that you are on your journey.

The more that I give myself that perspective, the more that I do inversion, George, who's just landed in town,

I don't know whether he still does this, but he's doing it for a long time.

Once a month, he laid in bed and did a really, really hardcore meditation that he had no legs.

Just to be like, okay, what would life be like if I had no legs?

Okay, so I've got to get up.

I got to go to the bathroom.

Like, how do I get to, how do I get to the bathroom?

Like, what's the way that I get to?

Do you know I've got a mate of mine who woke up with all four amputee, all four legs and arms amputated?

No.

Yeah, I've got this mate of mine.

I would love to introduce you.

He'd be a great guest.

His name is Pedro.

Went out clubbing, went out to a nightclub, got sick, like totally started feeling this heat rush, passed out, woke up in hospital to this horrific smell and like looked down and he's got all four limbs amputated.

What happened?

He got this, to not, I forget what it's called, but basically it's this virus that once it sets in, if you don't amputate, it takes over your whole body and you die.

And your toes and the fingers turn black and it just like within 48 hours, it starts creeping up and your skin starts going it goes from your extremities coming out of game of thrones yeah it's it's quite it's got a i'd have to look it up what its name is but it's like this um this particular very nasty virus that he contracted and wow um and they the doctor who was in charge said this is what we have to do um so above the elbow above the knee um and he was 19 and just boom boom boom boom boom so all four limbs and he's laying in bed and he

like everyone's crying and sympathetic and like all this sort of stuff and i think a few weeks in and like obviously his brothers and like they now get on with their life they go back to work and his mum is now looking after him and he's just sitting there watching television all the time

and he has this vision that he told me about where he saw himself looking down a pathway of either this is the greatest thing that ever happened to me or this is the worst thing that ever happened to me.

And if I don't make that decision today,

I by default go down the worst path.

And he makes this thing where he says to himself, this is the greatest thing that ever happened to me.

I can't change it.

So I'm going to make this amazing.

So fast forward to today, he runs a chain of rehabilitation clinics, seven-figure business.

He's in his 30s.

He's married to like this beautiful woman who's a GP.

First baby has just been born.

He snowboards.

He drives.

Like he's an entrepreneur.

He's written a best-selling book.

The guy's unbelievable.

And he's also like the most hilariously cool guy you've ever met.

Like it's wild too, being driven around by a quadruple amputee.

It's a little bit like Waymo for the first time.

Wow.

His name is Pedro Pinmenta.

So

I'll put you in touch if ever you want to.

It's a cool story.

Yeah, he sounds great.

Doing that inversion stuff, dude, realizing just how different life could be, and then also realizing that whether things go well or whether things go badly, your happiness is going to get back to the same point that you're probably at now.

Kind of

out of set.

You said on one of your recent videos, you're pretty hard on yourself, right?

Yeah.

Do you think that's because you have a low thermostat when it comes to happiness?

Yeah, I think I have a disposition toward negative affect for sure.

That's definitely.

Always?

Oh, you always have that.

Well, I can, oh, have I always had it?

Because objectively, you got it pretty good.

That's true.

That's true indeed.

But you have to look at, you know,

I have this little bit I say about how you should look at successful people with more pity than envy because what is it that's driven them to do this thing?

Well, most people, in my experience, are driven by fear of insufficiency, not a desire for greatness.

They're running away from something they don't want and that they fear as opposed to running towards something they can't.

Yeah, filling a void.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think typically that's the case.

And that's not to say for everything.

And, you know, objectively, it is way, way, way better to be successful and rich and, you know, be able to afford health care and go on holiday and do stuff like that than it is to be poor.

But when you look at, you know, real sort of outlier performers, a lot of the time they're driven by stuff that, that is a little bit more sort of dark.

But yeah, I can be very tough on myself and it comes in sort of waves.

I think one of the challenges you have is...

a little bit of gold medalist syndrome that you have a big goal that you're working toward.

And then when you think that this is going to be a thing and you have all of the dopamine, you have all of the positive,

and then you go, Okay, well,

what do I do now?

What's next?

What's next?

What's next?

And there's sort of two ways to deal with that problem.

One is continue to find nexts to what to what,

and the other one is to realize that the what next game itself is fundamentally broken and to try and transcend that.

And uh, I'm torn between the two uh pretty regularly.

But yeah, I think I can be tough on myself, I can drive myself forward to do uh really great things.

The hard thing with your

world too it's so quantifiable so like there's all these metrics that you would never have had to live to live with in any other time in history like

you on any given day can see how many subscribers how many views uh you know how many sales like there's just the dashboard is there all the time and if you think about it any other time in history when would you have had that like minute by minute feedback on how you're doing well what you want is a dashboard for the things that you truly care about.

Yeah.

You know, how peaceful were you today?

How many moments was your mind resting where your feet are?

How

connected do you feel to your friends around you?

You've got to work at that too, though.

Like, you've really got to be conscious about that.

Yeah.

Well, I'm balls deep in CBT at the moment for that exact reason to see, okay, how much can I step in and sort of purposely reprogram

that this works.

Getting back to the technology thing,

you've got to realize too that for the last 15 years, the smartest people on the planet have been hired with one goal in mind, which is to optimize you for time on their website.

Get you to click on ads.

Getting you to click shit.

So, people who previously would have launched rockets to Mars are now optimizing algorithms so that you spend an extra 17 minutes on TikTok every day.

Like, that's that is like, and in the same way that you cannot beat

an AI chess player,

Like your brain cannot beat an AI algorithm designed to get you to watch TikTok videos.

You can only either have it on your phone or delete it off your phone.

There is no way around this.

Yeah, avoidance is way easier than resistance.

We're going to have a society that goes in two directions.

We're going to have, because AI gives you the power to create or consume more than you intended.

And we're going to have a society where a bunch of people consume way more than they intended and their life becomes a very

dystopian because of that.

And we have another group of people who create way more than they intended and their life becomes like unbelievably opulent as a result.

You know, so you'll, you'll, you're going to have like plenty of people who make a million dollars a month and plenty of people who need like UBI just to survive and not die.

And AI is going to bifurcate.

Yeah, I think.

looping back to what we spoke about at the very beginning and

this maybe rising sort of socialist-light

tenor that we see in the UK, maybe it's going to come out in the US.

I think this sort of capitalist American dream thing is very, very strong over here.

So, I wonder whether it would catch hold of

quite the same way.

Karl Marx came off the back of the Engels pause.

So, all of social, the origin story of socialism is a technology breakthrough that benefited those who could use the Engels pause.

So, Engels Pause was from 1790 to 1840.

All the economic gains went to industrialists, and all the people who were from the farms basically saw no economic gains for 50 years.

So you got the bifurcation of society, Charles Dickens, all that sort of stuff.

And then, boom, you get Karl Marx, Gary Stevenson.

And Gary Stevenson, if I take a list of Karl Marx quotes and put them up against Gary Stevenson quotes, they're the same.

It's the same shit that resonated in 1840.

I wonder whether.

So, the thing that a lot of the UBI and a lot of the sort of socialist-light

policies look at that I don't think fully capture the human experience, and this was shown out.

You see, there's a big study done on what happens when you actually just pay people.

They did a UBI sandbox, a couple of them actually, and the results came out probably about a year ago, maybe a little bit less than a year ago.

And

the outcomes that people had, even including the health, didn't improve that much.

Really, really didn't.

I'll send you the studies to have a look at.

One of the problems I think, especially when it looks at life satisfaction and happiness, is that the reason that humans value money,

first and foremost, yes, you need to be able to pay for things.

You don't want to be starving on the street.

You don't have to steal food.

You don't not be able to pay for the medical stuff like that.

But even when that's still a problem, money itself is a status indicator.

And if you get money without the associated status that comes with it,

it's the same reason that no guy flexes the number of OnlyFans goals that he subscribes to, because anybody with the price of a cheeseburger per month can subscribe to it too.

That would be a fun flex.

It's the same reason I think that

AI girlfriends and robot girlfriends will never be high status.

It fundamentally misses, and I'm totally open to being wrong, and I probably will be.

But my current working theory is that it'll work for guys maybe that are like super tactile in the way that they need to It'll be like porn.

It'll be something that they do but don't want to talk about

the reason that men like to be in public relationships in that way is that it shows that they've been selected of all of the men and there were many more men available than just this one.

I was chosen.

I was chosen.

Look at what that says about me.

You see this, if you look at the groups of people who do have a form of UBI now, trust fund kids.

Trust fund kids are notoriously miserable.

They're the highest, one of the highest risks for drugs.

Drugs, gambling,

all the vices.

Oh, hang on.

Is it the working class, underclass kids that have it?

It's like, no, no, no.

I have known some trust fund kids in my, in my years.

As soon as we get close, oh my goodness, does Pandora's box open up?

Like, what do I do with my life?

I'm lost.

I'm dark.

I'm depressive.

I'm anxious.

I'm lost.

You know, like just,

and these are, these are kids who are like one of them who I'm thinking about from a family that's 600 million, I think.

You know, every month there's millions flying around.

The family has a plane and a boat, multiple houses.

Miserable, miserable,

dark because it's like, well, what am I meant to do?

And how am I meant to handle this?

I heard Eddie Hearn on a podcast and somebody asked him about, you know, if you could go back, what would you change?

How would you do things differently?

And, you know,

what are your sort of regrets?

And one of his biggest regrets, I didn't realize the way that his

boxing promotion had come about.

I didn't realize his dad was a legend in the sport.

He was.

He says, you know what?

I just wish that dad hadn't done it because I never got to do it first.

Yeah.

Well, this is the problem.

If you are the son of someone great.

If you succeed, it's because you were their son.

And if you fail, then you're a real idiot for not succeeding because you were their son.

You can't win.

Like Sam Branson, he's living a very difficult life because realistically...

Beat Richard.

How do you beat Richard Branson at anything?

He's an icon.

And it's like, if you do something great,

well, it's because Richard Branson's your dad.

And if you don't do something great, well, then.

I wonder how much of that explains Elon's kids, at least I think one of them, maybe a few of them, are pretty rebellious publicly.

Totally.

They've got to carve.

I'm going to make my own path and my own path is going to be diametrically affected.

It has to be detro.

Yeah.

Or else,

how do I...

I can't win this game that he's playing.

playing, so I'm just going to break it.

Well, at least he has many samples to choose from now.

Is he up to 14?

Yeah, yeah, he's slowly reversing population decline.

Uh, dude, you're you're fucking awesome, man.

It's been great.

You're really, really, really great.

Uh, where should people go?

Then we're going to check out everything that you do.

Yeah, so my company is called scoreapp.com, which is our software, um, and dent.global, which is our online entrepreneur accelerator.

Um, check out my books, um,

connect with me on X or LinkedIn

or Insta.

Yeah, And let's continue the conversation about entrepreneurship and this crazy fun way of expressing yourself in the world.

Heck yeah.

Daniel, I appreciate you, man.

Cheers, mate.

Ooh, made it to the end of the Daniel Priestly episode.

Well, Joe Hudson, who is kind of like an embodied, emotional business coach type guy, similar to Daniel, a bit different, really great.

Fantastic episode with him, which you should watch.

It's just that.

Go on.