From Finance Career to $1M Coach: The Full Strategy | Simon Alexander Ong

28:12Very interesting. So what's yours version of that? So when I was starting, I would love this setup. I would go to networking events. And a lot of us are scared of big groups of people yeah we prefer to go to someone who's on their own not talking to anyone because it's the easy option but i would love to go to groups of people insert myself into that group and already knowing that the first question they're going to ask is what you do so i would often lead with something like well there's four of you here i'm going to give you four guesses everything i do is built to awaken your imagination of what is truly possible so you can write a better story go and people would just throw out random guesses of what i do and i would say bingo close warm cold and it would be a great way just to interact with these people in the group that's awesome

28:58Simon Alexander Ong:and what about now what what do you what do you now now i tailor it depending uh on on the audience i'm speaking to because as i've become more experienced i understand that it's important to tailor it depending on the audience you're in front of so for example when i was in los angeles I was invited to do a fireside chat at a members club in Hollywood. Now, when you're at a members club in Hollywood, the audience is very much show business, media driven people. And I had a question of somebody asking me in the audience. So how does coaching work? What is coaching? Because they were interested in it.

29:29Immediately, I knew I couldn't lead with the same way I would tell a story to the average person because these were people from a very specific type of background. So I said to them, well, have you watched the film by Christopher Nolan, Inception? And the majority put their hands up. and I said well coaching is kind of like inception you know when people come to me the process of coaching is going layer beneath a layer beneath a layer all the way down to the core of who they are inside and in building them back out with new beliefs upgrade to their mindset so they have a new software operating inside themselves so that the reality hasn't changed outside of them but the way they perceive it has so think of it like I'm doing inception someone

30:09Simon Alexander Ong:yeah and they got it straight away that's incredible and it was very visual yeah because they could see it happening and so for me now i would tailor it depending on who i'm speaking to whether it's an audience um the person in front of me or the demographic of people that i'm uh i'm conversing with when you do start to start creating content what is the point of that that's the point is to help launch the book yeah and how does that go the book went a lot better than expected um you know one of the biggest tips i took on board from mentor one of the mentors i had when i first started was to succeed in business you have to be able to think like a marketer and i've taken that to heart and i remember when we were a couple of months before the book was launched in april 2022 i said to penguin can i can i can i lead the marketing because i love the process of marketing and they said sure well we're really excited to see what ideas you come up with and I sat down on the drawing board and earlier I spoke about the importance of building a powerful environment but the second level to that is making sure you have diversity in that environment because having diversity in the environment you curate around you ignites your creative energy so we ended up doing things such as partnering with the Conalt in London's Mayfair where they designed the cocktail named after my book Energize so if you went into the bar and you ordered the cocktail it would be presented on the signed copy of my book amazing just imagine the content people would create on the back of that yeah incredible we put together one of the world's first launches in the metaverse we partnered with a celebrity chef to create a six-course menu with each course inspired by a topic or theme for my book we had an artist who produces work that's put into lobbies of luxury hotels create a piece called energize which we would look to then auction to raise funds for mental health charities.

32:01So it was really me seeing this sort of idea of promoting a book as a canvas for creativity. And it was unique. One of the terms I coined looking back at this experience that I now share with entrepreneurs or people looking to upgrade their game in marketing is the idea of a UTP. Now UTP stands for unique talking points. And the more unique talking points you have in your business the easier it is for people to talk about it to share it you know my friend used to run a nightclub in south kensington uh called tonteria and when it first launched on paper you would bet against it because it was underneath a hotel the ceilings were low it wasn't the biggest nightclub and you as someone thinking about what to do of an evening you're sport for choice but what he did is he built utps into that business and he had queues night after night wanting to go into this club and one of the utps for that business was putting train tracks on the ceiling of that nightclub so every time a vip table ordered shots the bar would put the shots into a toy train light the train on fire and the train would go to the vip table and it would be characters from Day of the Dead coming out to present your shots onto your table.

33:19What happens at that moment is the entire bar, the entire room becomes marketers. Everyone is taking photos and videos and selfies of this thing happening. And that's what sold it. People couldn't help but talk about it.

33:35Simon Alexander Ong:If you'd like to implement Simon's frameworks for building a high value personal brand and coaching business, I'm going to put a full breakdown of it all in my next newsletter you can get a copy for free at the link in the description so if you'd like a copy of all of simon's frameworks so you can implement them get a copy for free at the link in the description now let's get back into this week's episode so for you at that time were you what was your main platform at that time was like instagram or so my main platform at the time was probably instagram and linkedin uh now i think the three core platforms for me are youtube linkedin and instagram but they each serve different purposes i've come to understand you got to treat each one different yeah you know instagram is what i would call your shop window it's the first place people check out when you're meeting them for the first time yeah what's your instagram let me follow you it's where they kind of get a feel for for who you are and the work you produce yeah linkedin i always say it's where most of the business comes from if i had to choose a social platform where business comes in because the people that book me to speak they live on linkedin a lot of professionals i coach they live on linkedin and so linkedin is a great platform for business and then YouTube is what I would call mass market you know people who can't access your coaching who can't access your products and services YouTube is free they can hop on there they can get your thoughts and insights for free to help them on their journey and that's how you begin to build that brand connection with them they start to trust you because you're sharing things that are helping them through whatever point in the journey they're at is it worth it starting to create content on linkedin youtube instagram has that like absolutely i mean obviously different different reasons for doing so i mean youtube for example for me it's the only platform that pays you when your content does well and meaningfully pays you if i have a instagram post that does really well you know one of my recent videos uh has nearly two million views in under a week i've not paid anything on it but on youtube i had a video called i'm 40 if you're in your 20s or 30s watch this that's got nearly 4 million views i mean that's paid a lot of money from the ad revenue and youtube has three layers you know the first is from youtube ad revenue the second is from partnerships and sponsorships where you can give a shout out to a product and they'll pay you x thousand dollars for doing so and the third level is redirecting viewers to your book your course to your membership whatever you're selling so you've got three ways to monetize your youtube channel the other channels the other platforms little to nothing so youtube has a very focused point on that side because it can become a business linkedin that's for lead generation and instagram's just for everyone else because people might follow me for the quotes there for the videos for what i'm up to just as a way of kind of keeping in touch and seeing what i'm up to yeah i'd love to get into your process for each platform yeah and how you run it and how you business where would we start what is the most valuable platform to you or your most important one it's youtube linkedin instagram but i would say instagram's the easiest to create content for because i can just put a text post together and get it up and it's very low lift very little friction linkedin would be the next one because that's not too difficult to do once you've got into a momentum of putting content out that you know what's working you can tweak and change things as you go along youtube will take the longest and it has a less frequency because we aim to put out two long form pieces of content a month on youtube because it has the friction it's also why there's not so many people trying to trying to win on youtube because there's so much friction on it so the processes are very different so instagram i might go home today and i might be struck by an insight i go home and write out my thoughts i post it straight away and it might do well.

37:20It's very easy to keep that content going. But the process for YouTube...

37:25Simon Alexander Ong:Just on Instagram, do you have any weekly schedule you're trying to hit or any kind of cadence or anything? Or it's just kind of like... I think the goal is once a day. Once a day, yeah. It's once a day minimum because it's easier to get content out. Yeah. Sometimes twice a day and it's driven by data. So if the data tells me that I'm getting a lot more viewers from the US, then I will probably sneak in a second post towards the end of the day here in the UK just to tap into the US as we kind of go sleep and they're kind of still working through their day I will add in another post on that day so it really is data driven once we've kind of got that one post out just to kind of monitor how it's doing where the viewers are coming from and then we try and tailor the post to that and how do you choose which formats to do because I see you do the just like they're like screen grabs of your books right or like yeah no so so they do really well they're doing really well so so i would say if i go back to may this year we're probably around 27 30 000 instagram followers and we're always testing what's working and we noticed the reels we're doing okay but it was kind of tough to get a lot of views on it so i started testing doing long form text because i'm already scripting for youtube so i was thinking why don't i repurpose some of that scripting into an instagram post i tried one or two it did okay and the third one we put out uh we followed the data within literally two days it had 50 000 views wow and we were like okay let's test this a bit more and then we just started putting more text posts out there and it started doing really well and then one of them got 1.5 million in a few days one got four million a few days and we said it's telling us that this this style of post is working so we started pivoting heavier you probably have seen on the grid we started pivoting heavier towards long form text posts because they were just doing far better than any type of content we're putting out there now i can do that for instagram but of course long form text posts wouldn't work on say linkedin or other you do them on it do you run your do you run your instagram account account or yeah yeah i i run the instagram account you create the content i create the content and you post and you post and you just try to keep that up daily yeah i mean And the only thing I'd jump into Instagram for is to get back to comments, keep in touch with people.

39:41It's one of the things that I've always embraced to make it human is I try my best to respond to as many people's comments as I can. Because I know what it's like being on the other side. You are inspired by a creator and you drop a comment and it's just lost in the ether. It's actually quite nice when you get a reply from the person you're actually commenting on. So I've done that a lot and it's often opened opportunities, partnerships, collaborations, just because they end up responding to, hey, I really like that bit of content you put out there. I'd love to find out more about your work. There's any links I should be looking at.

40:15So you never know where conversations can go.

40:16Simon Alexander Ong:I can see how like your text posts are very, very highly shareable. Yeah. Is that why you think they do so well? I think there's a couple of reasons. Dwell time as well? Absolutely. So when you first come across a long form text post, you can't skim it. You've got to stop the scroll and you've got to read all the text. And if the first few lines hit you, you want to read the rest of it. And by the time you read the whole text post, if it resonated, you are going to like, you're going to share it. You might even repost it because Instagram now has a repost function. And so when you repost it, it lives longer on Instagram because people now have it on their feed in the repost section of their profile.

40:57And so that was what we saw working. People were spending longer on the post. People were sharing it. They were reposting it. and it started popping up all over my network. I was having friends send me WhatsApp messages saying, Tom, I just want to say your work must be going far and wide because three of my friends have been putting it on their stories. And I said, I recognize that guy. I just had lunch with him the other week. And so it becomes highly shareable. It's why when I look at my YouTube, the listicles for me have always done so well because not every point will resonate with the viewer, but the points that do, they end up sharing it.

41:32so it's just conditioned to be something that people are more likely to share and how much time

41:39Simon Alexander Ong:do you put into creating content for instagram do you like if you're doing one of those posts do you actually write it every time or you're just like no so it's a mixture of uh repurposing and also writing new content so for example every three to four months we would go back and look at what posts performed exceptionally well three to four months ago and just repurpose them again because if it got four million views three four months ago chances are it will get the same number of views now and so every three to four months we can go and recycle some of the old posts as you get new followers coming in they wouldn't have seen the post from months ago and then we will look at the youtube scripts again what from what we share in youtube hit the audience in the comment section great let's take that as a catalyst for creating content for instagram and also my speaking if were there particular statements ideas or stories that really hit the audience again let's take that and put it in and we also look at uh shorts uh you know if we put an instagram uh short video or reel out and that got good reaction great let's repurpose that by taking the statements that landed well and making that into a long form text so we're just trying to see ways that we can lean into all the data points from different different platforms talk to me about youtube what's the process there look like that's so it's two videos a month so two videos per month is the goal uh so roughly every two weeks uh and i think we need that time because what people underestimate about youtube is that you have to have a process instagram and linkedin you can kind of get away with posting as and when and kind of thinking oh i've just got a bit of inspiration let me just share my story you can get away with that youtube you can't because there's an actual process to it and the process starts with well what is the video going to be about um and you have to think about the packaging first the big mistake for me is i started thinking about the content first as I started the channel but I realized it doesn't matter how good the content is if the packaging is rubbish nobody's going to click on it and watch it so now the first step is always the packaging and it's well what's the title of the video what is the thumbnail going to look like what is the first 30 to 60 seconds going to sound like how are you going to introduce the video get them bought in to the idea of what the video is about and wanting to watch until the end So that was the very first step we had to focus on.

43:53And we just created a sort of area. We use Notion for that. So we put a column of ideas for titles. And then we might go, oh, this title is interesting. Let's run with this one for the next one. And then you choose a title. The next thing is then formulating the script. You know, what you want to cover, how you're going to lay it out. Is it going to be a storytelling video? Is it going to be an educational-based video? Is it going to be a listicle? So you're just working at the best structure for the video. and then you go about putting the content together and then you still have to record the video you got to record it edit it and then you've got to distribute it so there's a lot of steps to the process and that's why for me it has the least frequency in terms of the social platforms with

44:35Simon Alexander Ong:you because a lot more thinking that goes into it there with the titles like and the thumbnails like what's your process there is that your inspiration or are you taking inspiration from stuff that you've seen elsewhere yeah so inspiration from elsewhere so uh to give an example when i first started um i started to coin descriptions for videos and we would always have a bias what i call outlier videos now an outlier video is where let's say somebody has a low subscriber count so maybe somewhere between 10 to 80 000 subscribers if a video within the last six to ten weeks has got say two million views 500 000 views relative to their subscriber count that's a huge win.

45:15So then we would just capture those videos into a list and we would try and understand what made that video do well. Was it the title? Was it the way it was structured? Was it the way the beginning happened? And then those become our inspirations. So for example, one of my early videos connected to my book was around energy management. Now the title we just started with was let's just do a topic on how we can increase people's energy levels. And so we just went about one about researching titles and then we saw a nutritionist who did a video on energy which was quite different to her normal videos which were all about cooking recipes and for her it had over 2.5 million views wow and we said okay we should do a variation of that same title and so from thinking about the video's content being around energy management and how to live with more energy the video title then became seven habits for almost limitless energy and that was a title we landed on and then it was about the packaging so then we looked at thumbnails what thumbnails did well related to this sort of title and then we saw there's a before and after sort of thumbnail that works really well so then we just did a before picture of me looking completely exhausted and drained of energy slightly darkened in the image and then on the right was a after where i'm full of energy i look like i'm ready to take on the world and so that became the thumbnail so now we had the thumbnail and the title done we then had to fill in the content what would be the seven habits and that's where you don't have to go back and whether you work with a script writer or you kind of bring your knowledge from other areas to go into the script that's where you then have to create the content so that for me was the is how i begin finding out live videos

46:51Simon Alexander Ong:that's awesome you broke that down really well as well so people can implement it for themselves do you in the scripting do you go quite rigid with the script or do you just have like bullet points and you just go off the dome and it's kind of a bit of a mix depends if the uh video is a realistical, it might be a bit more tightly kind of scripted because you have less time and you just want to rattle through the bullet points. If it's a longer sort of motivational style video, more of a storytelling video, I might give myself a bit more freedom to kind of just see where I go in each point or each section of the video because you can always cut it after.

47:26You can edit things down after. So yeah, it depends on the style and approach we're going for the video. Going back to the research, because I think this is also a great practical point for people, is that when you start a platform like YouTube, very often it's just you. You're doing it as a single person. So you have to be smart in how you research. And one of the best things you can do is create another account for your YouTube channel. Because if you are researching on your YouTube channel, your algorithm is messed up. Because you might be watching film trailers. If you have children, you're probably watching Coco Melon or some nursery school video.

47:59And so your algorithm is pretty messed up. So you create a second account. There's a clean account. and on that account you use it almost like your research assistant so that account you put into that watch sort of search bar all the videos that you consider outliers so that second account only watches outlier videos and so you're training the algorithm to send to your home page outlier videos interesting every time you log into that second youtube account your home page will be filled with outlier videos and you'll be like oh that's another good idea for a title then you watch it because the algorithm starts to learn what sort of videos you like.

48:36And you're just feeding it to give me more outlier videos.

48:39Simon Alexander Ong:That's a very good, good, good tip. And are those mostly in your niche? Mostly my niche, but also, again, there's a couple of different outlier videos. So the easy one is just a video's done really well relative to someone's subscriber count. Yeah. Another outlier video is if somebody typically talks about a different topic and for whatever reason decides to talk about a topic that's more relevant to you and it's blown up. that tells you there's traction in the video. So like an example I shared earlier, if someone usually does cooking videos and now does a self-development video and that's blown up, there must be something in that sort of title.

49:14So that for me would also be classed as an outlier.

49:17Simon Alexander Ong:Quick one, if you're enjoying the episode and you think it might benefit someone that you know, I'd love it if you just take out WhatsApp right now and send it to that person. The same is true if you're in a company Slack or Teams channel or WhatsApp. take out your phone and share it with them right now it really helps me grow the show help more people get value from the episodes and yeah they might be grateful for you sending it to them so if you're enjoying the show please share it with someone it really helps me grow the show now let's get back into this week's episode there's one video you did which really blew up can you talk me through the process for that one because that's that's one where i i think i saw it first with you and now everyone has copied that format like i i think for like at least for six months afterwards like it was just everyone every creator i knew is was was creating in that with that kind of format like how did that one happen and it's funny also you say that because um i was talking to uh someone from simon scribbs team and they did exactly the same title as mine and they even had the same thumbnail and the text uh on on the thumbnail design as well so they said yeah that was one of the videos we got inspiration from um so they're using probably the same process as well yeah uh but for me uh this was august uh 24 and i was on holiday and i was thinking okay what's my next video going to be for september when i when i kind of get back into the swing of things and it was going to be my 40th birthday and so i thought okay it's a good time to do a listicle everybody loves a good listicle with life lessons and and and tools strategies and insights but i didn't know how to package it and i started seeing people do videos like you know 13 harsh truths i wish I knew when I was 20 uh and those sort of titles uh and then I thought actually that's gonna be quite common so I need to find a different spin to it that kind of positions me as someone who's got experience and credibility but that kind of self-qualifies people I saw some similar titles where people were doing birthday lessons and they was they were sharing with like you know if I could tell my 20 or 30 year old self this is what I will share with them so then I thought okay maybe if I lead with the fact that I'm it's my birthday so I'm 40 that's the first part of the title and then self-qualify people with if you're in your 20s or 30s watch this so so that kind of became the title wow and then it was well okay how am I going to grab them in the thumbnail and again this is all easy saying in hindsight before the video went live we had no idea it was going to pick up we thought we need to make it sound like I'm someone coming at you to share with you wisdom you have to know so we almost try to recreate that look on my face yeah in the thumbnail and then we thought we needed something snappy uh so wake up became the sort of snappy hook on the thumbnail and as every kind of youtube strategist would say you need to give the payoff pretty quick in terms of confirming that they're clicking on the right video so the title was i'm 41 so literally within the first few seconds it was today so it was i'm 40 it was today i'm 40 and it was like it's my birthday today so we knew by saying it's my birthday straight away at a minimum uh people who follow my content we would get comments saying happy birthday yeah you know at a minimum we've already get we've already got comments coming in interesting it's like whenever you lead with your birthday even if they don't read anything else or watch anything else they'll say happy birthday yeah so we knew we'll get some comments straight away yeah so i said i'm 40 uh it's my birthday today and if i could go back and speak to my younger self here's what i would share wow we went straight into 40 bullet points which you know when we record it it was actually quite draining because we got to like 35 i was like okay we've or five more to go here yeah and we still have to edit the thing uh but when it came out it was i think it was 15 16 minutes um it kind of did nothing for the first few days interesting you know it was kind of ranking eight nine out of ten wow for the first time so interesting so it was only three and a half days into it that it started picking up and it climbed like from eight nine out ten to six to five to four and then within 21 days so before the end of that month when we published it then hit 1.5 million views and then we thought okay this you know this is this is doing well let's see if we can keep pushing it and then once it hit 2 million views uh we just started seeing everybody else started posting similar sort of videos on on youtube and now it's just shy of 4 million views uh since it was published that's so funny especially around it coming out as like a nine seven eight nine out of ten yeah because a lot of people when they get that like you feel the pressure like i've done something wrong or i need to repackage it the title's wrong i was tempted to repackage it so two days in when it was still eight nine and ten i was like do we change the title do we change the thumbnail but the people i shared it with uh i'm part of a few whatsapp groups i put it into a few whatsapp groups they said no this is really good i'm not sure why it's not doing better but i just thought let's stick it up for a couple more days just to see how it does because everything seems aligned we just weren't sure why it wasn't picking up And then for whatever reason, the shares started picking up.

54:07So we're looking at the YouTube studio and we noticed a spike in the share. So I think it was the shares that drove the uptick in viewership. And now I think it's been shared like 200 plus thousand times. It's been shared, which is incredible.

54:20Simon Alexander Ong:And it's still going. It's still going in terms of viewership. Across your content, that seems to be like the one button, I would say. That is... I mean, it's funny now when people recognize me on YouTube, it's I'm known as the I'm 40 guy now it's like hey you're the I'm 40 guy right yeah but it's an incredible video it's a great it's a great video and yeah so it's so it's so clever and it's it's so value packed as well like there's a lot of value in there yeah for actually quite a short commitment of time um I think that's another reason that's I think that's why the actual format as a whole yeah does really well it's like I'm giving you a lot of value here in a short amount of time and also there is a degree of the packaging is a little bit kind of but I think it also shows if you are looking to grow on YouTube, you don't have to have every video pop.

55:07I think there's too much pressure on trying to get every video perfect. In a given 12-month period, you just need three or four videos to do fairly well, and you easily get to 100K. You just need three or four videos to do fairly well. And the rest, it's just a way to keep up your relationship with your audience. Not every video will pop, and that's completely fine. But you don't know which one will pop ahead of time. You just got to keep churning out the content and just keep your fingers crossed that one of them will get lift off.

55:33Simon Alexander Ong:What does your team look like for YouTube? Is it just you? So just me, my wife, we draw on some editors. We're learning from strategists. And it's funny because I mentioned my wife because she also started on the YouTube journey. Yeah. And the hilarious part is that in November 24, we both went through 100K subs in the same weekend. Yeah, wow. Which was insane. So it kind of showed that what we were doing was working. Yeah. I mean, now she's ahead of me. She's like 205, 210 ,000 subscribers. yeah she's crushing it but uh it just showed it just showed us it can be done if you go at it with intention and strategy uh and just be consistent you know we see every video uh in the beginning was tough because we were very emotionally attached to each video but now we see each video like a lottery ticket it's like you put it out there you might get 10 pounds back 50 pounds back uh but one of them might hit the jackpot uh but you can't have that chance to hit the jackpot if nothing's put out yeah and so you just see each piece of content is something you can learn from for the next one and so do you see youtube as the goal there is a bit of ad sense yeah i mean the ad sense drive people to the email list yeah the ad sense is a bonus yeah uh because of course it's very volatile it's very much dependent on the video so if you get a video like um just to give people reference point if you have a video like i'm 40 that's done nearly 4 million we only introduced mid-roll about the 1.82 million mark because we took mid-roll off before then because we wanted people to watch the whole video yeah but of course if you had mid-roll on from the beginning you earn a lot more from the ad revenue but from that video alone nearly 4 million views that's made us about 22 23k just from the ad revenue and so ad revenue is volatile because it depends on how the video performs for us it's more of a brand building exercise so it's more to build brand but also in anticipation for when i write further books the youtube will become a a primary driver for that because we find that book sales do really well uh if you push it for the youtube because people that watch youtube videos tend to be people that want to learn something that want to get educated and so there's a product on on the back of it they're more likely to to purchase and you push them to anywhere at the moment to Yeah, newsletter, my current book, and we're looking at membership next year.

57:50So, of course, there'll be these added things on top of it as well.

57:53Simon Alexander Ong:And then there's LinkedIn. So what's your approach on LinkedIn? LinkedIn's an interesting one because it's got more personal, I think, compared to what it was meant for. It was meant to be something that was a professional platform, talks about your job successes, your accomplishments, deals and exits and so on. but now it's become very much a personal place where you would often share very personal stories journeys and so for me it's more of a story-driven platform and it's all about it's very similar to youtube in the sense that it's all about the hook so you've got a hook in i think it's the first 125 characters before it goes read more and so it's really thinking about what is that hook and then the story underneath that so linkedin is very much story driven in terms of getting people to share it getting people to comment and engage and so we look at youtube through three pieces of content there's what i call hero content uh educational content and interactive content so hero content always does well hero content is like hey i just won an award for book of the year boom you get a few hundred likes lots of comments and some people share educational content is hey my business failed here's what i learned and here's how you can to what you do and you share seven tips or strategies and frameworks and then people love it they share it and they save it and then the last one is what i call interactive content where you might put out a question you might ask for help uh you might throw a debate out there what are your thoughts on the latest uh budget in the uk and how's it going to impact your business and then people just jump in the comments and share share their advice and experience so we see linkedin content through those three lenses the the sweet spot is if you can of course combine them if you can combine hero content with educational and something interactive that's we've got a perfect piece of content and we're still testing linkedin's we found the hardest one so far um just because yeah some things we didn't expect to do or do well some things we expect to do well just didn't do well yeah uh so it's been tough but i think i'm looking to double down on linkedin next year this year's been very much about instagram you know if you've followed the instagram you see how that's grown from 30k to now i think it's 90k coming up now yeah it's doing YouTube was a year before in 2024 that we really focus on that.

1:00:04And I think 2026 will be a lot more trying to understand LinkedIn at a deeper level.

1:00:09Simon Alexander Ong:You'll love we've got an episode with Chris Donnelly's head of content, Josh Sanders. Josh kind of is the man behind his content and the LinkedIn algorithm. He like he gave us the complete playbook for it. Like when he said it, I was like, I was like, oh, my God, this all makes so much sense. Yeah. And it actually sounds pretty easy. i'm sure it's not as easy as he made it out but he told us like their approach and the things that worked really well for them yeah um and it did make a lot of sense so i reckon you could definitely crack it absolutely with a bit of uh bit of tactical insight from him and then um yeah just going hard at it what does your um business look like today because you i know i know you i know you coach some like pretty high level founders yeah so some really really fascinating people i coach less than i used to yeah um just because it allows me to do all these these other things but the people i coach like you said uh vastly different to the people i i i was coaching beginning of my journey uh i coach a small handful of people they may be tech entrepreneurs c-level executives you know creators um celebrities mission star chefs and so on quite a variety of different people but very successful in their in their own industries it's the speaking which i love because for me speaking is one of the most powerful ways i find to build brand because it hits while sharing earlier hits that sweet spot of bringing together offline and online because the speaking itself is offline you're doing it in front of a crowd of people and everybody in the room will feel your energy but if they love what you say and what you share they will go and share on their socials they will take photos they'll take videos they'll take selfies they'll buy your book and I can capture content from all of that as well.

1:01:51So for me, it's the perfect blend of offline and online. And then the speaking opens you up to lots more opportunities. We've got the content now and then just this year, just through the brand, I'm now advising a couple of companies. I'm investing in some startups. But again, that was organic. I didn't come into this year saying, okay, that's one of the things I want to do and I want to become this year. But it's just come naturally from building these other areas. I've got people saying, hey Simon with your network and with the way you think and we get you on board as an advisor to help grow our company when it launches in 2026.

1:02:26Simon Alexander Ong:Wow. And so I said great tell me about the business let me see what value I can add if I get some decent equity then let's do it and so now that's a new added sort of a string to the bow. Interesting. To someone who's listening to this can you just give a sense of what's possible in each of these avenues because like I feel like you're at the pinnacle of coaching in terms of the service that you offer and the price point like what what what have you found you can kind of get that to to a place where you enjoy doing yeah well first of all i would say uh the price point anything's possible uh but the most important thing is where i'm at you get to coach the people that inspire you when you first start you're just coaching anyone and everyone just to build your experience um understand how the game works when you get to a point where you can start choosing you can start choosing people that not just you inspire but they challenge you to be a better coach so i mean when i when i first got the opportunity to coach a ceo And I was like, what do I know?

1:03:32You know, there's a lot of imposter syndrome at that moment. You know, this guy's built an incredible company. But once you've done that first one, you're like, actually, that wasn't so bad. And then you start having more comfortability doing other CEOs. So for me now, it's really about being able to choose who you want to work with. And the fact they inspire you means it challenges your own thinking. What's possible than that? I would say anything is possible. but you have to really think about how you are positioning yourself and how you are interacting with your demographics so let's say you want to charge 10 000 pounds a quarter for for your coaching the question you have to ask yourself is do i show up and interact and give an experience that reflects a 10 000 pound per quarter coach if not well you've got to change otherwise you might be wanting to charge£10 ,000 a quarter and telling people your price is that, but you come across as £1 ,000 a quarter coach.

1:04:30And so that's the first thing I would do is think about what is that ideal dream number for you per quarter, per month, per year, and then reflect to yourself, am I showing up as that person? So when I started asking myself that question, I then created a brochure. So when people came to me to ask my coach, I said, here's my brochure, go have a look. It was like a glossy brochure, talked about my story, had photos, was a very visual piece of a document. And it had my investment options at the back. I was very careful not to say price, cost and fee, because price, cost and fee, again, have a negative association.

1:05:04But when you say investment, partnership, it's the sort of language people at that level would talk about. Because when you think about an investment or partnership, you're expecting a return. So Dennis then thinking about, if I am going to do some media appearances or media interviews, what are the magazines and events they show up at? You know, what are the events they attend? What conversations are they part of? You know, that's how you start to have those sort of conversations. You know, last week I was at an event at the Grosvenor House. It was called Legends Ball. And you had the likes of Sir Galf Southgate there, Sir Jeff Hurst.

1:05:39You had Teddy Sheringham, Rebecca Adlington, Paula Radcliffe. And amongst those, you had some very wealthy entrepreneurs, people who have had 100 million plus exits, people who are running financial companies, fintech companies. And for me to have been in that environment meant I had to have certain relationships to get there. Now, when you're there and you're having conversations with these sort of individuals and you understand their world, guess what? They see you as the£10 ,000 plus coach per quarter. yeah so he's really thinking about first what is your dream number per month per quarter per year reflect back to yourself do i realistically show up as that right now if not what do i change so i show up as that person yes and then start acting like that and everybody else will see you as that

1:06:25Simon Alexander Ong:level of coach that is brilliant that makes so much sense so that's the coaching the speaking the bit that a lot of people fall over is they think i get a speaking gig now i've got to focus on delivering an amazing presentation so they think so much about the talk and then they go on stage they deliver it they come back they decompress like okay i've got to find the next talk now so they're in this constant hamster wheel of just speaking and then trying to find another gig speaking and trying to find another gig whereas actually you have to have a system for how the speaking works so for me i i sit simply as a free phase system so you have the pre-event the actual event and the post event so the pre-event is to treat the event you're going to speak at like it's a film coming out yeah so you have a poster of the fact that you're speaking there you start to share the story of why you're speaking and what you're going to share because if it's a public event you're driving people to come to that event and the more people that show up the organizers are going to think this this person attracts a big audience we've got to book him again next year yeah and then when you get to the actual event you don't just speak you want at a minimum someone capturing high-risk photography of you in action yeah someone capturing videography someone capturing all of these moments that are going on so then when you get to the post-speaking phase you can distribute that and then that allows you to turn those things into speaking show roles content on social media, stories you can share, images you can put into your brochure document and so on.

1:07:54So it's kind of doing those three phases well every time you speak and that naturally leads to lots of inbound traffic. So just to give a practical example, we often do highlight videos of talks I do. They do okay on social media but the ones that do the best are when we leave the mic on and I come down from stage, I'm signing books, I'm talking to people who've just heard me speak those raw moments generate the most engagement so there's one we shared on linkedin where a lady comes up and you know i've just finished signing her book and she says you know before you came on stage we were a bit low on energy we just had the lunch and then you come on stage and share your insights and i was just blown away and i'm going through this moment in my life where i'm starting to question my next step in my career and it's so raw it was just her just opening up in that moment and we captured the whole conversation on camera put it onto linked in and the amount of messages we got from people saying what did you talk about can we can we book you to do the same to our audience as you did to that audience yeah they were just really curious about what the backstory was for that conversation that's amazing i love those moments

1:08:59Simon Alexander Ong:as well like chris williamson does these great vlogs at the moment where post tour they capture that and again that's what sells it yeah is almost better than just filming him delivering it it's the reaction you're like what the hell did they talk it's sort of very unfiltered isn't it yeah like and and that's when you also realize the impact of the podcast because there are people saying you know it changed my life i had cancer and you know i was in a terrible place for six months and you turned it around and i've i've seen those with my clients in the dms the messages but when you see it on camera it's is visceral it's also really cool as well because i guess there's there's a there's a real degree of they're like the perfect case study the perfect endorsement of your product and this is why it's good this is why this sort of content is good because if i say to you you should buy my product or service yeah you are going to be naturally skeptical and say well of course simon's going to say he is the product and service why would he say his his business is rubbish but when somebody else says it live through a testimonial through feedback this changed my life you now want to buy what that person bought yeah you know we have this tendency to go into trip advisor before we book hotels or review sites it's exactly the same thing when people are exposed to endorsements or testimonials about your work they're more likely to buy it's also the context isn't it it's like you're not i'm you're clearly not selling to me yeah i'm just overhearing that or i'm seeing you in action um that's why i really like actually really am bullish on vlogs for business owners rather than the talking head yeah because if you can document you delivering a service in action or giving advice to a client in action yeah that is there for everyone to see and you're there's living proof that you're doing it rather than you just telling me that you do it or telling me that this works and telling me these are the results you got like i'm actually seeing it in action and this is why when you know just quickly go back to what we said about coaching earlier when i first started it was all about story you know when somebody says what do you do it was lead with a story and then when they say well how do you do it i didn't go into logistics or processes i would just say well let me tell you about sarah who i started working with six months ago and here's what she's been on in terms of her journey and now they're thinking in their head can you do to me what you did to sarah yeah because they're putting themselves into that story and so it's always thinking about how do you sell through storytelling because then the selling comes naturally you don't to have to focus on, okay, so this is what we're going to do.

1:11:29This is the next steps. This is your packages. It just comes natural. And then say, well, what would my investment be if I brought you on board to do this? They would be asking that question.

1:11:38Simon Alexander Ong:I'm super excited to share that this podcast is produced by 7x content, my own podcast agency. I've been building this agency for the last four years. We now work with some of the world's leading brands and biggest creators, over 30 million subscribers to our podcast channels. If you'd like to work with us to take your existing show to the next level or you're thinking about starting a podcast we'd love to hear from you you can check us out at the link in the description i'd love to work with you and in terms of speaking gigs like what can you be paid to do a speaking gig so when you're starting it depends on region i would say when you're first starting out uh go for free actually when you first start go for free because what you want to do at the beginning is build assets um because you aren't going to get the higher ticket speaking gigs if you do not have assets because people that book you want to see your stuff they want to see how you're on stage they want to see testimonials they want to see how other people found you as a speaker when you're first starting out you have none of that so what i did is i started off speaking for free now when i say free it's not just any event i go and speak at it's very strategic what are the events you would love to speak at reach out to the organizer and say hey i would love to speak over in for free in exchange for capturing content and if i can get a testimonial if i'm rubbish you haven't paid a single penny if i'm great then here we both win and so what you do is you do the free stuff you build your assets which is photography video assets testimonials and then you use that to then pitch for your first paid gigs so then you go hey i spoke at these events and conferences on these topics would this be something of interest to you and then you might start charging a couple of thousand pounds and then over time that can go up to 10 to 20 000 pounds now what helps you go quicker up that journey is your brand yeah so you might get to about maybe six or ten thousand pounds just purely by people finding you to be a great speaker but for a lot of people six or ten thousand pounds might be the cap what helps you break through to the 10 to 20k range is then if you have a book deal right if you have a book that's coming out if your youtube's got to a million there's something that then differentiates you from the other speakers in that bracket and books are a great part of that because then when you can say you're a published author with a known brand endorsed by some individuals everybody knows then that moves into the next bracket so what gets you to that first top range is going to be your ability to kind of put yourself out there find the right opportunities build your assets what's going to take you to the next level is in your brand and and that's why the brand part is so important and do you have an agent or do you I have an agent now.

1:14:10Simon Alexander Ong:Yeah. So I used to do, I still get a lot of my speaking inquiries inbound just because I'm putting out a lot of content and a lot of the inquiries comes inbound. But I now have an agent for two plus years now. Yeah. Just because once we had the book out, we just started to get a lot more inquiries. So now we have an agent. But just on those fee ranges, it also depends on your region. So I'm quoting obviously UK. But if you go to the US, the budget's automatically 1.52 times bigger. because you're speaking to a much bigger audience. Events are bigger scale. And so there's a lot more opportunity to be had in a region like the US.

1:14:49It's really interesting as well because in all of this,

1:14:53Simon Alexander Ong:there's that balance, as you say, between what's happening offline and what's happening online. Because I think people assume that you create content, build an audience, and therefore all of your clients come from that or all of your speaking inquiries come from that. But I'm getting the sense speaking to you that actually, is it more of a case of your coaching clients or your speaking gigs? Is it 50-50, 50 % coming from offline and normal methods and you outreaching and getting referrals and connected? Yeah, a lot of coaching clients are offline referrals. Sometimes I get online because they see my work on LinkedIn.

1:15:31They'll come in and we'll end up having a partnership because it's very private, very confidential. I might say industries my clients work from, but sometimes unless they're okay with me doing so, I won't mention who they are. So it's a very confidential sort of business. Speaking, that's very public. So, of course, I get a lot of that online where people have seen me do videos or YouTube or podcast interviews. They're like, hey, can you come on my podcast or hey, can we get to speak at this event? So that's a lot of that also online. But yeah, I think offline I've always valued a lot because I've met some super interesting people offline that I would never have met just purely on the online world.

1:16:09Yeah. And a lot of stuff that we've done, whether it's like I've come on board as an advisor to their business or we've collaborated in some way. Like a lot of the collaborations we did for the book launch, they only came about after I got to know these people offline. Yeah. We had coffees. We traveled together. We spent some time together. that's where I think the friendship is built that's where the relationship is deepened because online is very surface level it's a very surface level relationship

1:16:36Simon Alexander Ong:how do you engineer that? so do you create space for that serendipity to happen or you go to certain events try to go something every week there's an element to that, I mean it's changed over the years so for example recently the word that I've been sharing a lot with people is community is I've been tapping into community a lot so this year I've been part of a community of creators, I've been part of a community of authors i've been a part of community of uh post exit founders i've been a part of a community of people who are tech startups and so on and so by just by being part of different communities i get not only to understand what's going on in these ecosystems but who are who could be some good people to kind of reach out to nurture a relationship with just kind of take our conversation to a deeper level um and community has played a big part in that this year uh it's connected me to some amazing people um some of whom we've already done business with some of whom we are exploring ideas within the next year um and again if i sent them an online message they may respond they may not but when we're meeting a person we're guaranteed to at least build a friendship and then we open doors to see what we could potentially do together the last thing we didn't touch on there is with the book deals what's possible there again is it is it a case of the first one you're doing it for credibility and reputation more than a fee i know it's actually very hard to make money yes so i would yeah so the reality is uh you're not going to make uh money from the book itself yeah unless you you know unless you do like a james clear and you sell like tens of millions of copies which is very rare in in the author world but the book itself you don't make money from it you'll get some passive income from it depending on how much you sell but it's nothing life-changing what the book does it's the opportunities it opens for me it's an unlocker so you know i can go to events i can bring some signed books with me and if the opportunity arises i might say hey well you know great to meet you this evening here's a copy of my book for you so check out when you have the time that allows you to remain top of people's minds because for me it beats the business card any day they get to know your story and they get to know your journey just by reading the book so for me it's been the doors are open so for example speaking opportunities, people that want to connect with me, podcast invites, invitations to work with businesses.

1:18:51It's the opportunities the book affords you, especially when it's a traditionally published book. Now, I'm not saying there's a right or wrong way. Self-published books have worked for people. You just have to look at the likes of Alex Hormuzzi and Michael Bungestania, who sold millions of books without working with a traditional publisher. so there's no right or wrong way just kind of working out what path works best for you and what leans into your strengths for me i wanted the penguin deal i wanted the traditional publisher because i knew it would carry greater credibility when people would go into a waterstones see my book on the shelf and and visually they could see that the book was out in the open what are your

1:19:33Simon Alexander Ong:tips for writing a book how long does that take or what's the i think the biggest tip would be surround yourself with other people uh who are also on the same journey as you writing i had the luxury of writing it during covid so i had more time than i would have otherwise had being at home in front of my laptop yeah but what also what helped is i would meet with other authors every couple of weeks just to kind of like either write together we would put our zooms on mute and we would just kind of write and then touch base two three hours later to see how we on and just share like challenges struggles with writing the book but also by learning from other people you realize that when you write a book it's not as easy as just sitting down typing on microsoft word and you're done you don't actually start writing when you sit down you start thinking about the structure the narrative the research the studies you want to include and then it just starts as bullet points before you start threading it all together and to realize you do need focused time for this yeah you can't just go i'm gonna do writing for an hour here an hour there it doesn't work that way it takes you probably 30 40 minutes just to get stuck into it okay and so you really do have to block out time and be committed to that journey of writing um and keep in mindful that writing the book and getting it over the finish line is still only 50 of the journey you don't have to go market the thing and so save some energy for the marketing part because a lot of people burn out once they got to the end and they're like oh man i'm gonna market the book now and they don't have the energy to kind of hit the road hard to get the book out there and to be a sunday time is best said it's you've got to sell is it like in a seven day period you've got to sell a lot you got to sell a lot in the first they usually say the first week because for a lot of people that's where you're going to get the biggest traction because usually over time people start to forget the book um and the reason the first week is very important is because the pre-orders that you sell before the launch count in that first week so let's say you sold i don't know 5 000 copies pre-ordered before that week even comes you're already 5 000 up yeah and so that's why usually the first uh week of sales is where a lot of authors focus very heavily on yeah um and depending who else is publishing uh will drive how much you need to sell to hit those numbers let's talk about communicating because you communicate really well you speak on stage you speak on YouTube.

1:21:52Simon Alexander Ong:What have you done to develop that? So for me, I've always had this geeky interest in learning the mechanics of how things work. You know, we've talked a lot about content here, but it's the same with speaking. So when I started, I could have gone the option of going to a Toastmasters and learning the ropes and being part of one of those clubs. But I remember going to one of those, I was invited by a friend to go to their Toastmasters to see if I liked it. So I stayed for a whole evening for one of these Toastmasters sessions. but the biggest drawback to me was the fact that if i joined and i practiced my speaking the one thing it could never recreate was the fact that i know everyone in the audience yeah the real speaking events i go to i don't know anyone in the audience so how am i creating that ability to be comfortable with my nerves if i really know everybody's sitting in the room so i said that's not going to be the way that i learned speaking the way that i learned speaking is by putting myself out there in the open just like a stand-up comedian would by doing the sort of the smaller circuits before they go and do the big theaters and just by trying it and that's what I did I put myself out there and I just started practicing in small groups of people I went into a website called meetup.com at the time and said hey I'd love to speak for free just to practice my speaking and I would also watch YouTube videos of people I would consider to be great speakers not for the content but for the mechanics so how did they start how did they tell a story how did they engage with the audience and that was how I learned and I would just kind of codify what they did so I could test it and so one of the things I I would then later coin which is the James Bond opening of a presentation came from what I learned from other people because a lot of people when they start a presentation they begin with hey my name is Simon today I want to talk to you about this this and this and by the end we're going to cover this I hope you enjoy it people really switched stuff because it's how 99 % of speakers start their talk instead I remember watching some James Bond films and what I loved about it is they all started by dropping you to the action and then you had the James Bond theme come on and then they would pick up where they left off yeah and so that's what I learned I learned that in order to hook people in in a talk I had to start with a James Bond style introduction so instead of starting with my name and here's my background and here's what I do I would just jump straight into the story to hook them in and then kind of go back later to fill in the blanks and then as I saw people building out the presentation I realized I had to lean into storytelling a lot visual storytelling but then it wasn't just that it was in understanding the pace and the speed of your delivery so when you want to hit something important you really slow down your communication so you can emphasize those words so then if it's a question you can really slow down, let each word land, or if there's a statement such as ready isn't a feeling, it's a decision.

1:24:49When you slow your speed down, it hits people more. And then when you tell a story, you want to create some tension, you can increase your speed of talking. And so that variety of use of voice really helps to bring people into your story. And then the ending, again, when I was understanding how speaking works, is then thinking of what your crescendo is going to be. so a crescendo in music is just when things start picking up pace in speaking is how do you close it because chances are when people leave the room they're only going to remember what you said last yeah and so the last thing you say should be either a powerful story to get some thinking a quote or a question that lingers in their head and so once i started understanding these mechanics i just went and tested it i tried to fit my content into these frameworks and then tried it and i just hoped people would enjoy it.

1:25:40Simon Alexander Ong:Have you done any coaching on it? I've done elements of coaching with the leaders I've worked with on the wider coaching. Because inevitably sometimes communication will creep into what we work on. So it could be they're pitching for investment or it could be they have to present to their stakeholders or employees. So communication will inevitably come into our coaching in some way. I think you can't avoid it, especially as AI starts to take over a lot more functional skills that we take for granted. The one thing that differentiates us will be our ability to communicate and deliver information at scale.

1:26:15Simon Alexander Ong:It would be remiss of me having a personal development business coach here not to touch on the 80-20 of your coaching. What are the biggest things that you find people are struggling with or that you go through in your process with them? Like what are the biggest questions and your favorite questions to ask people? The favorite questions I like asking people are anything that distances themselves from the situation they're in. Because when you are going through a phase in your life or career when you're stuck and you have no idea what to do next, you're procrastinating and you're not following through what you told yourself you were going to do my favorite questions are ones that distance themselves enough from that situation so they can come up with their own solutions so one of my favorite questions is something like if your life were a netflix tv series what would the next episode be called and what would be happening in it because what happens then is with that distance they start coming up with the solutions themselves they might say well the next episode is going to be called comeback and i'm like well i'm really curious now what happens in that well having gone through a redundancy having gone through a structuring this character is now finally taking the time to think about what he wants to do and he's making a plan to follow through he's meeting some extraordinary people and he's taking his first steps into the beautiful unknown.

1:27:49And so what happens is by removing the person from the situation, they're almost coming up with their own solutions, their own advice and their own answers because I think we all know the answers deep within. We just need to find and discover the courage to take them. And so questions like that for me are beautiful. What else comes to mind? Anything that sort of like makes them think about their existence. So another popular one I've asked is we are a miracle. You know, the odds of us being born are something like 400 trillion to one. You've already won the greatest lottery ticket there is going, the lottery of life.

1:28:26Question for you is, what are you going to do with that winning ticket of yours? What are you going to do with it? And then they would usually pause, go inward, have a think, and then so much comes out because we we don't really appreciate we have one life you know we always say life is short we've only got one life but i don't think we truly appreciate it when we do we do things so different we do things vastly different and so my job in some of these sessions is to remind themselves that you don't have forever and to remove them from the tragic scenario of living as if they're never going to die and then dying having never really lived.

1:29:13It's to get them living now, to start living and stop waiting.

1:29:18Simon Alexander Ong:They're definitely questions you've got to sit with. And they unpack a lot. Do you find that, because you work with a lot of very successful people, do you find that, what do they tend to be struggling with? It depends where they're on the journey. I'll give an example. So I worked with a Michelin star chef. Now to go from zero to one star It's not really that difficult because to go from zero to one, so one, nobody knows who you are. So you have an element of freedom to experiment. Try dishes, try creations, put it out there. Just literally focus on the thing that you do best, which is cooking.

1:29:52Now, when you get your first star, you're happy, you're proud. But now from one to two stars, the game is completely different because now you don't have as much time to focus on the cooking. You're doing interview. The media is following you. Critics are coming to your new restaurant. You're now hiring lots of people to run the restaurant. You're now becoming a manager, which is very different from zero to one style when you're just a chef. So it's navigating a completely unknown phase. And what comes with that is the stories you tell yourself. Can I do this? What would the media think of my new restaurant?

1:30:25What would the critics think of my new dish that I'm putting together? And so it's really helping people to understand the power of the stories we tell ourselves and the influence that has on how we show up. And I understood that when I was in school, You know, when I was a 15 year old, this was before mobile phones and social media and the internet. So when we came back to school in September, after the summer holidays had finished, rumors would always go around. People would want to find out what we did in summer holidays and people would make up stories. And I remember coming back to school, I'd made this decision that I would shave my head.

1:30:57You know, before, you can't imagine it now, maybe I had longer hair. I would spend 20, 30 minutes in the morning styling my hair. And I came back to school and I remember sitting at lunch in the canteen and a friend of mine came up to me and he said, Simon, have you heard this rumor going around? Is it true? And I was like, well, what is the rumor? And he said, well, the rumor going around is saying that you spent the summer in the Shaolin monastery and that's why you've got a shaved head. And then nobody wants to mess with you because they think you can whack out a move or something. And the reason I show that is because the stories we tell ourselves create our reality.

1:31:31and for a lot of people I work with the stories they tell themselves are based on old data and so they need somebody whether it's a mentor or coach to challenge them about the stories they're telling themselves and how to rewrite better ones that help to move to that next level because what they forget is that as we go through evolutions in our life we also have to shed identities what got us here is not going to help us get to this level and so we have to understand we have to upgrade our internal software in order to make that next leap even more possible and sometimes without that challenge we're using old beliefs and old ways to try and get to a level that requires a

1:32:09Simon Alexander Ong:new set of beliefs well what is your experience of that because i i assume a lot of people listening to this will have their working content they'll be a creator or there'll be a brand and so you set these goals and these milestones when i get to 100k subscribers i'll have made it or when i get to a million in revenue i'll have made it or and then you reset and it's like where do i go from here like what how have you processed that and how yeah the truth is uh process that and it's interesting for me as a coach because the truth i tell people is there is no dare if you kind of work on the fact that i'm going from here and when i'm there i've i've made it that's actually a trap because when you get whatever there is well what happens next For many people, and I've looked at lots of success stories, what happens is complacency creeps in, especially in the world of sport.

1:33:01It's easy to win that first trophy. So you become champions, you lift the trophy, everybody's enjoying the success of that moment. And next season, you're bottom of the table because you've forgotten what got you there. It's the same thing with people saying, this year I'm going to run the marathon. So for them, getting there is finishing the marathon. But what happens when they finish the marathon? they then go back to their unhealthy ways before they were training for the marathon and so for me it's less the idea of having a dare that you've made it and it's a combination of being content and grateful for what you have now but also realizing that this is an infinite game that this game never finishes all that happens is you keep evolving and the only goal now that i have and i think the only goal people should have is to be better than who you were yesterday.

1:33:48That's it. If you focus on being better than who you were yesterday, the results will come. And often results you cannot anticipate. You know, if I started my entrepreneurial journey, I want to be a coach and only a one-to-one coach. I would have probably ignored all the other opportunities to become a speaker, an author, and a content creator. But because I was open to seeing where the journey would go, I was content and grateful in the present. but I was also open to the fact this journey could go lots of different places I'm just going to focus on being better on who I was yesterday in terms of relationship in terms of value I can give in terms of my knowledge I'm sure doors were open and this reminds me of a of a beautiful Japanese saying that goes be attached to no outcome and open to everything be attached to no outcome and open to everything because when you embrace that sometimes the universe works in beautiful ways in giving you more than you asked for that's absolutely incredible i've absolutely loved this

1:34:50Simon Alexander Ong:time and you've just given so much value in terms of content building personal brand building a coaching business but i think also the life the life advice and there's some questions that i'll i'll definitely reflect on it's like incredible i see the i see the value that you bring to the world and I love what you're doing and what you create and what you put out there. So thanks so much for coming on. Thank you so much. If you enjoyed this episode, let me know, send me a comment or a DM or an email. And if you're looking for something similar, I think you'll really enjoy my conversation with Caleb Ralston, former director of marketing for Alex Hormozzi.

1:35:21Simon Alexander Ong:He has built personal brands for huge creators like Alex and Gary Vee. And it's just one of my favorite conversations. So I think you'll enjoy it. Make sure you're subscribed to the channel or the podcast and queue that one up next to listen to. I think it's one of my favourite episodes.