How Anyone Can Develop The Mindset Of A Multi-Million Dollar Entrepreneur - Daniel Priestley
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By the way, in case you haven't heard, my brand new book, Feel Good Productivity, is now out. It is available everywhere books are sold. And it's actually hit the New York Times and also the Sunday Times bestseller list. So thank you to everyone who's already got a copy of the book. If you've read the book already, I would love a review on Amazon. And if you haven't yet checked it out, you may like to check it out. It's available in physical format and also ebook and also audiobook everywhere books are sold.

Wanting to have a side hustle, wanting to have this is all about your own personal needs, which are irrelevant to the market. The market does not care. Daniel has written five books all about entrepreneurship and business and stuff. In particular, Oversubscribed is the book that I have most highlighted on Kindle out of any book I have ever read. And his whole library of books, essentially starting with The Entrepreneur Revolution, gives a very legit and systematic overview

playbook for how you can start the business from basically wherever you are with a full time job without having to give too much time to it. As an entrepreneur, you're kind of asking the question, what is the problem I'm trying to solve in the world? There's a group of people out there. They've got an unmet need. They're frustrated. There's something that they're not happy about. And then I'm going to come along and solve that holistically for them. We also talk a little bit about Daniel's backstory from how at the age of 19, he got a job at a startup.

Started his own company at 21, became a multimillionaire by the age of like 23. Super, super interesting stuff. I hope you enjoyed this interview as much as I did.

Well, Daniel, thank you so much for being here. It's really nice to see you in the flesh because your book, Oversubscribed, is the most highlighted book I have ever highlighted of all time on Kindle of like hundreds of books in my library. Amazing. Basically, almost every other paragraph in this, I was like, oh my God, this is so good. Just select all. Just select all, yeah. And there was a bit at the end where you say, hey, one of these chapters I wasn't even planning to include in the book, then it's up to you to figure out which one. I was always like, but all of it.

All of it is just sick. Anyway, you've written a bunch of these books, Entrepreneur Revolution, Scorecard Marketing, Key Person of Influence, 24 Assets. Key Person of Influence is also quite influential amongst the sort of creator space around building a business around

around an individual. Personal brand, yeah. Yeah, all that kind of stuff. But before we dive into all the business stuff, I'd love to open with how did we end up here, you and I talking to each other? You were from Australia originally? What was the backstory? Yeah, I kind of did retirement first. I grew up in a beach location called Malulaba in Australia, which is just a beautiful beach and a small town. And I

I had the opportunity when I was 19 years old to join a startup. And basically I joined this startup when there's three of us around the table, there's no bank account, there's no business name. It's just, we're going to be starting a startup. This guy who's 37 years old, who's previously had businesses, he's going to be launching something. And I'm 19 and I'm like, okay, I'm joining something. Um, cause I just dropped out of university. And, um,

And it was really exciting. And it was like, oh, wow, okay, what's going to happen? And then over the next two years, it really took off fast. So we went from, you know, zero to I think six million in two years. We went to 60 people. So from a beachside location to 60 people in a city Melbourne offices. Wow. What was the startup? So it was a marketing agency. And it was very much focused on event marketing.

Event marketing. Yeah. So, well, what- Like when Tony Robbins puts on an event, he hires a marketing agency to get people to go. Filling events. Yeah. Bums on seats. Yeah. And partnering with different people and brands to fill their events. Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne.

So that was this exciting first start I had to being in business. And I had this amazing relationship with the founder, John, where I was always under his wing and learning and learning. And he would recommend books and he'd recommend these crazy challenges for me to complete. So I had to keep a journal. I had to stop watching news. You know, no news. I had to carry $1,000 in my pocket. There was all these kind of weird things that he got me to do over the period of building that business.

And then two years in, I go to John and I say, I would really like some shares in the business because I was here at the beginning and I've set up this subdivision, this regional division, and I'm doing all the right things. And I caught him at the wrong time. I remember it vividly. He was loading boxes into the back of his car and I'm asking him about shares in the business. And he says, Dan, if you want shares in the business, go start your own. So...

So I did. At 21 years old, I went and started my own company. I replicated everything I'd learned from John and I basically copied the business model I knew. It was the only thing I knew. I went and launched my own business and it took off and it went really fast growth. So you launched your own marketing agency? Yeah, event marketing. And basically the whole business model was lead generation for companies that want lead generation and introduction events.

What is lead generation for the unfamiliar? Yeah. So lead generation is where you get someone to signal that they're interested in doing business with you. Right? So if you think about it like a financial planner, they could try and sell financial planning and like literally

say, here's how much it is. Or they could say, take an online scorecard and fill that in. And then people, that's a signal of interest. And that person is a lead. And another way to generate a lead is through an event. So you could put on a weekly event called an introduction to financial planning or an introduction to building wealth for retirement. So that is what I talk about in the book as a product for prospects or a lead generation product.

And so my first business was all about creating these introduction events. And what we'd do is we'd partner with established businesses and they were rightly focused on their core business, but they didn't really have a lot of time for focusing on lead generation. So we would do these introduction events.

an introduction to, you know, whatever it was, introduction to blank. And we'd run these weekly events up and down Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne. Like in real life. Yeah, in real life. Back before Zoom. Back before YouTube. Real life events. Yeah. Like this was before MySpace. Yeah. So we're going way back. So we would just have these live events running. In 2006,

No, 2005, sorry. I did 174 live events that year. We did 10.7 million in revenue. And it was year three. Okay. How does a company like this make money?

So several different ways. So we would get paid sometimes per lead that we would generate. Sometimes we'd get paid per sale that would come through. The difference was, is that most agencies love to do fee-for-service. Pay me 10 grand and then pay me this per week retainers and all that. What I did, which I'd learned from John,

was a risk to reward deal. So I would actually take the risk on running these introduction events and I would profit share or revenue share with the companies. So my very first day launching my business was a newspaper ad that was, I think, $7,000 for a quarter page ad. I put it on my credit card. I had no way of paying for that other than if leads came in and we made sales.

So that was the launch of my business on a credit card, taking out a quarter page ad. So really scary kind of stuff. How did you have the conviction to do that? Like even I wouldn't do that. And I think I'm a fairly risk-taking kind of guy. Well, it didn't feel super risky because I'd been doing it nonstop for two years with John.

And I had actually just before leaving his business, I'd set up a regional events marketing business. So they were doing Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne. And I started with Tasmania and a place called Geelong and Bendigo and Ballarat and all these kind of weird places that are a few hours drive out of a major city.

And I had basically been placing ads in their newspapers and running introduction presentations, introduction events, and I'd been through the motions before.

non-stop for two years. So for me, you were pretty seasoned at the thing. I felt like, yeah, I was going through motions that were familiar, but oh my goodness, it felt different at the time when you're putting money on your own credit card versus the boss's credit card. Okay. So the question on this front, a lot of young people want to start their own businesses and

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

So they end up being funneled down the big corporate path. Now, you can start a business that doesn't exist. You can go to a big corporate. So in the UK, there are 7,000 large companies that have more than 250 employees.

There's 5.5 million businesses in the middle that already exist but don't have 250 employees. And the vast majority of them have 10 people or less, right? So it's hugely stacked between 2 and 10 people is the small business landscape.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was something called fax broadcasting at the time. Fax broadcasting. Okay. Let's not even go. I'd have to even begin by telling your audience what a fax machine is. Just a quick message from one of our sponsors and we'll get right back to the episode. And this episode is very kindly brought to you by Heights. Heights is a brain care smart supplement. It is two capsules that you take every day. I've been taking it for the last 12 months and it contains over 20 evidence-based micronutrients that you need to keep your brain and body healthy.

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You as the marketing agency are trying to... You're putting that in a newspaper being like, do you have 20 grand to spare? Have you thought about starting a franchise? Well, no, we would do... See, that's the mistake. So what most big companies do is they promote their core business. Do you want to buy a franchise? Okay. So that's not what you want to do. No, what we want to do is we want to create an introduction that is a low-risk first step. And it's not necessarily about...

I'll give you an example from when we worked with a financial planning company. They were marketing, do you want financial planning? What we would do is run events on, do you want to understand the current market? Do you want to know what the current trends are? Do you want to hear from a financial planning expert to explain what's going on in the current market? An introduction event is just a low-risk first step.

to introduce the idea. Now, anyone who turns up to that event, clearly they have an interest in solving a problem, but what we're not doing is saying, do you want to buy my stuff? Yeah. Okay. So you give them essentially a load of free value at the event or like very cheap value. And then some proportion of those will be like, oh, by the way, this... Exactly. So, yeah, by the way, if you would like to talk to one of our financial planners, there's a diary up the back of the room and you can book a meeting one-to-one and just...

head up and put your name in the diary and there's all the slots are highlighted that you can go and just fill your name literally with a pen and paper.

And that was a big part of what we did, right? So it was putting on an interesting speaker and getting 50 to 100 people to come along to that and then inviting people to put their name in the diary. And then you either get paid based on how many people put their name in the diary or how many of those then convert to a paid customer for the financial planner? Yep. Yep. So we would do a combination of success fees based on leads or sales. Wow.

Wow. Okay. So when you were- And mind you, we're going way back in time. I'm 41 now. So you start this lead generation marketing business and you said you were doing sort of 10 million plus? We got to 10.7 million. Yeah. Within how long? Three years. Bloody hell. How did that feel as a 24 year old at the time doing that kind of business? It was pretty wild. It was a lot of stress. It was, I mean, we had a huge team. Well, when I say huge team, we had about-

20 of us working out of a massive seven bedroom house. I was 24, I was buying a brand new BMW X5, which I wasn't able to really even insure and things like that. I traveled constantly, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne. I stayed in five-star hotels and ate in Michelin star restaurants because we were taking clients out and all of those kinds of things. Sometimes I would be staying in Sydney and

wouldn't bother checking out of the hotel because I was ducking down to Melbourne for one night. It was crazy. We were doing a million a month in sales and we were very profitable. It was a pretty amazing first start to life. One of the lessons I got from my first mentor, John,

is that success doesn't have to, it can happen quite quickly, right? It doesn't have to be this long road that actually if you tap into a trend, you can push the door and it can fling right open. So a lot of the message that entrepreneurs get is that, oh, you've got to really grind it out and you've got to crawl across glass and then you can make $1 and then you can make $10. And we did a couple of million in the first year with John and then we're doing 6 million in year two. So

It was in my head that it can happen quite quickly. Okay. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah, because that very much is the prevailing entrepreneur narrative. And that's certainly the narrative I peddle when it comes to creators and YouTubers and stuff. Compounding. Yeah, compounding and long-term growth. And if you expect revenue within six months as a YouTuber, it's like, you might be kind of aiming for the wrong sorts of things. In what way is the entrepreneurship stuff different to that? Yeah.

So there are some businesses that are compounding businesses and there are businesses that are what's called a J curve. A J curve is where it loses money before it goes up. And that's the shape of the cash flow is the J, right? That's what the J stands for. It doesn't stand for anything that begins with J. It's the shape of losing money and then making money. So that's called a J curve business. And a J curve business a lot of the time is like technology. So let's say you spend a million dollars building something of technology

tech related and then you sell it for 10 pounds a month, $10 a month, right? I keep jumping between dollars and pounds. But you would have

have what's called a naturally occurring J curve. You've spent all this money to build something and now you've got someone paying $10 a month. Now you've got 10 people paying $10 a month. So now the J curve starts. And now you're compounding. Yeah. And hopefully you get to the point where, oh, when we hit 5,000 people, then we break even. And then when we hit 10,000, it's all profit. So that's the J curve. And the uptick of the J is what you're hoping for. That's why you're in it in the first place.

But you've got to get through the J. So that's a lot of business models and naturally occurring J curves, setting up a restaurant as a J curve. Like large expense to set it up and then you need to hit a certain threshold of customers to break even. Yeah, you've got to hit volumes. So a restaurant, the average spend might be $30 per person. So you've got to have a lot of people coming.

So that's a J-curve business. There are other businesses that are not necessarily J-curves. Like, for example, consulting. You could sign up one consulting client who spends 80 grand a year with you and you've got almost no overhead.

And straight away you're consulting and let's say you get four clients and now you're making hundreds of thousands and you have very little overhead and you might hire an assistant or you might do something like that. You might work on their site. So for example, I know people who are consultants to manufacturing companies and they optimize the manufacturing process and they actually look for what's called lean systems where

And they get paid hundreds of thousands to go and do manufacturing consulting. They work on site, very low overheads. That's not a J-curve business. Yeah, that's so interesting. So two thoughts on this. I think the business of being a content creator or doing the YouTube channel or whatever thing,

It's definitely a Jacob business. Even if you're not spending any money on it, it's definitely a Jacob in terms of the time because you're a massive, like sinking so much time into the thing before you hit the monetization threshold. And now all of those assets that you've spent years building up are now still compounding and then you get to stupid levels. But it's like people get disgruntled and discouraged because they're sinking in the time generally while they're a student or while they've got a full-time job and they're not seeing a return straight away. Whereas...

And I think it's a lot less... I listen to a bunch of business podcasts and I generally don't hear about non-J curve businesses. I've got a friend from university who does this manufacturing consulting for fashion companies because he's into AI and coding and stuff and loves fashion and understands how fashion supply chain works and gets stupidly large amounts of money for a single consulting arrangement. And he's just...

just making money. He doesn't have an audience. He's not trying to do the whole YouTube thing. He's just making money from day one. And you just don't hear about those sorts of businesses. And so people who are like, oh, I want to maybe start a business on the side or

automatically feel like, "Oh, I have to sink two years of free work into this thing before I can make money." Yeah. And you do if it's a J-curve, but not if it's not. So typically the difference is the sales process. So a J-curve business normally relies on almost a frictionless sale where people either do a free piece of content or they do a free trial or they sit down at a restaurant expecting to spend $30 or something like that. So it's fairly frictionless.

The non-J curve businesses normally have a sales process. So you're sitting down with a potential client and you're actually convincing them to part with a sizable chunk of cash. And normally it would be thousands to tens of thousands per sale.

And you need to generate leads and then you need to make the sale. So you have to sit down with that fashion business and say, look, here's how your current system works. Here's some of the best practices that you're leaving off the table. And you might sell an initial scope of work that is like fact find or something like that. And then you present that and you come back and now you're presenting a piece of work.

That can also turn into a boutique. So you could have three to 12 people working together, doing supply chain consulting together. And all of that, everyone can be making great money in those types of businesses. So anything that involves a sales process is normally a non-J curve business. Interesting. Where does a freelancer fit into this? Yeah. So a freelancer is self-employed. And

It's not a model that I think is a great model. So you're essentially chief cook and bottle washer. You're doing strategy and implementation and finance and scheduling and all of that sort of stuff. And essentially what you're doing is you're charging a premium because people don't have to commit to a long package. So what tends to work entrepreneurially

is to not get caught up as a freelancer selling your own labor. Let's just zoom out a little bit. The school system teaches us to be component labor. So when we go to school, the whole thing is about everything is based off the industrial revolution model and most people end up as a component in a larger system. So we get taught how to become a piece of component labor. So

When we freelance, we're essentially selling ourselves as component labor to someone else who has a bigger outcome in mind.

right? But we're just doing that ad hoc. Now, the trick about being an entrepreneur is to separate from the mindset of being component labor and to actually move across to being outcome focused and looking at what is the customer trying to get done? What does the customer want? Why is that customer buying this? What's the payoff for them? Radical empathy with the customer and then saying, I will build you a solution that you want and I will find the components that

whatever they are, and I'll put those together and sell you that. And it may well be you doing the thing at the start, but they don't have to know that? Well, you could potentially be a piece of labor. However, the better option is to have some expertise

such that you know how to organize other people's labor. So that you, like if you've got the knowledge of how, let's use this as example, right? If you've got the knowledge of how supply chains should function, you should be able to organize a team of three or four people who know how to optimize that and you should be able to select the right people. And then you're better off actually being the key person of influence up on stage telling stories,

winning the deals, writing a book about it, putting a podcast out there about it, and then having a team who deliver the actual outcome. But the trick is that you want to, as quick as possible, avoid being a component in somebody else's system and actually be someone who stands for an outcome and someone who's an expert in either talking about that outcome, selling that outcome, overseeing that outcome, putting together teams that know about that outcome, et cetera. And so-

Let's say, just to use a concrete example, I know a bunch of people who are interested in writing. They've maybe done English degrees or something. Maybe they've tried consulting for a year or two and freaking hate it. And they love the idea of, you know, live my dream remote digital nomad life, work from anywhere, type stuff on my laptop, become a freelance writer, would be how...

Oh, like the default path would be, I need to get a normal job. The next default path would be, I should become a freelance writer. But it sounds like, how would you be thinking about that to maybe think more entrepreneurially? So let's start with the downside. The downside is that that sounds lovely and we love thinking about doing the work. So the freelance writer loves the idea of sitting in Bali with the laptop and doing the freelance writing.

One of the issues is that in order to do the work we love, we have to win the work that we love. So now you're asking the question, well, okay, I know you can do the writing piece, but are you going to be able to win the significant number of clients necessary in order to do that?

Now, for most businesses, winning the clients is going to be 30, 40, 50% of the time. You're going to be constantly hustling for a client. So what you can do if you're a freelancer is you could try and find four or five companies that need regular work and you split your time between them. And really what you're hoping for is that each one pays a slight premium.

and they're not worried about your flexibility that you can work from Bali. So that's the total upside package that you're looking for. Maybe splitting your time between four. Yeah. And you're hoping for a retainer or something. So you've got a regular income coming in. And whereas you might've been paid 50 grand, if you split it up between several, you might get 60 or 70 grand, right? And you might get time flexibility or that sort of thing. So it's

It's okay. The downsides are significant. You don't have a real career path unless you invent one and you can easily lack motivation because you're not in an environment that's dictating a level of performance. You're having to create those elements yourself. You can get

caught up in things like finances and paying taxes and chasing invoices, all of those things, suddenly you realize that you've got all of the downsides of having a business without the upside scalability.

You've got all of the downsides of having a job without the security of a job. So freelancing to me is not necessarily a great idea because it comes with a lot of the downsides without the upsides. Okay. So using this writer example, how might they level up their thinking and think more entrepreneurially? Well, you could create a writing agency. You could create...

packages of content intellectual property that you've created that you can then resell and on sell you could create your own written assets which get used in any number of ways so you can create licensable assets so there is stuff like that the difference is though you have to stop thinking like a technician a technician is someone who's going to component labor they're going to

you know, do a job for money. You've got to start thinking about an entrepreneur, which is what problem am I trying to solve in the world? So it all starts as an entrepreneur, you're kind of asking the question, what is the problem I'm trying to solve in the world? Like there's a group of people out there

They've got an unmet need. They're frustrated. There's something that they're not happy about. And then I'm going to come along and solve that holistically for them. I'm going to come up with a full solution, full and remarkable solution for them. And that's going to solve that for them. And I'm going to organize labor, systems, IP, technology, all of that's going to be organized. And we're going to put that together. So... Yeah. So I'm not thinking...

I want to be a freelance writer. I'm thinking, what is the problem that I can solve? Well, the issue is if you're a freelance writer thinking about, I'm a freelance writer and here's what I want to do, you're essentially your own customer. You're thinking about your own needs and your own problems. And that's the opposite to where entrepreneurs need to think. Entrepreneurs need to park their own needs and their own problems in order to research what somebody else needs.

So in your example of going to this franchise or expo, realizing that, hey, there's 300 people out there, you, instead of thinking,

I want to be a lead gen person running events. You were thinking, what is the problem that these guys have and how can I build a business to solve that problem? Yeah. So I was marrying up a set of skills that I had acquired and a business model that I knew with looking at these people really clearly frustrated that we've paid all this money to come to this show and we're just surrounded by competitors. Okay. And so how...

What was your relationship to money like around that time, if you can remember? Age 19, you start working for this startup, you're earning a salary, and then suddenly you're making millions doing your own thing. Yeah. So as a university student, I was properly broke to the extent that I would

you know, go to the butcher and see if they had offcuts that were going cheap that day. And I would go to the veggie store and get a box of like horrible vegetables that were, you know, going like for $2 a box. I was a Pizza Hut delivery driver on $3 a delivery. I was a

late night barman. I was doing door-to-door sales for a roof installation company, setting appointments. Like I was doing whatever I could to just simply survive. And I would work, if I wasn't doing uni, I was working and I was like completely just trying to optimize every spare moment and making maybe like a thousand, maybe $1,500 a month, just enough to cover rent. And I was living with five people in a three bedroom house.

So all of those sorts of things. So I had a real, you know, the evidence that I had was that money was very scarce, very hard to come by and that, you know, this was something that was just how it was, right? Everyone I knew was in that position as well. So one of the questions that happened with my mentor was he said to me, Daniel, how much do you think is a lot of money?

And I said, 52,000 a year, right? If you earn a grand a week, there's, I remember saying, there's not much you can't do on a grand a week. And he kind of laughed and he said, Daniel, I'm going to put you in a sales role and you're going to get 10% per sale. And if you're only making 520,000 a year worth of sales, I'm going to fire you because that's way too little. He's like, I need you to be making like 1.2 million a year worth of sales and you need to be earning 120,000 a year.

And I'm like, what? And this was kind of radical. But he said to me, Dan, I think you need to adjust your psychology around money. He said, I want you to bring me, I think it was $1,000, maybe $2,000. I want you to bring me $1,000 tomorrow in cash. I'm like, why? And he's like, you'll see.

So I had a little bit of cash in the bank and I think I might've borrowed some from dad. I used to run these nightclub parties in university and like everyone paid in cash and I had like a little stash of cash. So I kind of brought him a thousand dollars and it was like a lot of money. It was all my money, right? So he grabs a clip, a bulldog clip, and he says, carry that in your pocket at all times. I want you to always have a thousand dollars in your pocket.

And I was like, oh, okay. So for the first couple of weeks, I'm walking around like this is very dangerous and ninjas are going to come and get me and people will judge me and all this sort of stuff. And I think I'd gotten it in $100 notes at that point. So I've got like $1,000 notes in my pocket.

And what was interesting is about two weeks or three weeks in, my brain starts to adjust that $1,000 is just pocket money. It's just the kind of money you carry on you. And my energy towards money just shifted very rapidly. So...

When I first was doing sales calls and I would say, oh, this is $2,000, it was like my energy towards $2,000 is like I'm asking you for your kidney. And then a couple of weeks later, it's like, oh, it's pocket money. It's like my nonverbal communication, my energy towards money just shifted so radically just by carrying a bunch of it.

So several things happened. It brought up to the surface all of the issues that I had around money. So I'm going to be judged. If I've got money, people will judge me because I'm thinking, what if somebody sees it? What if they think I'm some sort of high roller or something? What if I'm paying for something and someone sees my money clip? And then it brought up, if you have money, people will attack you.

So that was another psychology of money. It's like you're going to be attacked for having money, physically harmed. And the other one was like money's really hard to come by. It's a very scarce resource. And it's like getting it is really hard and you have to hold onto it. So all of this kind of bubbles up to the surface.

And the other one was, what if a girl wants to date me because she thinks I've got lots of money but I don't have money? So it was this whole idea of my only value as a man is my having money. So all of that is bubbling up.

And then because it's bubbling up to the surface, you're able to think about it and process it and think, oh, is that the belief I want to have? Is that something I like thinking? So it was a trigger for dealing with money issues very rapidly. And mind you, $1,000 back in 2001, 2002 was significantly more. If you want to do the activity today, you probably need a couple of thousand. There's inflation. In fact, it's going up 10% a year. Yeah, so let's add 10% to that number.

Sounds like a pretty cool mentor. He was great. Yeah.

Did you have any other lessons that he taught you in a sort of somewhat weird manner? Well, I'll give you two. One was no news. So I was completely banned from the news. And he basically said, look, the news is just statistically irrelevant things that they present to you on a daily basis. They're not going to report to you that a plane landed safely. They're not going to report to you that people woke up and went to work and had a lovely day. It's only going to be the statistically relevant

irrelevant things, the things that happen to one in 100,000 people. That's the only stuff that you're going to read in the news. The second thing about the news is none of it is anything you can do anything about. So you might think it's absolutely horrible what's happening in a particular place or a particular situation. That's not, you've got no ability to influence that. So get on with what you have the ability to do. Build your own platform, build your own life, and then you might have the ability to influence more stuff.

So, one of his rules was a complete blackout on any form of news, newspapers, radio, television, just completely gone. And that is quite freeing as well, right? It frees up time, frees up headspace, frees up negative emotions. So, that was great. And then the big lesson I got from John was everything is downstream from lead generation. Okay.

You can't build a business if you can't generate leads. You can have a big audience, but if they can't signal that they're interested in something, you can't build a business. You could have an amazing product that you've spent 10 years developing. If you can't get people to signal their interest in that, you've got no business. So-

His thing was everything is downstream from lead generation. Almost everything I learned over those two years was just lead generation. It was all about how do you generate warm leads. And there was dozens of different ways that we would go with and we'd constantly, the whole business was this idea of lead generation. And what was interesting about it

is that when we would blow up a client's business, it was just we turned the lead generation tab on. Nothing else changed. You could have a financial planning business where they've been in business for 15 years and they're struggling month to month and they're really good at what they do, but their business isn't growing rapidly. You blow up the leads. You put on 40 events, introduction to the markets, introduction to investing. And

And then that business just goes and it blows up in no time. So everything's downstream from lead generation. I literally watched our clients' lives completely change because we turned on the lead generation tab. Yeah, this is sparking so many thoughts in my mind around our own business and like how...

The first time we really sold something, this was before I read Oversubscribed. It was our high-ticket course. We just launched it expecting, I don't know, 12 people to sign up for a beta testing cohort. And 354 people signed up. I was just like, bloody hell. But I think that's because we had four years worth of almost pent-up...

demand for this thing. But then every time we've run it since, it's felt like harder and harder. It's felt like we've exhausted some of the warm audience more and more. And now it feels like we're having to do more to generate those leads. But I guess in my mind, I'm not even thinking of it as lead generation.

Yeah. Ali, imagine this. You've got three and a half million subscribers. Most people don't have 3,000 people on the database. So whatever you're feeling and experiencing, most small businesses are completely crushed by this problem. This lead generation problem is a crushing problem that impacts every area of their life, prevents them from taking holidays, prevents them from ever switching off on the weekend. So

If you take most of those 5 billion businesses out there in the UK, the lead generation problem is the big problem. Like they have no ability to generate leads. Just a quick note from one of our sponsors and we'll get right back to the episode. And this episode is very kindly brought to you by Skillshare. If you haven't heard by now, Skillshare is probably the single best place in the world to learn anything online. And the best thing about Skillshare sponsoring this podcast is...

It's very exciting because I have actually been a teacher on Skillshare since 2019, and I actually have 13 classes on Skillshare. Yes, 13. Most of the online courses I've ever made are on Skillshare, where you can access them completely for free by going to skillshare.com forward slash deep dive, and you'll get a one month free trial. Anyway, on Skillshare, there are thousands of classes on all sorts of topics from entrepreneurship and business to lifestyle design to interior design to

cooking to graphic design to video editing, loads of stuff. But in particular, you might like to check out my own classes on productivity. I have three classes on Skillshare, all about productivity. We have the productivity fundamentals, we have productivity creators, and we have productivity strategies. And so if you want to do more things with your time, if you want to do more of the things that matter to you in a way that's fun and sustainable, you might like to check out those classes, which again, you can check out completely for free by just going to skillshare.com forward slash deep dive. And then once your trial is over, you can choose to carry on with the subscription or

I pay for Skillshare. I think it's great. They've got loads of classes. And so it becomes one of my first places to go to if I want to teach myself anything at all. So check out my classes on Skillshare. And thank you so much, Skillshare, for sponsoring this episode. Your recent book, Scorecard Marketing, kind of talks about that very tactically. Anything else you'd recommend for helping someone learn the skill? So all of these skills relate to a broader set of skills, which is entrepreneurship. And

Some of the skills is understanding why people buy. So for example, all people buy things to relieve a psychological tension between what they have and what they want. So that is the underlying reason why anyone buys anything. There is some form of a psychological tension. Something's not right in the world. It should be this way, but it's currently this way, and I want to close that gap. So that's the buying process.

Now, sometimes people don't have much psychological tension around something, but it could be widened. Some people have a dormant psychological tension, which they're not consciously aware of or they're not solution seeking. They're just holding on to the problem and holding on to the frustration, but they're not in the process. And you can spark a decision making process.

So the more you understand why people buy and what's going on under the surface and the fact that there are people actively looking for things and then there are people who are passively dealing with a frustration or problem but not actively searching. So getting a working understanding of these things is really powerful. The other thing that triggers every single sale is a combination of emotion, logic and urgency. And I've found that all businesses are only really naturally good at one.

So some businesses naturally are good at generating emotion in their customers, but not logic or urgency. Some businesses are really good with the logical side of why you should buy, but they're not very good at the emotion or the urgency. And some businesses are the hard sales business. They turn the screws and they're all about urgency, but they're not very good at logic or emotion.

And great businesses, they understand how to do logic, emotion, and urgency in the right doses. And they get the minimum effective dose across nicely. And people go, oh, I'm excited to buy. I love buying from this company. Like an Apple would be a great example. They give you logic, emotion, urgency. Yeah. They have the pre-order for the pre-order. And I'm just like, oh, yeah, this is so good. I can prepare my pre-order so that when 1 p.m. comes around, I can just hit the button and it's just

Yeah. And they do a great combination of like educating you about the phone combined with showing you stories of people who are out there taking amazing photos and they look really cool and it's all woven in together. And then there's a moment to act. Um, so logic, emotion, urgency, all coming together at once. So how do you, how do you learn these skills?

Well, I've written about them. You can read Oversubscribed and Scorecard Marketing. Those are two great books on that. So like you, I listen to a lot of podcasts. But there's some other things you can do. You can survey your customers, right? So you want to be able to ask lots of questions about why people are buying from you or not buying from you. You want to ask people questions where they quantify, right?

As a doctor, you probably asked people on a scale of one to 10, how bad does it hurt? And people like, oh, it's a four. Okay, so it's not as bad as I thought, right? Oh, it's bearable. Or it's like, oh, it's a nine. It's like, okay, well, wow, that's pretty intense. So asking people to quantify with a number is really powerful because that is logic and emotion coming together. So when people feel something and quantify it with a number, they're integrating their left and their right brain together.

And they're giving you very clear signals and feedback as to what's going on. So some of the questions that are super powerful to talk to your market about is on a scale of 1 to 10, how motivated would you be to solve this problem? On a scale of 1 to 10, how frustrated are you by this?

Because you're looking for things that people rate highly as a frustration if it's a dormant need. On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you with your existing solutions? So these are the kind of questions. And then you're trying to use that data to figure out what is the solution that I can build that really helps people move from a low score to a high score.

on these types of things. I know this is getting a little bit geeky, but conducting research of just 30 people is often very revealing. It tells you a lot about what you are doing right or not doing right. And yeah, some more research is pretty powerful. One thing that I used to have a big hang up about and probably still do a little bit is that sales and marketing equals bad

is evil it's like a bit icky it's a bit scammy and there was a lot of i think unlearning i had to do when selling our course for the first time two years ago now um and yeah is is this and and it's it's definitely a sentiment i've i've heard from a lot of people that oh i just i just hate the idea of sales i hate the idea of marketing what's what's going on there

I totally agree. When you're a creator, when you're building something and you put your heart and soul into it, the idea that you have to then justify that and that you have to convince people to do it, it's kind of like, you know, weirdly like trying to sell your best friend to someone or like, you know, it's kind of like...

this weird thing that you want it to be self-evidently valuable. You wanna be able to create something and people self-evidently just know about it and love it and all of that. And that's just not how humans work, right? So humans have to go through a process of discovery and we have to get to know something, which is all about understanding the logic. We have to get to trust something, which is the emotional connection of like, yeah, I've done enough research.

And then we want to basically, we like it, we trust it, we feel a sense that now's the right time. So we're going through this process of discovery and it doesn't really matter what the product is, whether it be camera equipment or musical equipment or any of those sorts of things. We like to do our research and we like to go through a series of steps of getting to know things. So the evidence-based research on this is from Professor Robin Dunbar and from Google.

And they say that you go through 11 touch points before you buy something based on your Google search history. And Professor Robin Dunbar says you go through about seven hours of contact before you feel a sense of trust.

So, if you just simply think about what is marketing there to do, it's there to accelerate that journey at scale with more people to help guide them through a process of discovery so that they get to know about something, like it, trust it, learn about it, right? You know, you're helping them to discover and research it.

Unfortunately, there is a part of every sale that is urgency, and this is the ickiest part that most people hate, which is trying to tell people that now's the right time to buy something. So

I don't think many people have a problem with communicating the emotional payoff of their product, that it's going to feel great and that it's going to be a really enjoyable thing. I don't think people have much of a problem talking about the logic. Sometimes they do because logic is about quantifying and return on investment. And this is where this is the cost to benefit analysis, right? This is why you would do it.

But then what people want to do is they want to be able to say, okay, when you're ready, come back and buy. But humans are humans. What do they do? They forget and they go find something else and all of that. So we need an urgency trigger. Urgency is a little bit like a spice than an ingredient. You don't want to overuse it, but there needs to be a subtext of urgency.

Now, for most products, the only viable subtext of urgency that works is genuinely being oversubscribed. So genuinely being oversubscribed means that there are plenty of people who want this, there is genuinely a limited number available, or there's a start date, there's a reason that you need to begin, and unfortunately, it's only going to be available for this number of people.

Now, what the perfect scenario is, is that there's some form of demand and supply tension that's transparent. So for example, if there's a lineup out the front of the restaurant, oh, it must be a good restaurant and you must need to book ahead.

If there is, you know, if Apple phones sell out in the first week and then you have to wait and it's a delay, oh, okay, so if I don't buy, then I'm going to have to be the person who gets it three months from now. So the subtext of demand and supply tension and some form of transparency that we can see that transparently there's a lot of people who want this, there's only a limited number or there's a start time. Yeah. Okay, I better do this. Yeah.

Yeah, with my first business when I was 19 and selling courses to help people get into med school, we did. And I'm not sure how ethical this was, but we would artificially sell out

Or like deliberately book smaller venues for places that we knew like wouldn't have that much demand. And so when we sold seven seats, it's like sold out. And no one has to know it was only sold out seven, but it's sold out and some CSS stuff to make it look red and like, and that seemed to just work well.

Well, here's the frustrating thing about humans. The frustrating thing is that taking no action is actually quite safe. And you can't, most people kind of have a subconscious belief that if I don't take action, then nothing really bad can go wrong. But if I do take action, then, you know, something might go wrong.

So it's unfortunate, but there's no successful businesses that are long-term successful that don't do something around creating an urgency queue for buying. And if they don't do logic, emotion, and urgency, they're normally not profitable. So you get a lot of businesses that they turn over money, but they're not very profitable. Airlines, for example. So can you imagine...

If there was such thing as a prophet God who handed out profit fairly and they looked at every business model and they said, only the business models that are really hard to operate and really important to society, those will get the profit. And anyone who's just superfluous, you know, you don't get any profit.

So you look at the airline industry and you say, you've got to have 100% safety, hugely capital intensive, customer service expectations are through the roof, logistics, you've got to leave on time, finish on, like land on time. If you're a minute late, we're going to start charging you a fee, a penalty. And you think, wow, what an incredibly complex business model is.

I bet the profit gods would give them 50% profit margins. It's like, no, no, it's like 5% to 10% profit margins. It's nothing. Why? Simply because there's freely available. There's always seats available. You can buy a ticket when you want. If you miss this one, there'll be another one going in an hour, right? So all of that's built into it.

Let's have a look at the opposite. The opposite is Rolex. So Rolex is a business that has barely innovated its product in many years. A Rolex today looks much the same as a Rolex 50 years ago. It's made from the same materials. It's made pretty much in the same way, in the same place. So there's hardly any innovation. They're terrible at customer service. The product itself can be easily copied.

A copy can cost 1/10 to 1/20 of an actual real article. But here's the difference: Rolex has a waiting list of 18 months to get a genuine Rolex. And when they call you, they say, "We've got your watch available, but we can only hold it for you for three days. If not, you'll miss out on it and you'll go back on the waiting list for 18 months."

Now, Rolex is massively profitable, something like 70% margins. So this is the difference between being oversubscribed, logic, emotion, urgency. Actually, and I will say this, Rolex has logic, emotion, and urgency. The emotion is status and achievement and significance and marking a significant occasion.

Logic is that they hold their value. They're incredibly good to hedge against inflation. There are people who buy Rolexes and keep them in a drawer purely as a store of wealth. And the urgency is that there's an 18-month waiting list. So when you bring it all together, explosive. Okay. So the mentor, John, these three big lessons, the value of money, no news is good. And everything is downstream of lead generation.

So what happened next in your story? So you're 24, you're doing 10 million a year in this company. You've got a team of 20 people. You're doing marketing for other businesses. Yeah. So we were pretty concentrated with one major client. I had a big falling out with that client. They were going to acquire us. And then they did a really nasty negotiation tactic.

And I threw my toys out the pram and basically said, deal's off. I'm moving to London. I'm going to go do something else. Oh, okay. Yeah. Because I was 24, 25. I mean, it's funny because I walked away from tens of millions in that sale. And they had disrespected me and tried to bully in the situation. Not expecting, like because they were more grown up.

They would never walk away from minions and minions. But everything had come to me so easily and so quickly that I just had a very different attitude. And my business partner and I just went, we don't want to work with these guys long term. If this is how they are in the negotiation, then this is going to be horrible.

let's turn it off. And they were shocked. And then they tried to sue us. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, they were like, really, it was really weird. It was very weird. But anyway, we untangled ourselves from that.

And then I was offered the opportunity to go launch an office in London of that business and take it to London. And it was just kind of like, you know what, this will be really fun. There's three times as many people in the UK and we're going to just travel and we'll go to Europe and we'll go snowboarding and we'll go to Ibiza and we'll do all that stuff. So we just kind of went, oh, that's it. We're going to move to London. It was a really brand and

We went from having tens of millions to basically shutting down the Australian business and moving to London. Why did you shut it down? Why not keep it going? Because I was a 24-year-old. Okay, fine.

It was just the next adventure. So we'd ended the relationship with a major client who represented a huge chunk of revenue. And we could either restart in Australia with a new client or restart in London. It just felt like a great time to go restart in London. Okay. So question on this front. So at this point, you're 24. You've presumably got a net worth that's in the six or seven figures, probably seven. And you could just choose...

choose to put your feet up and not work and and and stuff probably live the good life in bali or whatever that looks like um what gave you that drive for a kind of more more ambition more

It was hugely fun. You've got to remember, we were working and partying and traveling and like the business was not digging ditches. We were running events, going to restaurants, going to nightclubs, driving fancy cars. All of my mentors were way ahead of me.

I was hanging around with people who had businesses doing $50 million, $100 million. I was regularly hanging around with people who had built billion-dollar businesses and things like that because we would hire speakers and we'd have people like Dragons and Sharks and best-selling authors and people who'd written amazing books and all this. So I was hanging around a peer group of people who normalized that level of life and

I was being invited as this young entrepreneur into these really great, amazing circles. I got paid to go to Bali and speak at a conference, and I got paid to hang out backstage with all the people. Why would I give that up? Everyone on the team was under 30, and we were all single, and we were all night clubby kind of people. A typical week, we'd finish up the week, and then we'd all go clubbing.

as a team. Cool. So you're, so you moved to London and you were like 25 at this point, like 24, 25? Yeah, about 25. Okay. So what was the, well,

We launched a similar business in London, working with international speakers to launch them in the UK market. Took off crazy, 4 million pounds in the first year. And just doing the event stuff. Event stuff and all this sort of lead gen stuff. Basically doing launches for businesses that were successful outside of the UK. So we had a Singaporean company and we had a US company and we were launching them in the UK.

$4 million in year one. And at the end of year one, we hired the London Palladium Theatre, 2,000 seats. And we did 600 grand worth of sales in the following week. It was just wild, right? So it was good times. And then the GFC came along, global financial crisis, and the whole thing came crashing down. So we went from making millions down to 400,000 in 2009. So it was just a complete... The recession just put a stop to everything.

out Singaporean client

almost collapsed in Asia and had to stop coming to the UK, right? Because that was their growth plan. So that client was gone. And then our US client, the pound against the dollar went from like two to one to like it jumped by like 40% in a day. And it was just like unaffordable to do the deal. So it just wasn't, the exchange rate didn't work and we weren't able to successfully renegotiate.

So I went from living in a penthouse apartment near Chelsea to moving into my sister's spare room in Acton and just entering a really weird dark time of like, oh my goodness, everything has just literally come crashing down. How was that transition?

Oh, it was great. Yeah, fantastic. I recommend it to everyone. It was dark and horrible. It was so dark and horrible. I remember in the middle of winter slipping on ice and like almost breaking my arm. And I remember a really bad phone call and hanging up and being on a reflex of just like anger.

putting my fist out like that and banging it into a wall, a concrete wall, and almost breaking my hand. I almost had an almost broken hand and almost broken arm. I'm like, "What is going on?" It was a horrible time, but it was a time of reflection and there was time of thinking through what do I want to do next. The other weird thing that happened at that time is I decided to try and sell the business

And I had this guy who agreed to buy the business for 300 grand, two payments of 150 grand. And I was like, oh, you know, at least I'll start again with something new, but I'll have 300 grand. And anyway, on the day of exchange, he just doesn't show up.

And it turns out he'd had a heart attack and went into hospital. Randomly, my acquirer had a heart attack. Yeah. So weird, like crazy weird time. How long did that period last?

So in 2009, I wrote the book Key Person of Influence, which was all about my experience working with celebrities and authors and how they were building personal brands. During my reflection period, I reflected on what am I really excited about? Social media, this new emerging technology called Facebook and YouTube and

Twitter and all this sort of stuff and how we've built these technological engines to build personal brands and how that will give rise to new types of businesses and all this sort of stuff.

So 2010, I launched something called the Key Person of Influence Accelerator. It's a huge success. We launch in London. It sells out three times in a row. We launch in Melbourne. We launch in Sydney. We launch in Singapore. We launch in Tampa, Florida. We launch in Canada. So suddenly I'm building a global business again and we're back to like eight cities, a million per city, you know, so we're just smashing it. So then it was another thing.

And that was over the following couple of years. Oh, wow. Okay. So the key, key post of influence, the five-step method to become one of the most highly valued and highly paid people in your industry. I would love to come to this in a moment, but I guess sort of you wrote Entrepreneur Revolution a few years later, and this is sort of,

the more more like getting started with entrepreneurship beat type book so when i was writing key person of influence there was about 8 000 words at the beginning setting the scene for the strange times that we're in and that the world is changing in a massive way and it just seemed like the book took forever to kick off and get going so i cut that 8 000 words off and i parked it

And then I released KPI and it became a good bestseller. And then the publisher said, well, what do you want to do next? Do you want to do another book? And I said, oh, I've got these 8,000 words that I cut out. And I sent that across and they went, oh, that's a book. That's a great book. It's all about how to start up as an entrepreneur before you're a key person of influence. And I'm like, oh, okay. So I released Entrepreneur Revolution. So what is the Entrepreneur Revolution? So this is the idea, and a lot of your listeners won't understand

get the significance of this, but I was born in 1981 and I was born in the industrial age of very much career and workforce and all this. There was no such thing as being a creator and there was no creator economy and there was no just become a YouTuber. Of course, none of that existed. And then

There's this whole other world that we live in now where people can live and work from anywhere. You can set up a business. You can have $1,000 startup costs and start a business that's global. You could literally use your phone and build a business that impacts thousands of lives. And it's like, wow, what a time to be alive. What an incredible moment in time for the first time ever. Yeah.

So I likened this as an analogy to what it must have been like going from the agricultural age where everyone had to have a farm and you had to have a family farm and you had to plow a field by hand or with a donkey and then suddenly tractors and then suddenly factories and then now there's this entire different economy that exists with its own set of rules, completely different rules.

And I use this analogy of like, you know, what must it have been like to look across to the neighboring factory and see a 22-year-old on a tractor doing the work of 100 people. And now we look at what is a 22-year-old with a TikTok account making $3 million or whatever. And it's like, whoa, but how's that happening? Well, they're playing a different game. And there's this digital age. There's this entrepreneur revolution. So the book outlines the times that we're in. And then it says, okay,

Given that the world has changed and that there's a new set of rules, but most of us were raised in a schooling system that was built for industrial age, what are the new rules? How do we leverage the new rules? How do we start something that is in alignment with the new rules, right? And how do we then build a successful business and launch a successful business with a different mindset? Yeah, I was just thinking that the industrial revolutionary type mindset, I think, is...

still very prevalent amongst probably like most people that I know like anyone who's not an entrepreneur or a creator like

Half of my friends are medics, and so that's still very much a, you have a job, you go to work. There's no innovation there. It's a system that shouldn't change radically, right? Or it should change slowly. Yeah, exactly. Because you're dealing with people's health outcomes, so it's going to change really slowly. And the school system is a really slow-changing system as well. So ultimately, we have a health system and we have a school system that is very much entrenched in the industrial age. Yeah.

And I think also that, and so like often it's like when I was first doing the YouTube stuff and even with my first business when I was at university, which was, you know, I was making like, I don't know, 40k a year, 50k a year or something, which was the equivalent of a doctor's salary when I was like in med school. My mind was just like blown astack. How...

sort of like easy it was to make that money compared to toiling away on a ward for 60 hours a week. And then when I actually started working and I was toiling away on a ward for 60 hours a week and all of a sudden like one 30 second YouTube integration where I just spoke to the camera about a freaking app was making the equivalent of one month's salary. It just completely changed my entire world. Totally. It's like you're on the tractor plowing the field in a day or you're one of a hundred people with a hand plow

going, this is ridiculous. And it's this weird thing of like, well, why would I not do that? It's hard not to. So there's some things that you'll notice in the industrial age. So for example, we teach kids that you should not be disruptive, right? The worst thing you can get on your report card is, you know, Ali is a disruptive person.

person in the classroom. The best thing they can possibly call you on the front cover of Inc. magazine is disruptive. So there's a disconnect between these things. In school, putting together a team of smart kids who give you the answers is called cheating. In life, that's called having an executive team that is a really high functioning executive team. So for me personally, if I have a great CFO who does all my maths homework for me, that's smart. That's

That's a good thing to have, but in school that would be the worst thing to do. I mentioned it before, component labor is the name of the game in the schooling system. Your job is to become a useful component of labor to someone's big machine.

And we're not taught anything about sales, marketing, money management, coming up with ideas, ideation, minimum viable product testing, market surveys. None of that stuff is in school. Yeah, I think the school thing as well also encourages the sort of perfectionistic attitude of I'm going to do the work and then I'm going to hand it in and I'm going to get a grade for the thing and now my self-worth is wedded to the grade.

And so, again, if I just think of the example of a bunch of my friends who did really, really well in school and they are doing well in their corporate jobs or something, to put out a single blog post or write a single thing on LinkedIn to them feels like, oh, my God, it has to be perfect. And it's just this attitude of like, I can't put something out. Someone has to approve it. Yeah, someone has to approve it. Yeah. And even almost...

kind of maybe an unhealthy obsession with qualifications. I randomly met a doctor at the train station who recognized me, you know, like last week sometime. And she had been in medicine for 14 years and was come across my stuff. I think she actually read some of your books as well and was sort of transitioning out to become a coach. She was doing a coaching qualification. And then we grabbed breakfast and she

she was like, I was like, okay, so how's the coaching business going? And she was like, oh, you know, I'm doing it for free for a few friends. And I was like, okay, what's stopping you from charging? And she was like, oh, well, I haven't finished my qualification yet. Like, oh, it's going to happen in like four months. I was like, okay. And then when that happens, what are you going to do next? And she was like, oh, then I'll start posting on Facebook. And I was like, when are you going to charge people

people for the coaching. She was like, oh, you know, maybe in a year or two. When I get a letter from someone to say, yeah, now it's time to charge. I have a doctor friend who told me, oh, I'm thinking of starting a business. And then next time I saw him, he'd enrolled in an MBA.

for the certification. But I mean, imagine if in school they said it's actually the first person to hand in their assignment and it only has to be directionally correct. Then it would be a very different environment. It's like, we're going to mark you based on speed to mark it. Here's the assignment.

Clock starts now. Whoever can hand in something that meets minimum standards and is directionally correct, you're the one who does it. And extra points if you can pull together three or four people who all work together and you can get something there.

Yeah. I think on this point as well, I've had similar conversations with friends and there seems to be a lot of resistance in the sense of, "Oh, but are you saying that a neurosurgeon doesn't need to be qualified?" It's like, "Well, no, it's not what I'm saying." Definitely. If you're component labor, you have to be certified because you're a component. You're a cog in the machine and that cog has to be perfectly fit for the machine.

So, you know, you absolutely have to be, there are certain professions, especially like medicine that you've got to be qualified and, and yeah, perfect, perfectly machined within an inch. But I guess the danger is that sort of having that way of thinking, which then bleeds into anything else. And you think that suddenly someone has to give you permission to do a thing.

As soon as you're in the entrepreneur revolution, you're adopting a very different mindset. It's a mindset of not knowing rather than knowing. So the most curious person wins, not the most qualified person. So if you said, oh, I'm going through a period of great curiosity, I know nothing and I'm trying to explore what people are frustrated by, that's probably the smarter position to take as an entrepreneur. Some of the best entrepreneurs are

They love saying things like, talk to me like I'm a three-year-old. I just don't understand. Sometimes they deeply understand, but they'll ask dumb questions because they're trying to stay curious. Steve Jobs' advice in his commencement speech was stay humble, stay curious. Yeah, that just sparks a thought. So again, when I was at university and kind of building this business and stuff, I would...

It was weird how often I'd be the one to put my hand up in a lecture and ask a question about something that was like apparently obvious. But like, I just had this sort of complete non-fear of looking like an idiot. And a bunch of friends spoke to me afterwards and even

to this day, I think it was like two weeks ago, I was chatting to some friends and they were like, "Yeah, I remember you would always ask these dumb questions in lectures." And I'd be thinking the same thing, but I would be thinking, "I don't want to ask the question because I don't want to look dumb." I was like, "Well..." And it was, I think, having done the entrepreneur thing and trying to make my web design business when I was 14 years old, all sort of entrenched in me this idea that it's totally reasonable to ask a dumb question. Yeah. If you're a component,

If you're a cog in the machine, you don't want to reveal that there might be a crack in the cog, right? Because then they might replace you. So it's better to be quiet and pretend that you're a perfectly formed cog as opposed to... But if you're building the machine and you're looking for how could this machine run better, how could this be optimized to produce better outcomes, then you're totally looking for...

you're basically going back to first principles. You're like, well, what problem are we trying to solve? What are we solving for? How do we do that faster? What's the fastest point between point A and point B? Talk to me like I'm an idiot. So those sorts of things become very useful. And that's the big mindset shift. So in the book Entrepreneur Revolution, it's all about

changing the mindset. It's about getting out of the traditional mindset. I talk about three mindsets, reptile, which is fight, flight, freeze, anger, aggression, upset, emotional response. There's autopilot, which is learn, repeat, learn, repeat.

Repeat the past, repeat the past, put more inputs in, remember those inputs, then deliver the correct outputs. And then there's visionary, strategic thinking, inspiration, love, connection, empathy, curiosity, all of those sorts of things. So it's about being...

in that visionary mind more than the autopilot or the reptile. Nice. Okay, so let's say someone is listening to this or watching this and they've got a normal job. Let's say, I don't know, they work in consulting or something like that. And they're like, cool, I love the idea of being an entrepreneur. I joined my consulting job because...

quote, it would teach skills that I could then use to start a startup someday. But they've ended up there for way too long because the promotion cycle or the bonus cycle is always, you know, it's only four months away. What would be the sort of next steps that someone would take to kind of develop this mindset slash become an entrepreneur?

Well, you can develop the mindset by having a go at producing something of value. There's a few sets of steps that you want to go through. So one step is ideation. Ideation is coming up with at least 10 ideas and then figuring out which one would be the best or which two or three ideas would be the best. So that's an actual process called ideation. And most people jump from first idea to action rather than coming up with nine other ideas and saying, well, why did I choose that one? And

When I worked with one of our guys who was a billionaire, I said, "How do you create a billion-dollar company?" He's like, "Oh, it's easy. You come up with 10 ideas that could be billion-dollar companies and then start narrowing it down." I was like, "Oh, okay. Fair enough." He said, "Well, it's either going to be a telecommunications company or it's going to be a tech company or it's going to be a bank."

So he's like, there's only a few things. - Actually he does narrow it down. - Yeah, he's like, there's only a few things a billion dollar company could be. So you've got to then figure out which one would it be? Like what would be your take on it? What would be your spin? So we went through and he was the first one to show me just this first step of ideation. So you wanna go through ideation and come up with a bit of a criteria.

As I said, by the way, joining an entrepreneurial team is better than trying to start one yourself. So I'm a big fan of, let's say, I'm jumping around here, I apologize. But let's say you are a consultant for a large company. Go be a consultant for a 10-person company. Go be a consultant for a five-person boutique and do that for a year or two. And you're going to be the special person because you came from a big name brand and now you're working in a boutique. They're going to be

treat you like a king or a queen. So it's going to be great. Okay. Just on that note, I'd have to get your take on this. One issue that lots of people have is I am currently making X at my current company, big company, et cetera, et cetera. I would be taking a pay cut to do this other thing that sounds cool

And I think it's interesting because usually X is higher than what you would actually need to live. And usually the new salary is also a very reasonable salary. But people, I think, feel like, oh, I don't want to take a drop in my pay. Yeah. And I can understand that, especially, look, you're in a unique position in the sense that you don't have kids. Once you've got kids, then as much as you might personally, like for me personally, right, I can personally happily live mattress on the floor, you know,

you know, ramen noodles, whatever, right? That wouldn't bother me at all. But now I have kids, we have huge overheads, insane overheads every month, right? And I can't make decisions of like, oh yeah, we'll all just live on mattresses on the floor. I might find myself divorced or something like that. So the key thing, or it wouldn't be fair to take them into that decision.

So the key thing is there are certain people who can't take a pay cut. You've got to figure it out. So you've got to figure out, okay, what is my after-tax earnings? And sometimes a pay cut is not as savage as you think about it. If it's after-tax, you also might be spending a lot of money on commuting or you might be spending a lot of money on things to keep up that particular role, which may not come with a boutique role.

You also might have a boutique plus your side hustle venture money as a bit of a crossfade. Or you might view it as making an investment. So let's say you're taking a 10 grand pay cut. The framing of it is I'm actually investing 10 grand into the creation of a startup. I'm willing to invest up to 30,000. So I'm willing to take this pay cut for three years.

as an investment into the equity that I own in my own business. So it's not a pay cut, it's an investment into the startup equity. So it's a bit of a mental gymnastics to justify activity, but essentially that's what you are doing. You are making an investment into startup equity.

So, yeah, it is tricky. It is difficult. One of the things that I recommend is you could do a little bit of evening consulting or something like that. There have been times for me personally where I have taken on a client in L.A., being in London, because I wanted to earn an extra amount of money and being in London allows me to consult in L.A. at 8.30 p.m. until 10 p.m.

right so i can do a consulting gig and do it in my evening in the morning so you know there are things that we live in this incredible range of options right now yeah just on that note so we we were kind of talking about steps steps to take we and we said maybe joining an entrepreneurial company might be a good a good sort of springboard um

One thing that a lot of people talk about in who've had like success in business is how in the early days it was, it was quite a lot, quite a long slog, quite a grindy, like, or like, even though it was fun, like work-life balance wasn't quite there. And usually when people get older, by the time I speak to them on the podcast, they're a bit more like work-life balancey and chill and stuff. And I'm always intrigued, like,

to what extent is it reasonable to want to have work-life balance while you're starting something?

versus once it's already successful and now you can chill. So it's quite a luxury belief, the idea of having work-life balance. It's something that you can afford to have if you've made... So once you hit a certain level of wealth and success, you can afford to pontificate about work-life balance. And if you're a single person who doesn't have any dependents, you can afford to think about work-life balance.

The numbers, the statistics are very, very clear that the vast majority of people who earn a lot of money, who make a breakthrough in business, have a period of being well out of balance. I mean, there is not anyone who's winning an Olympic medal who's not crazy focused on that goal. There's not anyone who is developing a

a high-rise building that isn't focused on that goal. So especially when you're creating a breakthrough and especially if it's an outstanding result, the data doesn't lie about this. It's for something like 65% of all people earning over 100 grand do 55 hours a week or more. And when you look at almost all entrepreneurs, here's the reality of business. When you're starting a business, you're in the process of creating an asset

sweating that asset and keeping track of what's going on. You're doing strategy, operations, sales and marketing, finance, HR. You're hiring people, onboarding people. So let's be real about it. If you were super optimized and gave each of those four things 15 hours a week, there's 60 hours.

And that's if you're doing part-time on each of those, like 15 hours a week is part-time sales. 15 hours a week is part-time creating an asset. So when you get to work-life balances, when you have a team, if you have eight people working on a team and you take a holiday, seven out of eight are still working on the business. So it works. If you've got eight people on a team and you come up with an idea, you've got a group of people who can

refine that idea, implement that idea, work on that idea and produce something. And you've probably got someone who's full-time sales and you've probably got someone who's full-time marketing. So now you've got a bit of team dynamic, team play. One of the great things to come out of the industrial age was something called division of labor, which is that if people just focus on one job and don't jump around, they make a lot more stuff.

And that's true for any entrepreneurial business. A salesperson who's just focused on sales gets good at sales. And someone who's focused on editing videos gets good at editing videos. So if you try and get the video editor to make sales, they're going to suck at both.

So, work-life balance does tend to come later. I know that's unpopular to say. Everyone wants to be like, oh, no, peace, love, love, Hare Krishna, as we can all just have a multi-million pound business in our spare time. But everyone I know who's gone through that, even the people who talk about work-life balance, the way they came to work-life balance as a concept was by getting themselves completely burnt out.

And then they, well, I'm reformed. Okay, great, you're reformed. Nice of you now you're a millionaire to be so reformed. Now you've got 55 people on your team working behind the scenes. Yeah, fabulous. Now you can just do a strategic role. Well done. That's the end state. But what they're not being honest about is how they got there. And they got there normally by being out of balance. They said no to a lot of stuff. They didn't go to the parties. They...

For example, when I did the 10 million year, all of those five years working for John and then that, that was 60 hours a week, every week. We worked weekends. We ran events on the weekend. We might've had one weekend off in a month. When I was starting my first business, it was roll out of bed, have breakfast,

And as soon as I've finished breakfast, it's start work. And then it's work, work, work, work, work until dinner time and then finish dinner and then maybe do some more stuff after dinner and then go to bed. And that was every day. And now we were doing fun stuff as well, taking clients out to restaurants, going out partying and all of that sort of stuff. There's no way I could have built those businesses without putting in serious time.

Building an asset, making sales, the whole lot. The whole thing. In your experience, like having spoken to a bunch of people who are successful in business, do many of them regret the way that they spent their youth in hustle mode? Or is it a lot of it was like, oh, I'm glad I'm chilled out now, but I kind of had to get through that phase and I don't regret putting in all that work back when I was young? Well, for starters, let's be honest.

Let's go to the data as well. Most people who start a business are 42. Most successful entrepreneurs are 42 when they start. So the most well-worn path is that you work for someone in your 20s and you do an apprenticeship. In your 30s, you start to get your stride and you start to make some inroads and you start to demonstrate value. You work up the chain a little bit.

Towards your late 30s, early 40s, you start to figure out how this whole industry works and you've got contacts, connections, you're trusted. And then at 42, you start a business that you then sell at 57, 15 years later and make your millions. So that's the data. That's the path, right? So the path that most people take is career,

and this is most successful entrepreneur, millionaire entrepreneurs, started at 42, sold the business at 57. So there are very few super successful entrepreneurs who started in their 20s. I've not met many people who do regret that. I think a lot of people went, "Oh my goodness, thank goodness I jumped in with both feet when I didn't have the commitments." Because life gets more complicated, not less complicated. We end up

We end up with houses and families and teams and all the stuff. We end up with sick parents. We end up with diseases or ailments. All of that stuff, that's life, right? The least complex is age 20. Yeah. So there's a...

there's a friend of mine who's she's currently working full-time as a doctor and like wants to do a sort of creative thing on the side and has kind of dabbled with it a little bit and has recognized that hey doing doing the side hustle on top of the full-time job is incompatible with also having a social life and also doing hobbies and also self-care and also going to the gym every day and also doing like yeah having good sort of having eight hours of sleep a night and i'm just like

Yeah, it is. You kind of have to choose if you want it and whether it's worth the payoff. How would you think about that? It's a huge risk. There are very few broke, struggling doctors.

Doctors cluster around a high point in society, around probably the top 10% of earners. And it's very unlikely that you would meet someone who describes himself as a doctor who's just trying to get a break and trying to make it. Yeah, they're usually pretty middle class, pretty jealous. There's hardly any that are crazy like billionaires.

There's hardly any that actually drop below $35,000 a year or something like that. You've got a very safe path. A safe path would mean the data clusters around a particular outcome and all the data sits around that outcome. That is the doctor's path. The doctor's path is very safely you're going to end up in this good, comfortable lifestyle.

That's not true for entrepreneurship. There are billionaires and there are loads of people who are completely broken, struggling. There are people who ploughed their life savings in and it was the worst decision they ever made. They just weren't cut out for it or they made radical decisions. So she's right to not take that lightly. That's an important decision to make. You need to really get...

good signals from the market that the market wants this thing that you have. So once again, wanting to have a side hustle, wanting to have this is all about your own personal needs, which are irrelevant to the market. The market does not care, right? Like if I go and buy a kebab at three o'clock in the morning,

Do I ever ask the kebab shop owner, are you okay? Are you managing your work-life balance enough? Why are you out here at three o'clock in the morning? Is your family seeing enough of you? I'm not asking anything like that. I'm just paying my four pounds for my kebab at three o'clock in the morning.

I have no care. The market does not care about your work-life balance, doesn't care about how healthy or happy you are. It just cares whether you're meeting its needs. So the starting point for any business first principles is not what do you want? It's like, does the market want something? And are you willing and able to make that work for the marketplace?

But you can't be too self-centered here. Entrepreneurship is an act of service. It is a gift to the world. You're creating something that's going to solve problems for others in a scalable way. You're going to create jobs for others. As you get bigger and bigger,

All the hard problems are going to roll up to your entrepreneurial desk. All the easy stuff will be solved by the people that you hire and only the tricky stuff gets to you. So you've got to work out, have I got a sufficient number of signals from market that the market says, I need you to do this? You didn't quit your medical career until you were getting

people signing up and subscribing and there were good solid signals where your brain very logically and mathematically worked out no no I can I can do this I'm getting a signal from market but there are many people who might go oh here's

And he just jumped out. I don't think that's the case. Yeah, it was three years of like market making and then getting the signals to be like, okay, now it's time. Totally. Yeah, exactly. So I'd encourage people to, you don't have to take three years to get the signals. You could do 30 to 150 surveys and people say a hundred percent, I really want this thing. I want that CrossFit gym in Putney to exist. And you know, we need you to set that up. Great.

And then I would also encourage, once again, go do a year or two with an existing business, a boutique, go work for an entrepreneur, see if you actually like the lifestyle. Yeah.

Yeah, I love it. It's just like a fairly reasonable path of like, hey, this is like the entrepreneur game is a different kind of game. It's got different kind of rules. So understand what the rules are. Recognize that your outcomes may vary massively compared to the safe career that you're in where outcomes cluster about a specific specific area.

And now, given that we know that there is a risky bet to make here, let's try and figure out a way to de-risk the bet. And signals from the market are one way of doing that. And I guess even when someone has a full-time job, especially if someone has a full-time job, the ideation stage that we've talked about, coming up with 10, 50, 100 ideas for what could work and narrowing them down and then figuring out ways to test those without spending money. That is the next step called MVP, Minimum Viable Product.

So minimum viable product is one of the best things you can do is set up either a scorecard or an event and see if you can fill an event or get a scorecard. So let's say you want to set up a health related business because you're a doctor and you want to zero in on a particular health related set of products. Can you get 30 or 40 people to turn up to an event on that scorecard?

You might discover it's a lot of work just to get 30 people to show up to an event. You might discover you push the door and it flings right open. You book a venue for 30 and 70 show up and it's like, oh, okay, that's a pretty cool signal. A scorecard is where you essentially set up an online survey or question where people can benchmark themselves and

And that is an amazing MVP, minimum viable product. So you're essentially collecting data, you're collecting signals of interest, and you're getting people to reveal themselves as being interested in that topic. So you might say, oh, what I want to do is I want to be a marathon running coach. I'm going to help people run marathons, right? And you say, okay, great. I'm going to launch the, are you ready to run a marathon scorecard? And we're going to see if I can get people to take that for free.

If I can't get people to take that for free, there's no way I'm going to get them to pay because everything's downstream from lead generation. So if I can't generate the leads, forget about the business. And it's like, okay, what's my next idea? Oh, my next idea is diet coach. I'm going to help people to eat better. Okay. Are you ready to improve your diet? Take the scorecard. Is your diet optimized? Take

Take the scorecard. Okay, great. I'll answer the quiz. Oh, look, I got 150 people who answered this. And look, all of them struggle with this thing. And I guess you can just start by making one of these things on some free...

and chucking it on your Facebook friends list or messaging your friends on Instagram. Someone created that software. Yeah. So what is a scorecard? What's the deal with that? So when I launched the Key Person of Influence Accelerator, we created the Key Person of Influence scorecard and this became a massive thing. 90,000 people took it and we made 15 million pounds profit

off the back end of sales. And it's just like a glorified online quiz. It's a glorified online quiz, right? It's like a personality test. It essentially, in the book, it says, are you any good at pitching? Are you any good at creating products? And it asks you, the scorecard asks you a series of questions and it gives you a score. And it says you're a four out of 10 for pitching. There's something so addictive about that. I signed up with a CEO coach like three days ago

He had two scorecards that he made me take and I was like, damn, I've got a lot of improvement. Yeah, right. Because it's like if I ask you 50 questions and each question gives you a little bit of psychological tension and then it adds up and then your score comes out at 43%. And you being you, you're like, oh.

like, oh, I've got to optimize right off. There's so much to improve. This is great. Exactly. So that quantification on a scale of one to 10, how painful is it? Oh, it's a four out of 10, right? So all of this works. Psychologically, it all comes together in a scorecard. So basically, we launched a scorecard, Key Person of Influence. It was a huge success. You know, lots of millions and millions worth of sales came off the back of it. And my clients started saying, hey, that assessment thing,

that I took, how do I get one of those for my business? So at the time I had an IT business and we were building them for clients about eight grand each. And we're basically, my now co-founder, Steve, he was building them. I was selling them and we sold like 10 and everyone who bought one had a massive result. So we had this guy who was running a DJ school

He had this big social media following and then he launched the DJ scorecard. Are you ready to become a professional DJ? We're going to measure you on five areas. And suddenly thousands of people are taking the scorecard and he's got all this data and he's like, whoa, and his business grew big off the back. So it went from having a social media following to having proprietary data and leads and

So we saw this working. We thought, okay, let's make it super easy and not eight grand. We created ScoreApp. Now people can just basically build their own scorecards. It gives you a template with a landing page and a questionnaire and a results page and a PDF. And then you create your own scorecards. So like, for example, you could do a productivity scorecard. Yeah, I was just thinking that. I was like, why don't I have a productivity scorecard? Yeah. That'll be so good. Yeah. I basically take all my knowledge of productivity and be like, do you currently have...

sort of life values? Do you currently do a weekly review? Do you currently set a daily highlight every morning? And the answer to a lot of those things will, if the answer to all those things is yes, it's like, I have nothing to teach you. But like for 99.9% of people, there will be holes in that thing. And I can be like, all right, cool. Here are the resources. And you don't have to waste time on the things that you're good at. You can just go straight to, oh, okay. All of your productivity issues relates to scheduling. So let's get you all the scheduling tools.

And that's your own proprietary data. At the moment, it's unlikely, but at the moment, social media could just switch you off. They have done that with people. I can't imagine you getting switched off with your radical beliefs on productivity. But the good thing about this is you would own your own database. You'd have your own data. Damn.

Because we do so much work in creating courses and stuff. And we whip together a landing page and sometimes do a little bit of pre-collecting things. And then I read over subscribe, like, oh, we should probably do a little bit more. We probably shouldn't just be like, all right, here's the thing, guys, take it or leave it. There's more to do.

And a scorecard just feels like, it's just like, we just take our course syllabus and turn it into questions. And now people identify that, okay, my camera confidence is at 15%. I have so much to go. This course will take me up to 95. Yeah. And then they take the scorecard at the end and they go, it did take me to 95. Yeah. And if it doesn't, we can give them their money back. Yeah. That's like a guarantee tied to the thing. Exactly. And it quantifies it and it makes it ROI is clear. Yeah.

The other thing, too, is you might have lots of ideas and you might say, oh, okay, creating a whole course is going to take three weeks. It's like a bullock. Right? It takes ages. Yeah, it does. Way more than three weeks for a lot of people. So let's say you say, okay, well, I've got three ideas and I'm not sure which one. I'll just take three scorecards. I'll create three scorecards. Yes. I have an idea for a course of like…

essentially called something like the life-changing magic of a personal assistant. And the team has always been a bit like, I don't know if anyone... Should you hire a personal assistant, take the scorecard. Yeah. So then... This is so good. If 4,000 people take the scorecard... It's like, we should clearly make a course on this. Yes. And then we can... Then we've got their email addresses. We can interview them. We can be like, hey, what are your problems? Like, let's make sure this course is really good. Well, you'll know what their problems are because they'll have answered the questions. This is genius. Yes.

Okay, cool. Anyway, I'm going to take lots of notes off this, but you've just released this book, Scorecard Marketing. I bought it on Kindle on Friday or something. Super tactical. You can see it's really short compared to the other books. It's half the size. It's designed to be tactical and it's just about creating that MVP and that lead generation asset.

By the way, just a quick thing to mention, we actually have a link to ScoreApp with a discount code in the video description and in the kind of show notes if you want to check out this kind of lead gen method that Dan's talking about in this episode.

Okay. So I have an idea for a business and I want to test it by creating some sort of questionnaire type thing that I can send to people that I know through Facebook or through being part of the Runners World Forum or part of menshealth.com or whatever. Chuck on the forum or chuck it to my Facebook friends. Would you be interested in this sort of thing? Free scorecard, free questionnaire. They put their email address in at the end? Yeah, or at the beginning or at the end. Same thing if you run an event. So as I said, my whole first empire was...

intro events, introduction events. And that was the lead generation and warm-up phase in one. And then scorecards became the digital version of that, always available 24-7, collecting data, making recommendations on autopilot. So those are all lead generations, but they're also good MVPs. So anyone who's got an idea, run an event,

See if you can fill it, launch a scorecard, see if you can get people taking it. And that'll tell you whether you're going to be any good or not, or whether you've got any chance to do this. Do it for maybe four months in a row and see whether you can grow it each month. Because if you get 30, then 20, then 10, then five, you're

then we're tracking in the wrong direction. If you get 30, then 50, then 100, then 150, okay, maybe this could take off. So you want a very simple MVP. It's just lead generation at first. So all you're trying to do is can I generate leads because everything is downstream from lead generation. So can I generate leads? If you can't generate leads, forget about how good you are as a doctor. Forget about how amazing your product is. Forget about how well you can do it professionally.

speaking, right? All of that doesn't matter if you can't get the lead. So ultimately, the first thing to test is lead generation. Can I generate leads for this idea? So what counts as a lead? Any signal of interest, where essentially they're giving you some revealing signal of interest. So buying a ticket is a reveal. It's basically, if I buy a ticket to the magical life-changing power of a personal assistant,

and it's a one-hour Zoom webinar workshop, clearly I'm the type of person who's considering a personal assistant. So it's a signal of interest. Name an email and I'm giving you an hour of time to tell me about this. Or if I fill in the scorecard, that's a strong signal of interest. So a lead is just somebody revealing themselves

to say I'm interested. It's that whole, hey, yeah, I'm interested in that. That's a lead. So what happens next once you've got the lead? I've got the email address. So that's called your minimum viable product. So the next thing is called product market fit. Product market fit is adjusting the product to meet the market. So you imagined the product would be red, but everyone wants it in blue.

And you're like, oh, okay, as much as I thought it should be red, it needs to be blue. So this is where you do product market fit work. So you want to be the marathon coach and you imagined that you would be tweaking everyone's running style, but they all want help with diet. They all want help picking a pair of shoes. And it's like, just go down and get a pair of shoes and like, just watch this video on diet. It's like, yeah, but that's what we want. And it's like, oh, okay. So I need to include that in the product.

So this is called product market fit, and it's essentially making adjustments to your product so that the product fits what the market wants. So we, I think, accidentally did this. Well, it wasn't quite accidentally. When launching the first iteration of our YouTuber course two years ago, we worked with this marketing coach, and he was like, okay, send an email to your list being like, what is your biggest challenge with growing a YouTube channel? And see what happens. And then on the second page of that, ask them a few sort of more qualifying, a few more questions. And

And initially I was imagining our YouTuber course would be helping people from 100,000 subscribers scale up by building systems and processes and stuff. Turns out 95% of the people who filled out the survey hadn't even made their first video.

And like the other 5%, like we're all under a hundred subscribers. And we were like, what the hell? Like, this is not what we had in mind. This is more like a YouTube for complete and utter beginners who have a job, but like, we don't feel like they have the time to do YouTube properly and want to just learn all the, Oh, that's a very different product too. Here is how you can hire and outsource a team and build systems and stuff to blow up.

blow up your business. No, it's like your market, they're like, we want to get started. And they almost always would say, what equipment do you have? And you might've gone, oh, well. It doesn't matter, just start with your phone. But like people love the equipment thing. They want the equipment thing. And people love templates. People love the whole like, oh, what's the template you use for your videos? It's like, I mean, it's not that hard. It's just these three things, but okay, let's package it up as a template. And now people love it. They're like, oh my God, thank you so much for the template. It's so useful.

And I'm always a bit baffled, but now I've kind of learned over time that- But that's product market fit. Yeah. And product market fit is often baffling because your values are different to the values of someone who's buying the product.

Because if you're a fitness trainer, you've got fitness high on your values and you research it all the time, you read it all the time. If you're a fitness trainer buyer, you're buying a product like that, fitness is low on your values, which is why you're buying. So you basically have a mismatch in values. The things that are quite obvious to the person who's setting up a business are actually non-obvious to the people who are buying from the business. And the things that are highly valuable over here might be too advanced over here.

So there's always going to be a mismatch and you have to get into that alignment and that's product market fit. Yeah. And that's where I guess, you know, our doctor turned coach thinks that people care about a qualification when in reality they probably don't like if, or maybe they do, but like there's some level of testing the market to see if that's, if that's actually a thing.

Yeah. Well, maybe they want a certificate that you're now certified and ready to put your first YouTube video up. And maybe that's important. And you might sit there and go, that's so silly. But it's like, but I just want to be certified that I'm ready to start. And it's like, okay, well, here's the certificate. Right? So that is all product market fit. Nice. And the great thing about this is that this is all stuff people can do like in a couple of hours on a weekend while you have a job. Totally. Like it's not that hard to put together one of these things. Go on ScoreApp, go on Google.

any Google Forms or anything like that and you can probably whack one together. Exactly. Yeah. And you're collecting data, you're collecting signals of interest, you're getting leads. Remember, my background was like people ringing 1-800 numbers and people emailing that they would like to attend. So anything like that, like, you know, any signal of interest is going to be a powerful signal of interest. And then product market fit is making adjustments.

Now, the end result of product market fit should be a landing page or a brochure that when you show it to people, they go, oh, that's cool. So we must, I know this sounds weird, but the end result for that stage is you now have a landing page or a brochure

that is the document that shows this is the offer. This is the product. It's an offer form. And most people, it's like they kind of steamroll ahead, but they don't produce that piece of collateral. That piece of collateral is a very important step where people can hold it, see it, open it, look at it. You don't have to have it. By the way, you could create a brochure for going on a trip to the moon.

And it doesn't necessarily have to exist and you don't have to own rockets and all of that sort of stuff. But you could say in 2025, I'm going to be partnering with a rocket company for a trip to the moon. Would you...

would you sign up for this? Would you, you know, does this look like something you'd want? And all it needs to do is be a brochure that looks like a trip to the moon brochure. And, you know, it says trip to the moon right there. And now there's no cost in doing that, right? A little bit of time and design, but ultimately you can show people and they can then go, yes, I want that. Wow. Yes. And this is,

I'm just thinking like, this is the exact stuff we used to do in like a ICT class in school of like, Hey, pretend like you're designing this database and let's make a brochure on Microsoft publisher or whatever it was back in the day around the thing. And I guess the equivalent in the modern world is either just like whipping up a quick landing page on like Squarespace or anything simple, even like a Google doc. Um, this, uh,

A coach person who I had breakfast with was like obsessing over her WordPress website. I was like, honestly, I have paid for $10,000 coaching packages off the back of a Google doc. You don't need the thing where it's just like the offer laid out. You need some document. Yeah, something that I can be like, okay, here is the offer and here's how much it costs. Oh, on that point, here's how much it costs. Do you put the price on the- So there's three documents that eventually come together. There's the brochure, the offer form, and the signup.

So the brochure is all the kind of story around the product and what's included. The offer form is how much is it and what do you get specifically. Now, on a landing page, you would have seen if you hit the pricing button on most websites and it gives you one of those drop downs where it says gold, silver, bronze, and it's tick, tick, tick, cross, cross, cross. That's the offer page. That's the offer. And the sign up is...

where people buy and they put in all their details and they pay a deposit. Often they'll pay just a holding deposit for a startup. Or they'll say, you can say, we will notify you when this is available. One of the best things you can do at the MVP level is you can put up a landing page. If people click the buy now button, it says this product's no longer available in your area or not yet available in your area. Join the waiting list.

And then people go, okay, I joined the waiting list. That way you don't need payment gateways. You don't need to have credit card machines or any of those sorts of things. You're just collecting the signal that they were willing to pay, but you didn't let them. Is it at all useful to, so we're having this dilemma with our courses where it's like, my instinct was that we should have the landing page before we even think about creating it.

about creating the course because then we're like, and we should do the audience interviews and use that to tweak the landing page. And then we should have like a pre-order form that gives them like a big discount or something. And so that we, in addition to getting an idea of how many people click the button, we get an idea of how many people were willing to pre-order. Yeah.

Is that something that you would generally recommend? It's so much better. You don't need to do discounts either. Demand and supply tension push the price up, but not down. So for example, if you said we're doing a cohort of 300 and join the waiting list,

And if it's transparent that 3,500 people joined the waiting list and there's only 300 spots, you don't need a discount. So transparent demand and supply tension pushes prices up. So essentially, any join the waiting list or register your interest or any of that sort of stuff, provided there's a level of transparency to show the tension, that will result in high prices, not low prices. Okay. So I...

I feel like through reading your stuff, I've stumbled upon a lot of these ideas over the last several years. But I think when someone hears about it for the first time, the thought that you can sell a thing without having created the thing leads to like, oh, is that unethical? That sounds evil. That sounds bad. It's very evil. What's going on with that? It's very simple. You're either asking them to attend an information event

which you're going to deliver an information event on Zoom, or maybe you're going to book a little room, right, boardroom or something, but you're inviting people to an event and that is a standalone thing that they can get some information and learn more about the topic. Or you're inviting them to take a scorecard or a survey and they're going to hand over some data in exchange for some feedback, right? So there's an ethical exchange.

Or you're inviting them to join a waiting list where they know that the product is not yet available, but they're wanting to be included in information and updates when they become available. So Elon Musk knew that Cybertruck was not going to be built for three years, but he launched Cybertruck. He showed people what Cybertruck would look like. He invited people to put down a $100 deposit if they wanted to be in the waiting list for a Cybertruck, knowing full well that it wouldn't be available for three years.

he collected a million deposits, million one hundred dollar deposits,

And that allowed him to raise an unlimited amount of capital from the market to then go and fulfill those orders. So he was able to go and build the factories. Imagine he hadn't collected those signals. And you go to JP Morgan and you say, hey, look, we want to create a Cybertruck. And this is what it looks like. It's unlike anything that's ever been built. And JP Morgan's going to go, we can't give you money for a factory for that.

But if you go in there and say a million people have put down a $100 deposit, it's like, great, what are the terms? Yeah. Yeah. So you're not doing anything unethical. It's an event, it's a scorecard, or it's a waiting list. Where did the name scorecard come from?

Well, a quiz typically is testing your knowledge. Like if I quiz you on your Beatles trivia, I'm testing to know what you know. A assessment kind of feels like academic. I just wanted to keep it like a fun way of describing. Yeah, it does sound cool. So it's like a scorecard. It's like, should you start a YouTube channel? Answer these questions, find out, take the test, answer them.

get a scorecard. And the scorecard is like, because we've set up the software so that you can have multiple categories. So you could have diet, exercise and sleep. And then it's like, oh, your diet's strong, your exercise is strong, but your sleep is the weakest. So it's that kind of a scorecard of, you know, being able to look at different categories. Oh man, I'm going to make a productivity scorecard. Yeah, definitely. And what categories would you do? Probably something like,

Do you know where you want to go? So like vision or... Vision type stuff. And then in terms of like, do you know where you want to go? Do you know how you're going to get there? So in terms of like goal setting... Tactics, tactical planning. That kind of stuff. Then it's going to be how good is your takeoff? So like getting started with work, overcoming procrastination, all that kind of stuff. Then...

How good are you at staying on the course? So like not getting distracted and focused and stuff. And then... Probably gadgets and tools, right? Some like people love gadgets and tools. Definitely. How strong are your supplies? Something around like, to what extent do you regularly take breaks and recharge and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So you probably want to have three to five categories. You want to boil it down to three to five categories. And you want to then do six questions per category. So it's 30 questions all up, something like that. And then basically when people answer the 30 questions, the scorecard will then break it into the categories and it'll say you have no gadgets, you're a zero for gadgets,

but you're really high on motivation. You've got an amazing vision, but your tactical implementation's low. So then you say, great, you've got a clear vision, but we need to work on your tactics and your gadgetry. And then that gives a clearer indicator. Even if I don't make the specific product of like, oh, wow, loads of people are really struggling with motivation. Cool, let's try and make a video, write a book, do a thing based on that market. Love it.

Okay, sick. So we've got the idea ideation thingy, we've narrowed it down and then we have built the MVP, which is the scorecard or the event or the webinar. On that note, what's the deal with webinars? They have a sort of a bit of a

In my mind, webinar equals slightly scammy. I guess it's basically an event bot online.

Because I want to reduce the amount of time that it takes for people to jump on or jump off if they don't like it. So I might say, hey, I'm a doctor. I want to do a lecture on what we've been learning around gut health, let's say. So I'm going to do an introduction to weight loss through better gut health.

Would you like to jump on? It's going to be a 45-minute lecture. Jump on Zoom. You don't have to travel anywhere. You don't have to catch a train. You don't have to do any of that. So it's a Zoom meeting. So-

Yeah, look, any tool can be used for scammy stuff. A boardroom, there are probably boardrooms full of scammers right now, right? But it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the boardroom. So it's just a Zoom meeting. It's low cost for you, low friction for them. And it's just an easy way to test the market. Because if you can get 30 people on that webinar, but half of them drop off,

during the webinar, then it's like, okay, something's wrong. So it's giving you feedback and that's all we're after at the beginning. So MVP, product market fit,

The next one's called go-to-market. Go-to-market is where you're now pushing sales and marketing on. You might raise some money to go-to-market. It's very easy to raise go-to-market money because you've done your MVP, you've got your data, you've got your testing, and now the data says we should go all in on this. So now it's go-to-market. When people think about starting a business, they normally mentally jump to go-to-market. So it's like, oh, I need to

go and talk to people and quit my job and all that sort of stuff. And they haven't done those first few steps. So go-to-market is where you...

Turn on all your lead generation. You might spend money on ads. You might do joint ventures and promotions. You're hustling. You're making sales. You might hire a team at that point. You might hire a salesperson. So that's all the go-to-market activity. You're probably going from testing revenue. Maybe you've earned 50 grand testing, and now you're going to earn $500,000 or a million. Where did the testing revenue come in?

Well, you might have had people put down deposits or you might have just taken on, like, let's say, well, for example, when we built ScoreApp,

I did like a dozen people who paid eight grand each for their scorecard and we built it on WordPress and we literally just charged them the full amount to build it from scratch each time. Um, and that's because there was no platform. That's how much it cost. Um, so we probably earned 80 to a hundred grand worth of, um, people paying for a setup. Uh, but it was a hands-on setup. Yeah. Yeah. It seems like a lot of startups do this where, um,

You sign up to the thing, but in the early days, it's someone on a Google sheet who's doing the thing. And they know they're going to build the software at some point, but at least they've got someone on a Google sheet doing the thing. That is the most successful startups. Yeah. That's how it's done. That's how the professionals do it, by the way. A lot of the time, the amateurs think that the professionals go and build this amazing all singing, all dancing thing and then sell it. That's

Absolutely not. The more professional the entrepreneur, the more likely they are to be just like putting together slide decks and making the sale and then doing a hands-on one-at-a-time sale to see how the customer's interacting at every single step. And you might want to create a productivity app and you literally have...

a Google Sheet and you have a person who rings up and says, "Have you done your Google Sheet today? Let's go through it together. Jump on and we'll both do it." It's like, "Oh, this isn't an app. It's a Google Sheet." You know that that's a pro entrepreneur. Amateur entrepreneur will get the family's 300 grand, mortgage the house, grandma's money is in it, and then they built this all singing, all dancing piece of technology that nobody's ever going to use. Nice.

Yeah, I think so. Personal trainers who do like online personal training and stuff are

I feel like there's this thing where it's like they're going to give you the programming or something like that, but it's probably just like a Google Sheet template that they just use for all their clients. And maybe at some point there's like a sophisticated level of customization, but realistically everyone broadly needs the same plan. So it's not that hard. Yeah. And a lot of the time people want handholding, they want support, they want accountability. So what they're providing is those types of things.

But once again, that is a self-employed freelancer type model. So it's not so much like what we're discussing is that world of the entrepreneur, building the scalable solution and building a business that will eventually have value. Because ultimately, an entrepreneur builds an asset. And the reason entrepreneurs can sell their business is they have an asset and the asset's saleable. And that's the difference. Self-employed people aren't really building an asset. Right.

They're selling labor. So this is a pathway to that exitable, saleable, scalable asset. People who have work-life balance are underpinned by assets. So the reason I might have work-life balance is because I've got best-selling books that are selling. Like it's weird. I sell a few books an hour every hour around the clock.

And that is like a relationship engine always running. And people are learning about what we do and who we are without me having to physically be anywhere. So that's called an asset. An asset has been developed and then the asset works. Online scorecards, we generated 90,000 leads online.

on autopilot and those were always coming in. We automatically connected those to a salesperson. So when a lead came in, a salesperson got a notification and then they pick up the phone, talk to that person, make a sale so I can be anywhere in the world.

That is underpinning yourself with assets. So what we're talking about with entrepreneurship is the creation of an asset that does the work. Intellectual property, media or tech is normally the primary assets that we work with as entrepreneurs is intellectual property, media and technology. Right. So again, I'm thinking to my hypothetical productivity course, for example.

The assets are the YouTube videos that plug the scorecard. Yeah, based on intellectual property. So the scorecard is technology, the video is a media, and your approach to it is intellectual property. And then every day X number of people will fill out the scorecard probably because it's a free scorecard. It's easy to plug in a video without seeming like scamming in any way. It's literally just a free scorecard. Of the people that are sufficiently then qualified through the scorecard,

We could then either do a frictionless sale of like, you would love the online course. Yep. Or do a, where does a salesman fit into this equation? Salesperson typically fits with any sale that is north of a couple of thousand. Okay.

Because just by virtue of the fact that there's a spend, normally requires some trust and some customization and conversation. So if you were doing a productivity rollout with a corporate and they were thinking about doing this with 70 of their employees, then that would normally involve some form of sales conversation. It's unlikely that the NHS would roll out a 70 person trial on productivity without talking to someone first. So

Essentially, when there's a commitment, normally for things that are less than 1,000 and that have a free trial, any of those types of things, you don't normally need a salesperson. You can do it through media. But once we go into the thousands, most people want to talk to someone and that's where a salesperson fits in. And then when the leads come in, that salesperson can talk to them and identify issues.

you know, and reassure and give the right information, you know, because you're taking, if a salesperson's good, they live and breathe this product and service. They understand all the complexity and all the moving parts. And then the person's got their narrow set of needs and the salesperson is essentially sharing with them. These are the features, advantages, benefits that are relevant for you.

So our YouTuber Academy course is now north of $2,000. So like two grand, I think three grand and seven grand is three different packages. And I've always sort of thought, especially after reading oversubscribed, would it be useful to have a sales function? Well, you'd probably find that you could add a million a year just through a salesperson. So if you've got warm leads, there are plenty of people who they've already signaled their intent that they want to do this.

The only reason they're not buying is they're just not sure. I would hypothesize that the number one reason people don't buy is they don't feel confident themselves that they will be the right person to do the work. And if you focus your energy on having a salesperson who can listen to what their idea is, show them some case studies or examples of people who've had a similar idea, help them to identify that, yes, there's a market for what you're talking about, or no, there's not.

And then just do a little bit of reassurance and then maybe offer some sort of a guarantee period where you say, hey, look, it sounds like you need to test this idea. If you knew this would work, would it be a silly decision to spend two grand on this? No, I could do that. Okay, great. So what if we have a guarantee period where we do some testing and if you can get more than 50 people to subscribe to your channel, that's enough of a test in month one to know it's a good idea and then you're happy to spend the two grand. Yeah.

Yeah, okay, great. So anything less than 50 people subscribed, we'll refund the money. If it goes over 50, if you've done the work, you've uploaded these videos, you've got your 50 subscribers, then you're happy. So a little bit of that conversation, you probably find that you can make a sale a day, 200 days of the year, there's another 400,000 and up.

It's not bad. That could be quite fun. Yeah. And it could be a good service, right? It's radical empathy for the person who's buying. Yeah. Is this genuinely useful for... So last time we did two cohorts ago, we sort of did a Zoom webinar, a Zoom call. I was available for an hour, four times a day just to answer people's questions about the thing.

But what I found was that like, I know 20 people would show up, 15 of them would have the cameras off. Most of them were like younger people that were never going to sign up, but just wanted to see what I was like on a Zoom call. And it just ended up being not overly helpful.

Is that where you then start qualifying leads and have one-on-one conversations and stuff? Yeah. So you'd probably have a salesperson who does an email out and says, hey, I'd love to talk to you about your YouTube channel. Would you like to have a chat? Here's a link to my diary. People then book a time in the diary.

maybe it's a 20 minute, 30 minute slot. Tell me about what kind of YouTube channel you'd like to launch. Tell me where are you at in your YouTubing journey? Right at the beginning, I've got 100,000 followers, right? Who knows? Or maybe the scorecard's already told you. So it's like, hey, a scorecard says that you've got 5,000 plus followers. Tell me a bit about how did you get there? So what are you looking to do next? What help do you think we can offer? What made you signal your interest in our product? What held you back? What stopped you from going ahead with it?

Oh, okay, so you were just going away on a holiday and the timing didn't work. What about now? Oh, no, you're fine now. Okay, great. I'm glad I called you. Let's get you set up. So, you know, those things happen all the time. And sometimes people will be too scared to ask you a question because it's you. You're the figurehead. You're the key person of influence. So they might just be too nervous to ask a silly question. But they'll ask you a salesperson. Yeah, and like the cool thing about this, I think, is that the ability to just –

offer someone a phone call is something that again anyone can do even when they have a job. The amount of people that I speak to who are like, "I want to do the side hustle thing, but I have a job where I'm a full-time student and I've only got a few hours on a weekend." And there's this impression that people have that they have to do this mountain of work over a period of several years before they can get anywhere at all. But actually this process of coming up with the idea as MVP with a scorecard or with a Zoom event or whatever,

get the product market fit, hop on a phone call with some people and just actually figure out what their problems are and be like, would you be willing to pay X amount for this thing? It feels very doable. It's all doable. Yeah. The hard part is go to market and scale and exit. So the next three steps is what we think of as entrepreneurship, which is go to market, which is turn on the jets. Let's go for it. Let's hire a team, salesperson, all of that sort of stuff is all go to market strategy.

Scale is multiple locations. Now we're going to go out in, so we might start in London and then go out to Los Angeles and New York and different locations. So we're going to go, scale is normally new products, new markets, new territories. So we're going to scale out and then exit is let's sell this business and go again. So when we think of entrepreneurs, we think go to market, scale up,

exit. But actually the first three steps are very doable, which is ideation, minimum viable product and product market fit. Amazing. All right. So we've talked a lot about these first few stages of the entrepreneur revolution, becoming an entrepreneur. I think we'll leave the entrepreneur subject there because most people, as we get down the list, the amount of people that scale up and go to market and exit is relevant to dwindles. But I'd love to hear...

What's it like for you? You now run a company that has like 100 plus employees and you own multiple businesses and you're living with wife and kids in London. It seems like you're living the dream life. What's that like? And I'm asking from a selfish perspective because I'm trying to figure out what does my career look like 10, 15, 20 years later? And

At the moment, I see examples of people like Tim Ferriss and Ryan Holiday who do this sort of content thing and writing a book occasionally. It seems good. But I haven't really spoken to many people that seem to be living their best life with Wife and Kids while owning multiple businesses and stuff. So, yeah, what's it like? Well, Wife and Kids is the best thing ever, right? So, you know, for me, that's the thing that really completes life and makes it all worthwhile and makes the journey worthwhile.

All the ups and downs just pale in comparison to when you get the family and the family home and all of those sorts of things.

Well, what's interesting is that no matter what level of wealth you're at, when you have little kids, life becomes very different, very boring, routine-based. It can be a massive challenge to your identity and your ego. Well, suddenly the whole world is not you. Suddenly you don't matter at all.

You go from being the center of your ego universe to being a supporting act to the center of the world, especially when children are very, very young and need a lot of care and attention. Your partner will be very focused on them. Right.

Right now, you take it very much for granted that you can roll out of bed whenever you want and go for breakfast somewhere and you can change your mind about something and you can just simply jump on a plane and go on holiday. Once you've got kids, all of that is logistics and you find yourself with nannies, bigger house, bigger car, logistics, all of that stuff starts to... So it's a different life. Yeah.

It's a very good life. It's lovely and I recommend it. I think life moves in chapters and I had an amazing chapter in my 20s which was the globe-trotting entrepreneur making millions and running team and partying and all of that sort of stuff. I had a different chapter in my 30s building a global business as well and in my 30s I wrote best-selling books. I spoke on big stages. I got paid money.

tens of thousands of pounds to give a one-hour talk regularly. I got to share the stage with my heroes like Richard Branson and people like that. Richard Branson follows me on Twitter, by the way. He only follows a couple of people and it's like that stuff. And then in my late 30s, early 40s, I'm now the family guy.

So we've got the big house and we spend a lot of time at the big house and we go to the park and, you know, little things are big things. Getting on the swings is a big thing. And, you know, overcoming a fear of a dog that comes up and sniffs you is a big thing. So, you know, my whole world now revolves around this chapter, a very different chapter. So what does...

Now that you're in this chapter, what does your work life look like? So I live a fairly normal work life now. I have work life balance. I arrived at that place. So I typically start my day at 9.30 and I finish my day around 5, 5.30. And a lot of the time I have nothing to do during the day. So I might go out for lunch with my wife and I often drop the kids at school and often pick them up from school. Yeah.

And, you know, I might sit and play computer games with the kids and all that sort of stuff. So I have a lot of that going on. Yeah. So how much do you care now at this point about making more money?

like professional success and like how, how, yeah. So for me, making more money is more about the fact that I've acquired a set of skills and I like using those skills, right? I'm really good at buying and selling companies. For example, I'm really good at, I've done seven acquisitions. I've done several exits. Um, and you know, the, the cool thing with entrepreneurship is,

is that it really starts getting going at 40 and you start getting really good at 40 and your career goes from strength to strength after 40. I felt it was a little sad. Roger Federer, he just retired and he has to retire because his body can't keep up with the demand of tennis. So career ends at 40, whereas entrepreneurs don't really get going statistically until they're early 40s.

So one of the things that I really enjoy is that now I've got a set of resources and team and data and skills that actually I can get a lot done in a fairly short space of time, right? Because now I've got the leverage. But when I think about making money, it's really...

I don't think a lot about making money, but I do think a lot about leveraging that set of skills and creating fun things and having fun projects. I also love doing businesses in partnership with people, especially I love doing partnerships like co-founding with slightly younger people, bringing them up in their entrepreneurial journey.

So it sounds like you're mostly motivated by the enjoyment, the love of the craft, the infinite game that you're playing around like, hey, this business thing is cool. I like building and growing selling businesses. Let's do more of that. Yeah, well, my infinite game is to develop entrepreneurs who stand out, scale up, and make a positive impact. That's my infinite game. So I do that through my accelerator programs. We develop entrepreneurs who stand out, scale up, and have purpose at the heart of their business. And we've done that with 3,500 companies around the world now.

Score app is a piece of technology that solves the number one problem that people have, which is the lead generation problem. So it allows them to stand out, scale up and start making a difference. And on my accelerators, I often put heads of social charities and change projects and put them through. And we like I do one to one coaching with people who could be a key person of influence in a way that really changes the world.

So yeah, look, I have a bunch of fun because if you have a set of skills, you want to use those skills.

it feels right that you've drawn to use those skills because it's like, if you're a ballroom dancer and you're really good at dancing, you want to dance. If you're a guitarist and you're really good at guitar, you want to pick up the guitar and play. So if you're an entrepreneur and you start figuring out how this crazy world of entrepreneurship actually works, you want to talk about it. You want to do it. You want to buy and sell stuff. You want to scale stuff. Yeah. One of my coaches asked a few weeks ago, he asked me the thought experiment of

what would life look like if I wasn't, if I just was not allowed to create anything on the internet for the next like two years? And I was like, okay, I mean, fair enough. I guess I do loads of reading, get into philosophy and economics and politics. I'm interested in reading all that kind of stuff. And then when the two-year market is up, then I can distill all that stuff. And that would be super fun. And then he was like, okay, what if you're not allowed to do anything on the internet, any kind of teaching on the internet for the rest of your life? I was like, oh damn, I'd be really depressed. Like,

I guess I'd, I don't know, try and do it in like teaching in real life and host like lectures and stuff. But it just...

That made me realize that for me, the infinite game is teaching, like learning cool stuff and teaching it. Learning how life works, sharing it with others and helping improve their lives, right? So that's who you are and that speaks to your identity and all of that. The risk can be that your strong suit can become overused. You can be a ballerina who dances until your feet bleed. So one thing that is a risk is...

When you discover how great life can be with fun, freedom and flexibility built in, you often become very picky about your partner who you're going to settle down with and have kids with and all that sort of stuff. So therefore, you get a lot of people like Tim Ferriss, bless him, but he's notoriously single and footloose, fancy free and not having kids and all that sort of stuff.

Which is, I get it. It's kind of cool. I was that guy, right? But there can be this risk that you've got your life set up so well that you don't want to disrupt it with a partner or kids. So that can be where your winning strategy becomes your losing strategy.

Have you come across this book called The Second Mountain? No, it sounds like a cool book. I think it's by David Brooks. The thesis is that in life, there are two mountains. The first mountain is the mountain of success and status and financial success and doing all the stuff. And then you get to the summit and realize that that's not where lasting happiness is. Or you get chucked off the mountain by like a health scare or someone dying or something like that. And you realize that there is a second mountain. And while the first mountain was the mountain of like,

The second mountain is the mountain of joy. And while the first mountain was all about optimizing for freedom and fun and flexibility, the second mountain is all about like, actually, I really want to invest. I want to commit. I want to build a home. I want to give myself to a cause that I really care about. And yeah,

But getting off that first mountain onto the second is like people get to different points. It's great. I can relate to that. I think it's a great philosophy. You don't want to just keep climbing up and down this same mountain. You're constantly searching for that new high of fun, freedom, flexibility. Because I see a lot of people... I'm in the space where I do come across a lot of people who have done that.

I think that it's hard to say because you only really kind of fall in love with your kids after they're born and after they're... I think it might be different. Once they're beyond a certain age or certain months or something. I think too, maybe there's a difference between men and women. I think men don't necessarily...

naturally love the idea of kids, but once you have them, then it's like, oh, now I get it. Yeah. Every dude I know who has kids has that kind of vibe. They're like, yeah, back in the day, we were talking to Gordon about this the other day. Yeah. Like, you know, when people show you photos of their kids, you're like, what the hell? And then you get kids and then you start showing people photos of your kids. You become that dad. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So

I think it's important to have the second mountain. The other thing too is, I have a friend of mine who sold a company for $900 million in cash and has gone on to build several more businesses. I totally understand, and they're worth hundreds of millions. I totally understand, and he's also my age, I get that he's got this incredible unique set of skills for building extremely valuable businesses.

but hasn't at all gone for the second mountain. And, you know, he's all about optimizing businesses and optimizing teams and building another hundred million dollar company. But I sit there with my family and I think I'm actually really happy on this second mountain. My first mountain is going quite well, but you know, I get more joy from the second one. Amazing. Thank you so much. This has been absolutely wonderful. I will put links to all of the books in, uh,

in the video description, in the show notes. Any final asks of our viewers or listeners? Final ask is this. My mentor said to me, Daniel, don't watch the news. You live in the most incredible time. You couldn't have been born at a better time. This is an amazing moment in history. Don't ruin it by looking at all the horrible things that happened today.

So ask number one is see if you can tune out from the news and spend more time doing positive things and see if you can tune into the fact that the world is actually a really amazing place right now and that there's so many great things that you can be doing and there's so many great opportunities and that the world is a big positive place. Think about if all of humanity got to vote

what you should be doing with this amazing life that you've got, what would they want you to do based upon, you know, if they could observe you and see, you know, what would they want you to do? I think it's an incredible time to be an entrepreneur. There's more money than ever before. There's more talented people. There's more technology. This is an incredible time to be an entrepreneur. So, you know, study it, learn it, get some mentors, get some people around you and go for it. This is the moment. Amazing. Thank you so much. Cheers. Thanks for having me.

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

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