How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis | with guest Alex Bodini

0:01Welcome to Business Book Club, the show where top entrepreneurs break down the most powerful insights from the world's best business books. I'm your host, Sam Brown, and today we're diving into How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis.

0:17This is an unfiltered playbook on how wealth is really made and why most people will never do what it takes. Unlike most business books, it doesn't sugarcoat the sacrifices, the ego, the sheer obsession required to get rich. Dennis sits on a goldmine of hard-won lessons on risk, ownership, and the mindset that separates the rich from everyone else. He explains how you too can develop this mindset, and on multiple occasions tells you to stop reading because you probably won't or don't want to. But who is Felix Dennis to tell you how to get rich? Well, he was the founder of Maxim Magazine and a pioneer of independent publishing.

0:56He estimated his own net worth at 500 to 900 million pounds when he was writing the book, saying that truly rich people can't get much closer to this estimation without actually cashing in all their assets. He built his empire from scratch, starting with no capital, no connections, and he became one of Britain's wealthiest entrepreneurs. And joining me today is Alex Bedini, a relentlessly entrepreneurial force with one simple goal. Have fun and make some money. As co-founder and CEO of Spin Group, a London-based social media agency with a global team of over 80, Alex has built a creative and fast-moving operation.

1:34Along the way, he's launched ventures like Acid Running, Janji Europe, and Your Film Poster, with a few failures in the mix too. For Alex, it's never been about perfection, but about momentum, learning, and loving the ride. So Alex, great to have you here. Tell us, why did you choose How to Get Rich as your most impactful book?

1:55Alex Bodini:This book always stood out to me because having read so many different business books, this feels like the one that had at least to prove it didn't feel like he was trying to make money out of the book, didn't feel like he was trying to promote a wider cause or a wider business. And from the first reading of it, I just realized he's so unbelievably open and honest about what it takes. And as you said in the intro, the fact that journey is not necessarily worth it, most people won't get there. And actually the pursuit of just purely getting rich in and of itself is not necessarily the goal. His candidness and his honesty and incredible writing style just basically hooked me in from the start.

2:29Alex Bodini:And I've read it so many times as a result. As always, I've asked you for the three most valuable lessons from today's book. What's up first? Don't listen to Jeremiah's. For those who haven't read the Bible, Jeremiah is an Old Testament prophet who is also known as the weeping prophet. And his prophecies were always gloomy and full of warnings of doom. And the funny part is that they were often ignored. What does don't listen to Jeremiah's mean? Hell yeah, there's a really interesting context on why the word Jeremiah is used and why it sticks out. I guess it's this overall feeling that within the business world of people who are actually doing something entrepreneurial, but more especially those who aren't.

3:07Alex Bodini:There's so much negativity, cynicism, and especially with kind of a slightly more British cynical lens to it, it can sometimes get overwhelming in terms of just how the doom says in terms of people who basically feel like things are going to fail. And if you listen to those people, you fundamentally won't get any sort of form of results or success. You won't be able to kind of like back your own conviction. There will always be people who will bring you down. And the idea of the Jeremiah's is they drive on fear of failure and they also drive on avoidance of blame. They're basically people who have never actually taken the plunge.

3:41Alex Bodini:They've never actually tried to do anything. There's a stat that always used in micro entrepreneurial journey, which is in the UK, 49 % of people say they want to start their own business one day, whereas only 2 % actually do. So within that, you've got 47 % of people who say they want to start their own business, but never actually get around to it. And those people are the ones who often like are the most negative and cynical. And you have to not be blind to ignoring negativity and criticism that you've got to be thick skinned, you've got to be open minded. But there is always reasons why not.

4:13Alex Bodini:There's always the wrong time, there's always the wrong business, there's always some challenge. And fundamentally, you have to push past those things in order to actually do anything that's actually meaningful. I've lost track of how many times and how many different ways I've said this, but skeptics and pessimists. They watch from the sidelines and optimists, they build the future. It's kind of a necessity of being an entrepreneur to be an optimist. It sounds like that you've probably had a few first-hand experiences of some Jeremias in your past. Absolutely, yeah. My primary business, the main thing we do is we're an agency, a sort of marketing services business, and people have been calling the death of the agency and the in-housing of this, and you don't need that, why do you need this?

4:49Alex Bodini:If you listen to the wrong headlines, you could believe that there's never going to be a need for that kind of business, yet there's this entire massive industry that exists and continues to exist and continues to grow equally with social media like fundamentally you could have a very very negative take on social media the impact it has does it work for businesses is actually a useful channel and you have to pursue past that so every single step there is criticism about who we are what we do the business model being in the uk whether it's actually impactful and we had to continue to listen to I got and look at the traction that we were getting as opposed to taking on some of these negative messages and thinking, oh, this is probably not going to go anywhere.

5:29Alex Bodini:Why does the world need another marketing agency? How do you know if someone's being a JMR, if someone's genuinely got concerns or giving you some feedback that you actually should listen to? Based on their experience, I think we have this overall kind of mindset of only taking advice from people who've been there and done it. Everybody's got opinion on everything. I often think that's a random TV shows like The Apprentice or Dragon's Den. And the ones who are spouting off the biggest opinion sometimes are people who have never launched a product, never launched a business, never, no one ever might be.

5:58Alex Bodini:And they're the ones which I think you certainly should be questioning of. However, when people fundamentally have done something, they know the industry. And in recent times as well, and that's the thing, things like our industry, they do change quite quickly. Whereas if people have been ultimately within social, within marketing, within communications in recent times and they have an opinion about it, whether they had success or whether they were burned, whether they had a good time or a bad time, those people we tend to listen to. Because if you've got real lived experience, then you've got stories to tell and only the people who've got the battle scars can actually relate to other people about those things.

6:30Alex Bodini:So if you show me the scars, show me that you did it, then I will 100 % listen. I'm not blinkered in terms of some of the messaging that's out there, basically. part of this avoiding negativity do you avoid spending time with those negative people and do you have any tips of building the tribe around you with positive people who actually want you to win yeah it's really the question it's not easy to do i'm certainly very conscious of the idea of an information diet what information do i tend to take in and how does that make me feel so i quite consciously am careful with what i let in and what i think about and i'm not always listed for high quality information, but I need mindless stuff.

7:06Alex Bodini:Like I listen to a lot of like surface level novels. I listen to a lot of sports podcasts because they're just an easy place to listen to and not have to go like taking notes. Because sometimes if you listen to too much high quality nonfiction information, it can be a little bit kind of overwhelming. That being said, I do cut out a lot of media, basically like news and media and like day-to-day current affairs. I have to tune into certain things and I like to be across the major trends that are happening. But generally speaking, I'm not one of these guys who's like, screw the mainstream media.

7:36Alex Bodini:It's all got an agenda. I don't actually believe that. But I think it's something like for every 10 stories, nine are negative. And I think it's something in the US, I think for every 10 stories, three are negative. So they're a bit better than us. Why do I want to be dragged down by that? I don't need to do that. And equally with social media, who I tend to follow personally, I almost have like a quite a ruthless one strike policy. If somebody's trying to rage bait me, somebody's trying to drag me down, somebody's trying to pull down others, if somebody's doing these negative things, I just very quickly unfollow, regardless of who they are, because I don't need to be triggered in that way.

8:06Alex Bodini:Equally, I definitely remember reading books back in the day, probably like four-hour work week type thing, which was all about putting people out who are negative and looking at your people around you. And I don't necessarily agree with that from a friendship perspective. I've got lots of friends with all sorts of different life experiences, all sorts of different views. I like having a range of different friends. However, I think when it comes to like my day-to-day work life, I'm definitely quite careful with who I spend time with. I've also got my business partner, Max, who is extremely positive and he's made a huge impact as to where my mindset is.

8:38Alex Bodini:And then I have developed over the last five or six years, a bunch of friendships, which do really lift me up. And I do surround myself by positive people. And in a similar sense, I was always a little bit skeptical about some, let's say, US-based kind of entrepreneurship media, sort of thinking sometimes it can be like unbearably positive type thing. Whereas actually, as time's gone on, I'm a lot less cynical about that now. And actually, a US mindset is really, really positive. And that's why we got a chairman who's based out in Los Angeles. And he's also a very talented, experienced individual.

9:08Alex Bodini:But having that kind of like slight mind opening to the US mindset where everybody wants you to win, as opposed to everybody kind of like seems to kind of have a little bit of skepticism about you has really, really helped me as well. Lesson number two, what do you have for us here? overhead walks on two legs okay unpack that far as a little bit what do you think felix meant by overhead walks on two legs it's a classic kind of felix phrase whereby like it's like the unusual it tends to stick in your head he's saying that it's very easy once you've had some initial success or you're seeing that things are going quite well to want what you're meant to want at that stage i.e you can easily get carried away by thinking oh let's grow the team out like wouldn't it be nice to have this wouldn't it nice to have that wouldn't it be nice to have a receptionist different teams doing different things.

9:51Alex Bodini:Wouldn't it be nice to have a lovely office in a high profile location? Or actually you could easily convince yourself that, oh, well, clients really care about where we are and where we are says a lot about who we are. So you might sort of find yourself looking at serviced offices in Soho before you know it. And maybe that's the right thing for you. Maybe it's not, but there are so many different things, which it's easy to say yes to. And you feel like you ought to do and you feel like you should reward yourself with. And And I think those things are dangerous because they do add up. And for a long time, I'm in my mid-30s, a lot of us had this kind of like bull run where we thought basically everything was always going to go upwards.

10:27Alex Bodini:Everything was always positive. Everything always felt quite safe. And then we've only seen in recent times just how many times that's been disrupted, obviously with COVID and financial crises and stock market drops and various different things. It makes you realize when you're looking at your own P &L, you're immediately wondering what is fixed and what is not. What is a variable cost? And I never want to treat humans like variable costs, but you have to live at the different things which you just cannot get out of. Big leases, big annual contracts, overhiring. These things are very hard to undo and there will be times where you might need to undo those and you can lose sight of what you're in it for because it's easy to say yes to these things.

11:03How have you thought about taking some of these principles into your own business? What changed after reading this?

11:09Alex Bodini:When we hired and how we hired, because we're such a people-based business and fundamentally we are only as good as our people. But the truth is, if you just have really loose ways of measuring kind of how many people you need and capacity, people will always say, oh, we need more people. Most people will sort of say, oh, I'm definitely too busy. We talk about Parkinson's law a lot, which is, I'll probably butcher this sort of summary of it, but essentially it's the idea that no matter how much time you give someone to do a task, they will make that task fill that time. So if you give somebody a day to do a task, In their mind, it will be a day-long task, and it will take them a day.

11:43Alex Bodini:If you give them two hours to do a task, they'll take two hours to that task. The task will spread to fill the void. And we see it as a similar thing with people's jobs. Ultimately, people always say they're too busy. And we have to get that balance right between listening to that, looking after our team, respecting our team, but also fundamentally, we can't be overstaffed because the business model doesn't work if we are overstaffed. So basically, we started using data in our decisions. And actually, we finally kind of grew up and we started using proper resource capacity planning. We started using agile data.

12:12Alex Bodini:We started using real numbers to inform when we need to hire someone, how we're going to hire them, where they're going to be used, as opposed to just pure kind of like touch and feel, which essentially run out of legs for ourselves. So one thing is understanding about hiring. Are there any other areas of either your life or your business that this kind of principle has kind of taken effect? For sure. I think what I quite like now is having kind of live rules of thumb. And I like finding out from people roughly where should numbers be and then questioning that. So for example, like we need offers.

12:39Alex Bodini:We always wanted to have an office. Of course, we could be remote and we could not have one. But Max and I always had this idea of, I don't know where we got it from, but we checked with a few people and it made sense. Never spent more than 7 % of your income on an office. So we were always looking at wherever we were kind of like annual revenue wise. And we would never spend more than 7 % on an office. And that was a useful parameter because it meant that you could easily look at an office and convince yourself that we're going to grow into it, we're going to need it and justify why it makes sense, why it will help you win a big client.

13:07Alex Bodini:Whereas by sticking to that, that's really, really worked. And then as we brought on more kind of like expertise, like kind of ops and finance and things like that, we now know, for example, that our basically revenue to staff ratio, we need to spend about 65 % of our revenue on our staff. Essentially, we can use that as an overall benchmark to say, okay, fine, if we're above 65%, we are being operationally quite inefficient. If we're below 65%, we're probably pushing our people too hard. And on a similar sense, we've got like an overhead budget of 15 % now. And of that 15%, we know we're going to spend an amount on office, an amount on socials, an amount on tools and things like that.

13:42Alex Bodini:And just having those ballparks means that we're working from those first principles. And we're not just thinking add cost, add cost, add cost. And then before you know it, actually, there's nothing left over. What do you have for lesson number three? Diversifying your baskets after you've got initial success from business number one. I know that you are a listener to Founders Podcast. There's people like Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos. They talk about it a lot in Founders Podcast that these people are so wealthy. They're the super rich. And they got there not by diversifying, but by kind of going narrow and going all in on one thing.

14:17Explain the counter argument. Why do you believe in diversification once you hit that initial success?

14:22Alex Bodini:Part of the reason I really like this is because I like to see an entrepreneurial journey as more than just how big a part of money do you make. And obviously, it's ironic, you're the name of the book, but he's also not necessarily an advocate for that. He's all about kind of like the experiences, the fun being rounded. At one point, he said if he could have his time again, he would try and get as wealthy as he could by 35. And then he would stop and enjoy his life. I like that kind of notion that there's more to a career, more to an entrepreneurial journey than purely from like building up the cash.

14:51Alex Bodini:And for me, I want variety in life and I wanted something that could give me an entrepreneurial challenge. I like to think about new industries. I like to think about new business models. I like to have reason to be in different places. I like talking about and thinking about lots of different things. One of our core values of the business is always be curious. And I think the reason I've always touted that as like number one value is because I am inherently curious about all sorts of different things. and I'm the classic person who's got like 300 business ideas like scribbled down on my phone and some are fleshed out, some aren't fleshed out.

15:20Alex Bodini:And I think it's a Jeff Bezos thing kind of, it sounds really like nerdy, but the regret minimization framework, which is basically the idea of like when you're trying to make a big decision in life, you should think through the lens of not what's best for me right now, but what am I least likely to regret when I'm in my 80s looking back at my career. And for me, I just want variety. I've always wanted a portfolio of different things. And it's partly to do with like curiosity, trying new things, as I said, but it's also this kind of feeling of stability. Most companies are never that far away from an existential risk of things going wrong.

15:51Alex Bodini:Things do change. Industries do change. Things happen. Competitors arrive. Tastes change. Lots of different things can change. All I know is as I move through my 30s and my 40s and 50s, I like the idea of having a portfolio of things that have diversified my risk. So I'm not going to suddenly have the rug pulled out from underneath me type I like the way that you talk about it being a more lifestyle focused choice. What is going to be the thing that you look back on and think, oh, I made some really good decisions there. That's a really good framework to make decisions. It sounds a bit direct, but like have fun, make some money.

16:25Alex Bodini:That is genuinely the goal. It is more fun to do different things. Like if every single day felt the same, it would be less fun. There's a balance here, isn't there? Like most things. It comes across in the title here of this lesson, diversify your baskets after initial success. You need to have done the work and focused and stuck at the same thing long enough to have the initial success. And at that point, you're allowed to diversify. If you try and do it before, if you try and do it too soon, you could just be spreading yourself too thin and then none of your four projects that you're trying to work on actually succeed.

16:55Alex Bodini:Yeah, couldn't agree more. People think I'm going to start four or five things at the same time, throw a load of sort of things at the wall and see what sticks. And that just feels very, very unlikely to kind of work. Or as you say, that early on in their career, they're doing one thing it's going quite well and they're like oh well let's make this and let's make that and let's do things on the side and that is dangerous i've know full well like it is exhausting to get something kind of like over those first few years and to put up that scar tissue from building something is so critical and only after we kind of had genuine initial success in an actual solid business did we start thinking about doing side bets side ventures like side hustles that's a critical thing to point out is after that initial success which is very hard to find in the first close.

17:34Alex Bodini:Tell me about what you've diversified into. Within Spin Group, but also outside of Spin now, we've always had an awful lot of our time, of our money invested in other things. So Spin is now kind of like a little bit of an ecosystem where there's a core agency there, but there's also a couple of businesses have launched on the back of it. So we've had Korean skincare businesses, we've had online marketplaces, we've had print-on-demand t-shirt businesses, we've had various different things. A couple of the ones that kind of still exist now, which were kind of born out of the Spin thing is a company called Acid Running, like a really cool direct consumer running apparel company.

18:09Alex Bodini:What is actually a former Spin team member who now runs that, and that's really exciting to see. Similar-ish story for Genji Europe, where we found this amazing brand that had amazing product market fit in the States, which hadn't tackled the US, so the UK at all yet. And we were able to bring that over and basically become the exclusive distributor for that. I've now started buying little businesses. So one of the little businesses as you mentioned at the start, was a company called Your Film Poster. I found out it was for sale, completely remote, kind of like highly automated business created by these two Dutch guys.

18:38Alex Bodini:They were looking to do something else. So I was able to buy that and run that passively. And Spit, we've started like acquiring some smaller businesses to bring into the group to widen what we do. And I'm always looking for different things. Again, I've got a limited bandwidth and I'm very conscious of that. But we've now got to the point where I've looked at spin and spin is still critical to me in my career. I still need that to continue to be the main thing. So certainly keep the main thing the main thing. But I do have other things now which give me something else to think about and make me feel less exposed to one single business.

19:08Let me just wrap up and take us back through the three lessons that we've covered. So firstly, don't listen to Jeremiah. They're often chronic pessimists that have never taken the plunge and built anything themselves. 49 % of people actually want to start a business and only 2 % do. So this pocket of 47 % of people, maybe the most negative and the people that you really want to watch out for to take their advice with a big pinch of salt. There's always negative things being said. There's always negativity to listen to. If you were to listen to it, then you would never end up building anything at all.

19:40The other really great point that you made here is be very conscious with your information diet. And the stat was that nine in 10 stories in the UK are negative or bad, and that is just not representative of real life. There's so many amazing things that are going on out there. And then having a business partner who is very positive is one of the most valuable assets that they can have. I know that from firsthand experience as well. Lesson number two, overheads walk on two legs. It's easy to get carried away when you've had a little bit of success with higher expenses, with bigger team, a fancier office, more promises to your team, which result in a big expense bill.

20:15But essentially it's poor planning because you will go through those ups and downs. And in the down times, you want to make sure that you are running a lean operation and you don't have to make the tough decisions and cuts and lay people off. Most people will say that they're too busy. So staffing here is probably one of the most key things to look out for. And you're framing around using like real numbers around how to decide when to continue hiring, when to stop is really important, especially for agencies. The last point really is that you have many rules of thumb. So if you know other founders, if you know other people who've got similar businesses to you, figure out what they're doing.