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 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 the age of 19 he got a job at a startup started his own company at 21 became a multi-millionaire by the age of like 23. super super interesting stuff I hope you enjoyed this interview as much as I did just a very quick thing before we get started if you have not yet subscribed to to the podcast either on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app of choice then please do it really helps us out a lot well Daniel thank you so much for being here it's really nice to see you in the flesh because uh your book oversubscribed is uh 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 oh 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 books and it's up to you to figure out which one I was was like but all of it all of it is just sick anyway um you've written a bunch of these books um you know the entrepreneur Revolution scorecard marketing key person of influence 24 assets key person of influence is also quite influential amongst the sort of Creator space yeah around like building a business around around an individual personal brand yeah all that kind of stuff um but before we dive into all the business stuff I'd love to open with how how did we end up here you and I talking to each other you're from Australia originally like what was the what was the backstory yeah I kind of did retirement first uh I grew up in a beach location called mooloolaba in Australia which is like just a beautiful beach um and a small town uh and um uh 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 a 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 because I just dropped out of University and um and it was really exciting and it was like oh wow okay what's what's going to happen and then over the next two years it really took off fast so um 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 so is it a marketing agency and um uh it was very much focused on event marketing and um event marketing yeah so well what what like when Tony Robbins 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 that was this uh exciting first start I had to um being in business and I had this amazing relationship with the founder John um 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 no news I had to carry a thousand dollars in my pocket there was all these kind of weird things that he got me to do uh over the over the period of building that business and then two years in I go to John and I say um I would really like some shares in the business because I was here at the beginning and I you know I've set up this subdivision this Regional Division and you know I'm doing all the right things and I called him at the wrong time I remember vividly he was loading boxes into the back of his car and I'm asking him about chairs in the business and um and he says dan if you want shares in a business go start your own so so I did uh at 21 years old I went and started my own company I replicated everything I 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 I'm not your own marketing agency yeah event marketing um and basically the 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 in back back before Zoo yeah you know back before YouTube real life events yeah yeah like this was before Myspace yeah uh so we're going right way back so we would just have these Live Events running um in 2016 six no 2005 sorry uh I did 174 live events that year we did 10.7 million in Revenue um and it was year three how okay how does a company like this make money uh 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 um the difference was is that most agencies love to do FIFA service pay me 10 grand and then pay me this per week retainers and all that what I did which I learned from John was a risk to reward uh 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 seven thousand dollars 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 uh 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 to do that 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 non-stop for two years with John uh 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 um 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 um I had basically been placing ads in their newspapers and running introduction uh presentations introduction events and I'd been through the motions non-stop for two years so for me you were pretty seasoned at the thing I felt like yeah I was going through emotions 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 how does it okay so a question on this front do a lot of young people want to start their own businesses um 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 it's massively useful to join someone else's startup like I would highly recommend that to absolutely anyone so here's what goes wrong with a lot of young people they go to careers fairs and all that sort of stuff it's only big corporates that exhibit so they end up being funneled down the big corporate uh uh 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 all already exist but don't have 250 employees so and the vast majority of them have 10 people or less right so it's huge 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 know have no idea what everyone else does um 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 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 I would highly recommend anyone who wants to start a business first do two years working inside somebody else's small business oh interesting so like a lot of people um sort of in our team want to talk to them about this or people have 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 can be like like what is what is there to learn like because we're just like doing stuff but I guess for someone who doesn't have experience running a business or being in or 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 know you do your study and you do your education and then you go and work in hospital and you're working around experienced doctors you know and like the theory is all well and good but like the two 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 it's yeah and here's how long this actually takes and you know these little things that you like in a business context flipping back from medicine which I know nothing about uh you know just things like uh 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 is 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 will mail our list for your product I'm sitting in on that meeting quietly and going oh wow that's how that happened 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 right okay that's just a meeting that you have and you just agree that in the meeting and then you write it down and confirm it and then you put it in the heads of terms yeah okay now I get it yeah I think the similar 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 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 the money for and wait what that's a thing like how 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 you have to like 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 I wouldn't know how to contact a government official yeah unless I know someone who's literally doing the thing yeah and you hear these fancy titles it's like oh I'm an analyst with um kpmj 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 I'll give you some real examples we worked with um financial planners we worked with franchisors one of the biggest deals we did was with franchisors who wanted to sell franchises and what we'd do is a road show of events introducing their franchise to potential franchisees um now as a sixty thousand dollar franchise we would get uh 15 of the franchise success fee um as our marketing fee okay so they paid us um an amount that covered costs first and then we got 15 successfully on on top of that so that was a great deal they'd put a lot of energy and effort into creating a franchise we um they when 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 and my child's always 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 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 two you know two um uh it feels too saturated so we just basically approached one that I thought was great and we negotiated deal and we did a road show where instead of them being shoulder to shoulder with competitors we would put them in front of 50 people who were potential customers how would you find these 50 people so we'd advertise do Direct Mail campaigns we would do um uh there was something called fax broadcasting at the time facts broadcasting okay let's not even go I'd have to 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 like I said I've been taking Heights every day for the last 12 months and through that I've actually become friends with the founder Dan who we actually had on season one of this podcast and this season we also have an interview with neuroscientist and psychiatrist Tara swart who is the chief science officer at Heights as well and one of the things I love about Heights is the fact that every single thing they do is very evidence-based over on their blog on their website they've got tons of Articles along with links to all of the different papers that they've cited that show all the benefits of the various micronutrients that they've got in these two little capsules and the best thing about taking these is that it's just two little capsules every morning so you don't have to deal with green sludge or any other kind of faffrey it's just literally taking two pills it's super easy to sign up you just go on the website you put in your address and they send you either a monthly or a quarterly subscription I sign up to the quarterly one myself because a it's cheaper and B I'd have to take fewer deliveries and if you use a coupon code Ali 15 at checkout that will give you 15 off the already discounted price of the quarterly subscription so you can try out Heights to your heart's content so thank you so much Heights for sponsoring this episode and for helping improve my own brain care 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 short form short form is the world's best service that summarizes books but it's way more than just book summaries they almost have a whole study guide for every book that they've got on the platform where they've got a one-page summary and then they also have chapter by chapter breakdowns and it's not just chapter by chapter breakdowns also in between the chapter breakdowns they have interactive exercises where you can engage more readily with the ideas in the book short form covers non-fiction books from a bunch of different genres that you might be interested in for example they've got a load of stuff in the business world so if for example you're an entrepreneur or you want to become an entrepreneur that'll be great for you they've got books in motivation they've got books in education they've got books in lifestyle and communication basically any genre of like non-fiction personal development is help helpy stuff that will help you level up your life it's all there on short form short form Publishers new book guides and articles every week and if you're a subscriber then you get to vote on what book they cover next and in fact through that that system I have voted for various books that they've then turned into summaries for example one book I recently Revisited is in fact Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki now I read this book ages and ages and ages ago I think when I was I was in school or university and it really shaped the way that I approach my views of money but to be honest the book is kind of basic and it's somewhat out of date but revisiting the short form summary of it meant that I could revisit the sort of abstracted lessons without having to deal with all of the you know the tone of the book no offense to Robert is a little bit a little bit too Brash whereas a short form summaries it is in a way a nicer way of getting the same ideas anyway if any of that sounds up your street and you would like to sign up to the world's best service that summarizes books then head over to shortform.com forward slash deep dive and that will give you a completely free five-day trial and you can try out the service to your heart's content that link will also be in the video description and in the show notes and thank you so much short form for sponsoring this episode so okay so you as the marketing agency are are trying to you're putting it out in the newspaper being like do you have 20 grand to spare have you thought about starting a franchise well no we would do uh 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 we would what we would 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 like so I'll give you an example from when we worked with a financial planning company so they were marketing do you want Financial Planning and what we would do is like 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 so 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 but 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 the name in the in the diary or if 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 okay so when you're now mind you we're going way back in time I'm 41 now so so he's taught this lead lead generation marketing business and you you said you were doing sort of 10 million plus we got to 10.7 million within how long three years bloody hell how did that feel as a 24 year old at the time doing that kind of thing it was pretty wild it was a lot of stress um it was I mean we had a huge team well when I say huge team we had we had about 20 of us working out of a massive seven bedroom house um you know I was 24 I was buying uh like a brand new BMW X5 which I wasn't able to really even ensure and you know things like that um I you know 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 kind 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 and like it was crazy we were doing a million a month in sales so and we're very profitable uh so it was a pretty amazing first start to life you know 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 um 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 you know and then you can make one dollar and then you can make ten dollars and you know we did a couple of million in the first year with John and then we're doing six 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 like YouTubers and stuff where compounding yeah compounding and long-term growth and if you expect Revenue within six months as a YouTuber it's like oh you you might be kind of aiming for the wrong sorts of things um in in what ways like the entrepreneurship stuff different to that 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 um okay so and that's the 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 Jay it's it's the shape of losing money and then making money so that's called a J curve business and the J curve business a lot of the time is like technology so let's say you spend a million dollars building something uh of tech related and then you sell it for 10 pounds a month ten dollars a month right keep jumping between dollars and pounds um but uh you would 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 ten dollars a month now you've got 10 people paying 10 a month so now the J curve starts I know you're compounding and you're 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 and you know 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 that's a lot of business models are 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 right even yeah you've got to hit volumes yeah right so a restaurant you know the average spend might be thirty dollars 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 uh and like 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 you know hundreds of thousands and you have very little overhead and you might hire an assistant or you might you know 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 and they get paid hundreds of thousands to go and do manufacturing Consulting they work on site um very low overheads that's not a J curve business yeah yeah that's that that's so interesting so so two two thoughts on this um I think the the business of quote being a content creator or doing the YouTube channel or whatever thing is definitely a Jayco business um 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 exactly 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 and generally while they're a student or while they've got a full-time job yeah and they're not seeing a return straight away whereas and I think it's it's a lot less like I listen to a bunch of business podcasts and I generally don't hear about non-jcove businesses like I've I've got a friend from from University who does this manufacturing Consulting for fashion companies because he's into like Ai and sort of coding and stuff and loves fashion and understands how fashion supply chain works and gets like stupidly large amounts of money for a single Consulting Arrangement um and he's just he's 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 exactly 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 sync two years of free F 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 uh so the 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 free piece of content or they do a free trial um or they sit down at a restaurant expecting to spend you know 30 or something like that so it's fairly friction unless 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 you know 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 at 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 twelve people working together doing supply chain Consulting together and all of that you know everyone can be making great money you know in those types of businesses so anything that involves a sales process is normally a non-j curve business interesting um what where does a freelancer fit into this yeah so 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 um 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 right let's just zoom out a little bit the school system teaches us to be component labor so when we go to school right 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 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 but you could 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 an example right if you've got the knowledge of how supply chain 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 you're better off actually being the key person of influence up on stage telling stories um winning the deals uh 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 yeah and so let's say uh so just use a concrete example um I know a bunch of people who um are interested in writing uh they've maybe done liking your English degrees or something don't really want 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 quick freelance writer would be how oh like the default path would be I need to get a normal job the the next to default path would be I should become a freelance writer but it sounds like like how 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 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 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 um yeah and you're hoping for a retainer or something so you've got a regular income coming in and whereas you might have 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 for you know that sort of thing so it's it's okay the downsides are significant you know you don't have a real career path unless you invent one and um you can easily have you know lack motivation because you're not in an environment that's dictating you know 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 up invoice 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 all you've got all of the downsides of having a job without the security of a job right 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 right for example how might they level up their thinking and think more entrepreneurially well you could create a writing agency you could um create um uh packages of content intellectual property that you've created that you can then resell and on sale 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 gonna component labor they're gonna 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 gonna 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 I'm not thinking I want to be a freelance writer I'm thinking what is the problem that I can solve well the problem the the 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 you're 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 in instead of thinking I want I want to be a lead gen person running events you were thinking what is the problem 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 you know we're just surrounded by competitors okay and so how what was your relationship to money like the in the around that time if you can remember sort of age 19 you start working for this starter Bureau earning a salary and then suddenly you're sort of making like Millions doing your own thing yeah so as a university student um I was properly broke um to the extent that I would uh you know go to the Butcher and see if they had offcuts that were going cheap that day um and I would go to the veggie store and get a box of like horrible vegetables that were you know going like for two dollars a box um I was a Pizza Hut delivery driver on three dollars a delivery um I was um uh late night barmen I was doing door-to-door sales for a roof insulation 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 fifteen hundred dollars 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 um 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 gonna get 10 per sale and if you're only making 520 000 a year worth of sales I'm gonna 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 um he said I want you to bring me I think it was a thousand maybe two thousand I want you to bring me a thousand dollars 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 have borrowed some from Dad I used to run these nightclub parties um in 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 you know 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 hundred dollar notes at that point so I've got like 10 hundred dollar notes in my in my pocket and what was interesting is about two weeks or three weeks in my brain starts to adjust that a thousand dollars 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 you know when I first was doing sales calls and I would say you know oh uh you know this is two thousand dollars it was like my energy towards two thousand dollars is like I'm asking you for your kidney um yeah and then a couple of weeks later it's like oh it's you know pocket money it's not not like my non-verbal communication my energy towards money just shifted so radically just by carrying a bunch of it so um several things happened it surfaced up to it brought up to the surface all of the issues that I had around money so I'm going to be judged uh 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 um and then it brought up if you have money people will attack you um so that was another psychology of money it's like you're going to be attacked for having money physically harmed um and the other one was like money's really hard to come by it's a very scarce resource and it's like you know getting it is really hard and you have to hold on to it so all of this kind of bubbles up to the surface and um uh and the other one was oh 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 like my only value as a man is like my having money so all of that is like bubbling and then because it's bubbling up to the surface you're able to think about it and process it and think ah is that the belief I want to have is that something I like thinking um so it was a it was a trigger for dealing with money issues very rapidly and mind you a thousand dollars back in 2001 2002 was 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 ten percent yeah so let's attempt to set that number um so this 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 well I'll give you two yeah 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 you know they're not going to report to you that a plane landed safely they're not going to report to you that you know people woke up and went to work and uh had a lovely day it's only going to be the statistically irrelevant things the things that happened to one in a hundred thousand 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 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 um 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 free frees up time Freed's up headspace frees up negative emotions um so that was great and then the big lesson I got from John was everything is Downstream from lead generation so okay you you can't build a business if you can't generate leads if you you know 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 he 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 we you know there was dozens of different ways that we would go with and we'd 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 turn the lead generation tap on nothing else changed you could like you could have a financial planning business where they've you know 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 they're you know their business isn't growing rapidly you blow up the leads you put on 40 events introduction to you know the markets introduction to investing and then that business just goes and it blows up in 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 I this is this is sparking so many so many thoughts in my mind around our own business and like how like the first time we kind of really sold something um this was before I read over subscribed um it was our kind of high ticket course and we just sort of launched it expecting like I don't know 12 people to sign up for like a beta testing cohort and like 354 people signed up and just like bloody hell um yeah but I think that's because we had four years worth of like 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 um but I guess like in my mind I'm not even thinking of it as as lead generation um yeah Ali imagine this you've got three and a half million subscribers most people don't have 3 000 people on a 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 um prevents them from taking holidays prevents them from ever switching off on the weekend you know so if you take most of those five 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 deep dive and then once your trial is over you can choose to carry on with the subscription 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 any anything else you'd recommend for like 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 all people buy things to relieve a psychological tension between what they have and what they want um 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 dealing 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 frustrational 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 so um some 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 what 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 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 um 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 pm 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 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 you can read over subscribed and scorecard marketing those are two great books on that um so I 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 as a doctor you probably ask people on a scale of one to ten how bad does it hurt um 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 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 one to ten um how motivate how motivated would you be to solve this problem on a scale of one to ten how frustrated are you by this right because you're looking for things that people rate highly as a frustration if it's a dormant need um uh you know on a scale of one to ten how happy are you with your existing you know 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 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 is pretty powerful one 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 definitely a sentiment I've I've heard from a lot of people that 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 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 you want it to be self-evidently valuable you want to 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 right and then we want to basically um 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 you know 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 um 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 uh 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 all right re 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 we 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 it's 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 and come back and buy yeah space even to 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 yep 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 um if there is um 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 gonna 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 transparency transparently there's a lot of people who want this there's only a limited number or there's a start time yeah uh okay I better do this yeah yeah with my with my first business when I was 19 and selling courses to help people get into med school uh we did and I I I'm not sure how ethical this was but we would uh artificially sell out or like a 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 of seven but they're just sold out in LA and some CSS stuff to make it look red and like um and that seemed to just work but yeah here's the 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 um you know something might go wrong so it's unfortunate but there is no really there's no successful businesses that are long-term successful that don't do something around creating an urgency queue uh for for buying right and if they do 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 if there was such thing as a prophet God who handed that Prophet 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 I bet the prophet Gods would give them 50 profit margins it's like no no it's like five to ten percent profit margins it's nothing why simply because there's freely available there's no there's always seats available you can buy a ticket when you want if you missed 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 all right so Rolex is a business that has barely innovated its product in many years a Rolex today looks much the same as Rolex 50 years ago it's made from the same materials uh it's made pretty much in the same way in the same place so there's hardly any Innovation uh you they're terrible at customer service um the product itself can be easily copied um a copy can cost one tenth to one twentieth of 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 uh we've got your watch available but we can only hold it for you for three days um if not you'll miss out on it and you'll go back on the waiting list for 18 months um now Rolex is massively profitable something like 70 margins so you know this is this is the difference between being over subscribed Lodge commotion urgency um actually and I will say this Rolex has logic emotion and urgency the emotion is status and achievement and significance and uh marking in a significant occasion the logic is that they hold their value they're incredibly good hedge against inflation there are people who buy Rolexes and keep them in a draw purely as a store of wealth and the urgency is that there's a 19 month waiting list so when you bring it all together explosive nice okay so the mentor John um these three big lessons the value of money um no news is good and um everything is Downstream of lead generation so what what happened next in your story so you're 24 you're doing 10 million a year in this company you've got you've got a team of 20 people you're doing marketing for 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 um and then they did a really nasty negotiation tactic um and I threw my toys out the pram and basically said deals off I'm moving to London I'm going to go do something else oh um okay yeah because I was 24 25. I mean it's funny because I walked away from from tens of millions in that sale um and they had disrespected me and tried to bully in the situation not expecting like because they're they're more grown up they would never walk away from millions 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 um let's turn it off and they were shocked and then they tried to sue us um okay yeah they were like really it was really weird it was very weird but anyway we we untangled ourselves from that um 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 uh there's three times as many people in the UK and we're gonna just you know travel and we'll go to Europe and we'll go snowboarding and we'll you know we'll go to Ibiza and we'll you know do all that stuff so we just kind of went oh that's it we're going to move to London okay so it was a really random we went from having tens of millions to to basically shutting down the Australian business and moving to London why did you shut it down why not keep it going because original manager all this as a 24 year old okay fine it was just it was just the next adventure so we jumped you know 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 class 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 uh probably seven and you could you could just choose to put your feet up and not work and and stuff probably live the the good life in Bali or whatever that looks like um what gave you that drive for a kind of more more ambition more stuff um it was hugely fun you've got to remember we were working and partying and traveling and like like the business was not digging ditches we were running events going to restaurants going to nightclubs um driving fancy cars um all of my mentors were way ahead of me um you know I was hanging around with people who had businesses doing 50 million 100 million um I was regularly hanging out 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 um best-selling authors and people who'd written you know amazing books and all this so I was hanging around a peer group of people who normalized that level of life um and I was being invited as this young entrepreneur into these really great amazing circles and you know I got paid to go to Bali and speak at a conference and I got paid to hang out backstage with all the people so why would I give that up that I mean okay and it was also everyone on the team was under 30 and we were all single and we were all like nightclubby kind of people so we were all like a typical week we'd finish up the week and then we'd all go clubbing um as a team nice cool so you're so you moved to London and you were like 25 for this point like 24 25. uh yeah about 25 yeah okay so what was that what well we launched the launched a similar business in London um working with um uh International speakers to launch them in the UK Market um took off crazy four million pounds in the first year um and just doing the event stuff yeah event staff and all this sort of lead gen stuff basically doing launches for businesses that were successful outside of the UK yeah so we had a Singaporean company and we had a US company and we were launching them in in the uh in the UK uh four million in year one and um at the end of year one we hired the London Palladium Theater 2000 seats um and we like 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 like just a complete like the recession just put a shop and stop to everything um our Singaporean client uh 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 U.S client that pound against the um 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 um 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 um like just entering like a really weird dark time of like oh my goodness everything is just literally come crashing without how how was that transition no 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 um and I remember a really bad phone call and hanging up and being on a like on a reflex of just like anger pretty much fist out like that and banging it into a wall a concrete wall and like almost breaking my hand and I almost had a almost broken hand and almost broken arm and I'm like what is going on um and yeah it was a horrible time um and it was a bit it was a time of reflection and there was time of thinking through what do I want to do next and the other weird thing that happened at that time is I decided to try and sell the business and uh I had this guy who agreed to buy the business for 300 Grand to 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 um he just doesn't show up and turns out he had a heart attack and went into hospital and brand new oh my goodness randomly my acquire yeah I had had a heart attack um yeah so weird like crazy weird time um 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 um this new emerging technology called Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and all this sort of stuff and how 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 launched in Tampa Florida we're launching 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 smashing it um so it was a then it was another uh that was over the following couple of years oh wow okay so the key key person 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 um but I guess sort of you wrote entrepreneurial Revolution a few years later and this is sort of the more more like getting started with entrepreneurship be 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 big 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 say oh I've got this 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 yeah and I'm like oh okay so I released entrepreneur Revolution so what is what is the entrepreneurial Revolution so this is the idea and a lot of your listeners won't get the significance of this but you know I was born in 1981 and I was born in the Industrial Age of you know 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 there was no just become a YouTuber you know of course none of that existed um 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 a thousand dollars startup costs and you know 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 um what an incredible moment in time that for the first time ever 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 the 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 used 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 well there's a 22 year old with a tick tock account making three million dollars or whatever and it's like whoa but how's that happening well they're 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 uh yeah that's I was just thinking that um the the industrial revolutionary type mindset I think is still very prevalent amongst probably like most people that I know like every anyone who's not an entrepreneur or Creator yeah like half of my friends are medics and so that's still a very much a you have a job you go to it like and there's no innovation it's a system that shouldn't change radically right because or should change slowly yeah exactly because you're dealing with People's Health outcomes so it's Gonna 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 and so like often it's it's like when I was first doing doing the YouTube stuff and even even with my first business when I was at University which was you know was I was making like I don't know 40K or 50k or something which was the equivalent of a doctor's salary when I was like in in med school my mind was just like blowing a stat how sort of like easy it was to to make that money compared to toiling away on award for 60 hours a week yeah and then when I actually started working and I was toiling away on a water 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 salary it just completely changed my entire world but just totally it's like you're on the tractor plowing the field in a day yeah 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 it it's hard not to exactly 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 in the classroom the best thing they can possibly call you on the front cover of Inc magazine is disruptive right so you know 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 if I for me personally if I have a great CFO who does all my maths homework for me that's smart that's a good thing to have but in school that would be the worst thing to do um so you know we're now this and 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 you know sales marketing money management uh coming up with ideas ideation minimum viable product testing you know Market surveys none of that stuff is in school yeah I 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 I'm now now my self-worth is wedded to the grade um and so like again if I just think of the the um 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 else someone has to approve it yeah someone has to approve it yeah yeah and even almost a kind of kind of maybe an unhealthy obsession with qualifications yeah um 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 staff I think she actually read some of your books as well and was sort of transitioning out to become a coach which was doing a coaching coaching qualification yeah and then we grabbed breakfast and she was like I I was like okay so how's the coaching business going and she was like oh you know I'm 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 gonna happen in like four months I was like okay and then when that happens what are you gonna do next and he was like oh then I'll start posting on Facebook and I was like when are you going to charge people for the coaching she was like oh you know maybe in a year or two yeah when I get a letter from someone yeah 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 um for the certification uh 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 like then it would be a very different environment it's like we're going to Mark you based on speed to Market like 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 and extra points if you can pull together three or four people who all work together and you you can you can get something there yeah yeah I think on on this point as well like I I've had similar conversations with friends and um 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 yeah no definitely if your component labor you have to be certified you have to because you're a component you're Cog in the machine and that Cog has to be perfectly fit for the machine um so you know you absolutely have to be there are certain professions especially like medicine that you've got to be qualified in and uh yeah perfect perfectly machined within an inch but I guess the danger is that sort of having that way of thinking which then yeah 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 Evolution 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 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 be they're trying to stay curious uh Steve Jobs advice in his uh commencement speech was stay humble stay curious yeah that just bugs I thought so again when when I was at University I'm kind of building this business and and stuff um 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 I just had this sort of complete non-fair of looking like an idiot and a bunch of friends spoke to me afterwards and even to this day I think I think it was like two weeks ago I was I was chatting to some friends and they were like yeah I remember you would always ask these like dumb questions and lectures and I'd be thinking the same thing but I would be thinking I don't ask the question because I don't want to look dumb I was like well it and it was I think having done the entrepreneur thing and trying to do what make my web design business when I was 14 years old all like sort of in entrenched in me this idea that like 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 know how 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 right so those sorts of things um 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 um you know repeat the past repeat the past uh put more inputs in remember those inputs then deliver the correct outputs and then there's Visionary strategic thinking um inspiration love connection empathy uh curiosity all of those sorts of things so it's about being in that Visionary mind more than the autopilot or the reptile nice nice okay so let's say someone is listening to this or watching this and they've got a normal job uh let's say I don't know they're working consulting or something like that and they're like cool I love the idea of being an entrepreneur I did my con 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 is or the bonus cycle is always yeah it's you know it's only four months away um 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 um there's a 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 the 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 you know when I worked with one of our 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 and then so it's like oh okay uh fair enough yeah so he said well it's either going to be a telecommunications company or it's going to be a technical company or it's going to be a bank or it's you know so he's like there's only a few things 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 uh like what would be your take on it because so we went through and and he was the first one to show me just this first step of ideation so you want to go through ideation and come up with a bit of a criteria as I said by the way joining an entrepreneurial team is 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 um and you're gonna be the special person because you came from a big name brand and now you're working in a boutique they're going to treat you like a king yeah right or a queen so it's going to be great okay just on that note um I don't forget your take on this one issue that a lot of people have is um I am currently making X at my current company big company etc etc I would be taking a pay cut to do this other thing that sounds cool and it's I I think it's interesting because usually X is like 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 I don't want to take a drop in my paid yeah yeah and I can understand that especially look you're in a unique position in the sense that you don't have kids if 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 um you know ramen noodles whatever right that wouldn't bother me at all um but now I have kids we have huge overheads insane overheads every month right and um and I can't make decisions of like oh yeah we'll all just live on mattresses on the floor um I might find myself divorced or something like that so um so the you know the 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 um 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 okay you also might have a boutique plus your uh 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 you're actually 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 you know so it's a bit of a mental mental gymnastics to justify activity but uh you know but essentially that's what you are doing you you are making an investment into startup equity so um yeah it is tricky it is difficult um one of the things that I recommend is you could do a little bit of um evening consulting or something like that uh there have been times for me personally where I have taken on a client in La being in London because I wanted to earn an extra amount of money and being in London allows me to consult in La at 8 30 PM till 10 pm 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 me and when 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 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 uh 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 valency and chill and stuff yeah and I'm always intrigued like does uh to what extent is it reasonable to want to have slash 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 well it's something it's something that you can afford to have if you've made so once you hit a certain level of wealth um and success you can afford to pontificate about work-life balance um and you know if you're a single person who doesn't have any dependence you can afford to think about work-life balance um the 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 high-rise building that isn't you know 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 it's for something like 65 of all people earning over 100 Grand to 55 hours a week or more so you know and when you look at almost all entrepreneurs here's here's the reality of business you're when you're starting a business you're in the process of creating an asset sweating that asset and keeping track of the 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 are super optimized and gave each of those four things 15 hours a week they're 60 hours you know and that's if you're doing part-time on each of those like 15 hours a week is part-time sales you know 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 uh if you've got eight people on a team and um you know 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 a 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 sales person 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 um work-life balance does tend to come later I know that's unpopular to say everyone wants to be like oh no peace love of Hare Krishna as we can all just you know 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 um you know and then they well I'm reformed okay great you're reformed nice of you now you're a millionaire to be so reformed right now you've got 55 people on your team working behind the scenes yeah fabulous now you can just do a strategic role well 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 um you know they didn't go to the parties they um you know like for example when I did the 10 million year that like all of those five years working for John and then that that was 60 hours a week every week um we worked weekends we ran events on the weekend uh we might have had one weekend offer in a month we like when I was starting my first business it was roll out of bed have breakfast and as soon as I 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 yeah building an asset making sales the whole lot the whole thing in your experience like having 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 uh well for starters let's be let's go to the data as well um most people who start a business are 42 most successful entrepreneurs are 42 and they start um so most the 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 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 minions so that's the data that's the path right so the path that most people take is career and this is most successful Entre millionaire entrepreneurs started at 42 sold the business at 57. um so regretting the there are very few who actually super successful entrepreneurs who started in their 20s um I've not met many people who do regret that um I think a lot of people went oh my goodness thank goodness I I jumped in with both feet when I had that when I didn't have the commitments because life gets more complicated not less complicated you know we end up you know we end up with houses and families and uh you know teams and uh all the stuff we end up with sick parents we end up with uh diseases or ailments um all of that stuff that's what that's life right the least complex is age 20. yeah so there's a this has a friend of mine who's sort of she's she's currently working full-time as a doctor and like wants to do uh sort of create a 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 um and you kind of have to choose if you want it and whether whether it's worth the payoff and like how how would you think about it it's a huge risk um there are very few broke struggling doctors right doctors cluster around a high point in society around probably the top 10 percent of earners um 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 and you know yeah they're usually pretty middle class pretty chill yeah there's hardly any that are crazy like billionaires and there's hardly any that actually drop below 35 000 a year or something like that so you've you've you've got a very safe path a safe path would mean the data clusters around a particular outcome and all the data sets around that outcome right so 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 plowed their life savings in um you know and and they're you know it was the worst decision they ever made they just weren't cut out for it or they've made they made radical decision so um she's right to not take that lightly that's a that's an important decision to make uh 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 you know 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 cat 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 are you willing and able to to make that work for the marketplace but you can't be too self-centered here your entrepreneurship is an active service it is a 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 all the hard 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 um 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 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 I don't know I can I can do this I'm getting a signal from Market but there are many people who might go oh it he just jumped out I don't think that's the case yeah it was three years of like Market making and then of getting the signals to be like okay now it's time totally yeah exactly so I'd encourage people to that now you don't have to take three years to get the signals you could do 30 to 150 surveys and people say 100 I really want this thing I want that CrossFit gym in Putney to exist yeah 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 um you know a boutique go work for an entrepreneur see if you actually like the like the lifestyle yeah yeah I love it it's just like a a fairly reasonable path of like hey this is like the 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 there is a quick 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 um and I guess even when someone has a full-time job especially has a full-time job the ideation stage that we've talked about coming up with 10 1500 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 topic um you might discover it's a lot of work just to get 30 people to show up to an event and you might discover you push the door and it flings right open you book a venue for 30 and you know 70s 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 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 he said 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 yeah so if I can't generate the leads forget about the business yeah 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 um are you ready to improve your diet take the scorecard um is your diet optimized take the scorecard uh okay nice great I'll answer the quiz okay oh look I've 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 like some free software and chucking on your Facebook friends list or messaging your friends on Instagram who you know someone created that software yeah yeah so what is a what is the 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 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 test it essentially in the book it says are you any good at pitching are you any good at creating products and it asks the scorecard asks you a series of questions and it gives you a score yeah and it says you're a four out of ten for people something so addictive about that I signed up with a CEO coach like three or 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 um you know tension and you're like and then it adds up and then your score comes out at 43 yeah you being you you're like oh god I've got to optimize right up there's so much to improve isn't that great exactly so that quantification um on a scale of one to ten how painful is it oh it's a four out of ten right so the 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 client started saying hey that assessment thing that I told or how do I get one of those for my business so at the time I had an I.T 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 uh 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 went from having a social media following to having proprietary data and leads so we saw this working we thought okay let's make it super easy and not eight grand we created score app um now people can just basically build their own scorecards it gives you a template with a landing page and a quick 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 about I was like well I don't have a productivity scorecard yeah that'll be so good yeah I'd basically take all my knowledge of productivity and be like do you currently have uh sort of Life values do you currently do a weekly review do you currently set a daily highlight every morning and the answer was 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 holding on 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 yeah so let's get you all the scheduling tools so that and that's your own proprietary data at the moment I it's unlikely but at the moment social media could just switch you off they have done that with people um I can't imagine you getting Switched Off with with your radicals yeah uh but but the good thing about this is you would own your own database yeah you'd have your own data damn because we do so much work and we're creating courses and stuff and we will 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 it we probably shouldn't just be like all right here's the thing guys take it or leave it we're like there's more to do and a scorecard just feels like it's just like we just take our core syllabus and turn it into questions and then yeah 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 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 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 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 agency yeah it does way more than three weeks so let's say you say okay well I've got three ideas and I'm not sure which one yeah I'll just take three scorecard I'll create three score cards yes I have an idea for a course of like um essentially called something like the life-changing magic of a personal assistant yeah 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 yeah this is so good there's four thousand 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 you'll know the question you'll know what their problems are because they'll have answered the questions this is genius okay cool anyway I'm I'm gonna take lots of notes off this uh but you've just released this book like this week I bought it on Kindle like on Friday or something I was like oh super tactical you can see it's really short compared to the other business uh the other books it's half the size it's designed to be tactical and um it's just about creating that mvp and that lead generation asset uh by the way just a quick thing to mention we actually have a link to score app 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 in in this episode okay so I have an idea for a business and I want to test it by creating some sort of questionary 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 yep health.com or whatever check 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 I do 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 uh 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 yeah 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 5 then we're tracking it 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 you know can do it 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 okay 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 um 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 uh name and email and and 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 a somebody reviewing themselves uh to say I'm interested it's it's that whole hey yeah I'm interested in that okay 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 ah 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 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 I accidentally did this well it wasn't quite accidentally we when launching the first iteration iteration of our YouTube of 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 your YouTube channel and see what happens and then on the second page of that asking them a few sort of more qualifying a few more questions 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 hadn't even made their first video and like the other five percent like we're all under 100 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 don't feel like they have the time to do YouTube properly and want to just learn all the yeah 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 your business no it's like Yeah The Old Market there like we want to get started and they almost they almost always would say what equipment do you have and you might have gone oh well it doesn't matter but like people love the equipment they want the equipment thing so people love templates people love the whole like what's the template they use for your videos it's like I mean it's it's not that hot it's just it's just it's just these three things but okay 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 that's a 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 yeah 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 right you're now certified and ready to put your first YouTube video up and you 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 we'll here's the certificate right so that is the 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 yeah on score I've gone 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 uh 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 right so we must we 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 they kind of steamroll ahead but they don't produce that piece of collateral that police 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 like by the way you you 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 and this is I'm just thinking like this is the exact stuff we used to do in like uh ICT class in school of like hey pretend like you're designing this database and oh 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 had breakfast with was like obsessing over a 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 like the thing with where it's just like the offer later some document yeah something that I can be like okay here is the offer and he has how much it costs oh on that point here's how much it costs how does 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 sign up right 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 that's the offer yeah and the sign up is where people buy and they put in all their details and they pay a deposit um they often they'll pay just a holding deposit um for a startup they'll just um or they'll say you can say um 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 join the waiting list that way you don't need payment gateways you don't need to have credit card machines or any any of those sorts of things you're just collecting the signal that they were willing to pay yes but you didn't let them is it at all useful to so we're 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 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 uh so that we in 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 um is that something that you would just 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 three and a half thousand 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 uh 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 um that will result in high prices not low prices okay so I I I I feel like I've like through through reading your stuff stumbled Upon A lot of these ideas over the last several years but when I think when someone hears about it for the first time the thought that you can sell a thing without having created the thing is gonna lead to like oh is that unethical that sounds evil that sounds bad sound like how it's very evil what's going on yeah it's very simple you're either 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 board room 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 that when they become available so Elon Musk knew that cyber truck was not going to be built for three years but he launched cyber truck he showed people what cyber truck would look like he invited people to put down a hundred dollar deposit if they wanted to be in the waiting list for a cyber truck knowing full well that it wouldn't be available for three years uh he collected a million deposits a million 100 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 and he like imagine he hadn't collected those signals and you go to JPMorgan and you say hey look we want to create a cyber truck and this is what it looks like it's unlike anything that's ever been built and JP Morgan's gonna 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 100 deposit it's like great what are the terms yeah yeah so 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 uh well a quiz typically is testing your knowledge like if I quiz you on your Beatles trivia you know I'm testing to know what you know um a assessment uh kind of feels like uh academic um I just wanted to keep it like a fun way of discussing cool yeah so it's like a scorecard it's like should you start a YouTube channel answer these questions find out uh take the test uh 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 yeah um oh man I'm gonna make a productivity scorecard yeah yeah definitely and what categories would you do um probably something like um do you know where you want to go so like Vision vision for type stuff uh 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 the goal setting so tactics tactical planning that kind of stuff and then it's going to be how good is your uh takeoff so like getting started with work over going for procrastination all that kind of stuff then how good are you at staying and staying on the course so like not getting distracted and focused on stuff and then probably gadgets and tools right some like people people love gadgets and tools definitely how strong are your how strong are your supplies um something around like to what extent do you regularly take breaks and recharge and blah blah blah blah um so you probably want to have you want to have three to five categories yep you want to boil it down to three to five categories and you want to then do six questions per category okay all right 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 you're Tactical implementations 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 struggle with motivation cool let's try and make a video right book to do a thing based on the exactly Market yeah love it okay six 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 in my mind webinar equals slightly scammy um I I guess it's basically change that yeah um it's just a cheap event that you can put on you know like I just think of it as a zoom meeting and you're just going to present some slides so if I was launching a new business I'm going to put on a zoom meeting 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 um so I might say hey I'm a doctor I want to do um a lecture on what we've been learning around gut health um let's say so I'm going to do an introduction to weight loss through better gut health uh would you like to jump on it's going to be a 45 minute lecture um 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 uh you a boardroom they're probably board rooms full of scammers right now right but um but it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the boardroom yeah uh so it's just a zoom meeting it's low low cost for you low friction for them uh 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 um 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 okay go to market is where you're now pushing sales and marketing on uh you might raise some money to go to market um it's a 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 uh 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 your your um 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 do 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 build score app I did like a dozen people who paid eight grand each for their scorecard and we built it on WordPress and we literally just charge 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 100 Grand worth of um people paying for a setup 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 like doing the thing yeah I know they're going to build a software at some point but yeah at least they've got someone on a Google sheet doing the thing that is the most successful startups yeah that's 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 it'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 is interacting at every single step um and you know 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 and let's go through it together jump on and we'll both do it and it's like oh this isn't an app it's a Google sheet it's like that's a pro you know that that's a pro entrepreneur amateur entrepreneur will get the families 300 Grand mortgage the house like you know Grandma's monies in it and then like they built this all singing all dancing piece of technology that nobody's ever going to use um nice yeah I think uh so uh personal trainers who do like online personal training and stuff um I I feel like there's this thing where it's like they're 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 like um customization but realistically everyone broadly needs the same plan so like yeah yeah and a lot of the time people want hand holding they want support they want accountability um so what they're providing is those those types of things but once again that is a self-employed um freelancer type model uh 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 salable and that's the difference self-employed people aren't really building an asset uh they're they're selling labor so um this is a pathway to that exitable salable scalable asset people who have work-life balance are underpinned by assets so the reason I might have work life balances 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 we generated 90 000 leads on autopilot and that those 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 um that is underpinning yourself with assets so what we're talking about with entrepreneurship is the creation of an asset uh that that does the work intellectual property Media or Tech is normally the the primary assets that we work with as entrepreneurs is intellectual property media and Technology right so again I'm thinking I'm thinking to my hypothetical productivity course for example um the assets are the YouTube videos that media plug the scorecard yeah which based on intellectual property so the IP 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 I'll just plug it's a free scorecard it's easy to plug in a video without seeming like semi in any way this like 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 you would love the online course yep or do a where does where does a Salesman fit into this into this equation salesperson typically fits with any sale that is north of a couple of thousand um 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 is 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 a thousand and that have a free trial um you know 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 and that's where a salesperson fits in and then when the leads come in that sales person can talk to them and identify you know and reassure and give the right information you know because you're taking if a salesperson is 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 two thousand dollars uh 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 over subscribed hmm do we 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 are 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 but I would 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 well 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 okay great so anything less than 50 people subscribed we'll 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 right so a little bit of that conversation you probably find that you can make a sale a day uh 200 days of the year there's another 400 000 you know and up that could be quite fun um yeah and it could be a good service right it's it's thinking it's radical empathy for the person who's buying yeah it's like is this genuinely useful for the so so like last time we did like two cohorts ago I was uh we we sort of did like a zoom webinari top on a zoom call I was available for an hour like 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 were like younger people that were never gonna sign up I just wanted to see what I was like on a zoom call and it just ended up being not really helpful um 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 um 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 um tell me about what kind of YouTube channel you'd like to launch tell me where are you at a new youtubing Journey right at the beginning I've got a hundred thousand followers right who knows or maybe this 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 in our product um what held you back what stopped you from going ahead with it um 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 happened 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 the cool thing about this I think is that the ability to just offer someone a phone call it's something that again anyone anyone can do even when they have a job like I I just the the amount of people that I speak to who are like I want to do the side hustle thing but I have a job or I'm a full-time student and and like I've only got a few hours on a weekend and and sort of 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 any anywhere at all but actually this process of come up with the ideas MVP with the scorecard or with a zoom event or whatever get you know the product Market fit hop on a phone call with some people who just actually figure out what their problems are and be like you know would you be willing to pay x amount for this thing yep yeah 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 ramp you know turn on the Jets uh let's go for it let's hire a team A salesperson all of that sort of stuff it's all go to market strategy um scale is multiple locations now we're going to go out in so we might start in London and then go 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 yeah 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 sort of first these first few stages of the entrepreneur Revolution becoming entrepreneur I think we'll leave the entrepreneur subject there because most people as we get the other list like the amount of people that scale up and go to market and exit is relevant to like dwindles but I'd love to hear like what's it like for you um 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 dream life what's 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 black people like Tim Ferriss and Ryan holiday who do their content thing and writing a book occasionally it seems good but I haven't really spoken to many people that do the 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 um so you know that's the for me that's the thing that really completes life and makes it all worthwhile and makes the journey uh 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 um so uh what well what's interesting is that no matter what level of wealth you're at uh when you have little kids life becomes very different you very boring all right routine based it can be a massive challenge to your identity in your in your ego um sudden well suddenly the whole world is not you um suddenly you don't matter at all so you you go from being the center of the um your ego Universe to being a second you know 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 um and right now you take it very much for granted that you can roll out of bed whenever you want and go for a 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 you know all of that is logistics and you know you find yourself with uh Nanny's bigger house bigger car um Logistics all of that stuff starts to her so it's a different it's a different life um it's a very good life it's it's lovely um and I recommend it uh 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 and all of that sort of stuff um you know I had a different chapter in my 30s building a Global business as well and you know uh in my 30s I wrote best-selling books I spoke on big stages I got paid 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 which is he only follows a couple of people and it's like that stuff um and uh and then in my late 30s early 40s I'm now the Family Guy um 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 we you know we little things are big things getting on the swings is a big thing um and uh you know overcoming a fear of a dog uh that comes up and sniffs you is a big thing so um you know that my whole world now revolves around this chapter a very different chapter so what does now that you're in the in this chapter what does your work life look like so I live a fairly normal work life now I have work-life balance um I arrived at that place so I typically start my day at 9 30 and I finish my day around 5 5 30. um 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 um I might pick I'd often drop the kids at school and often pick them up from school um and um you know I might sit and play computer games with the kids and and all that sort of stuff so I have a lot of that going on um yeah so how how much do you care now at this point about making more money like professional success and like 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 that it really starts getting going at 40 and you start getting really good at 40 and you know your career goes from strength to strength after 40. I felt it was a little sad Roger Federer you know 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. um 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 uh in a fairly short space of time right because now I've got the leverage but when I think about making money um 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 um and having fun projects I also love doing um businesses in partnership with people especially I love doing Partnerships uh like co-founding with slightly younger people bringing them um you know up in in their entrepreneurial Journey so it sounds like you're mostly motivated by like 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 that's yeah well my 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 three and a half thousand 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 um 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 um so yeah look I have a bunch of fun um because if you have a set of skills you want to use those skills you it feels right that you've drawn to use those skills because it's like oh you know I'm you know if you like if you're a ballroom dancer and you're really good at dancing you want to dance um 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 if you're an entrepreneur and you start figuring out how this crazy world of Entrepreneurship actually works yeah 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 he asked me you know the thought experiment of What would life look like if I wasn't if I 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 getting into philosophy and economics and politics I'm interested 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 in real 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's that speaks to your identity and and all of that the risk can be that your strong suit can become um overused you can be a ballerina who dances until your feet bleed um you know so one thing that is a risk is um 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 um 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 I was that guy right but um 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 you're winning your winning strategy becomes your losing strategy have you come across this book called uh the second Mountain no it sounds like a cool it's by the I think it's by David Brooks uh is 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 happiness the second mountain is the mountain of joy and while the first Mountain was all about optimizing for freedom and fun 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 you know getting off that first Mountain onto the second is like you know people it's great I can relate to that I think it's a great philosophy and uh yeah you don't want you don't want to just keep climbing up and down this same Mountain it's like it's you know 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 but um you know I I think that it's hard it's hard to say because you only really kind of fall in love with your kids after they're born and after their I think it might be different to be on a certain age or certain months 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 um yeah every dude I know who else kids has that kind of vibe that 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 yeah 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 you know and the other thing too is so I have a friend of mine sold a company for um 900 million right and cash yeah and has gone on to build several more businesses and I totally understand and and they're worth hundreds of millions I totally understand and he's also my age right 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 100 million dollar company but I sit there with my family and I think I'm actually really happy I'm on this second Mountain my first Mountain's going quite well but you know I get more joy from the the second one amazing done 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 uh any final asks of our viewers or listeners uh 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 um this is an amazing moment in history don't ruin it by looking at all the horrible things that happened today um 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 there's so many great things that you can be doing and there's so many great opportunities and um and that the 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 and see you know what they want you to do um 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 and go for it this is 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 going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes depending on where you're watching or listening to this if you're listening to this on a podcast platform then do please leave us a review on the iTunes Store it really helps other people discover the podcast or if you're watching this in full HD or 4k on YouTube then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode that would be awesome and if you enjoyed this episode you might like to check out this episode here as well which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode so thanks for watching uh do hit the Subscribe button if you aren't already and I'll see you next time bye