Everything You Need To Know To Start A Business In 2025

0:28Okay, welcome to Secret Leaders. So 2020, January the 5th, so around about the time that this is coming out, this week anyway, five years ago, I launched my company Heights. And so we're just going into our fifth year. And I was actually just at lunch with Chris and I was telling him how at the beginning of the year, one of my goals for 2024 was to fall in love with my business again. And that is because in 2023, I had a really hard year. like everything just felt hard and went wrong and wasn't good and we weren't growing and it was just a grind and yet you like 3x last year in the end yeah in the end but 2023 was rubbish and january 2024 was rubbish and i started the year feeling rubbish i started the year feeling just quite down about stuff and really like I need this to work this year.

1:30I think what's important to say is I was very much in a place last January, a very different place to where I'm at now. Right now I feel full of hope, gratitude, super excited about what the year will bring for me in my life and across my businesses as well. I wasn't in that place last year and so if you're listening to this episode uh you might be in one or two places you might be in a challenging place like i was last year or you might be in a more positive place like i am this year and i think it's a good reflection on entrepreneurship isn't it it's like constantly year by year january by january up or down it's never the same i can happily say like i've been an entrepreneur now for 16 years a variety of different country a variety of different companies over 16 years and I would say that out of those 16 years probably 14 13 14 of them felt exhausting and brutal maybe two of them one was good and one was great and I think that that's like context is really important when you are an entrepreneur it's like very difficult to have consistently good years and obviously I'm off the back of probably one of the first and best years of my entrepreneurial life 16 years in whereas the rest I ended those years so beat down so exhausted so much being like am i really an entrepreneur am i going to keep doing this like is this thing that i'm doing worth doing and i think the thing we don't speak about a lot of the time is that unless you really make it as an entrepreneur often you're not actually paid that much and so you're running these companies everyone thinks you're super successful but you actually make much money yeah and so i think to like everyone who's watching the show like i hope that we're able to help people make good decisions about the business they want to create in the future so and we're going to talk a little bit about that today like what businesses we actually would want to start if we were starting today.

3:14Yeah. So if you were starting a business today, what would you do? Yeah, it's a good question because I think when I started Heights, the reason that I ended up starting that business was I'd gone through my own personal experience of insomnia and chronic anxiety and just crippling mental health problems that I felt like I couldn't live with. And when I found a solution for them and was reading up on the science around it and all this stuff, I felt genuinely like a calling. You know, I finally felt like there was something that mattered to me that I made that was so focused on overcoming a personal challenge and knowing that there was a solution on the other side and knowing that I had some relevant skills that I could package together to turn it into a business.

4:06I think that's still so important. So you know, I started technically in 2019, I started writing this newsletter and in 2020, January, 2020, we launched. And what got me through 2023, five years, this will be the fifth year. And what got me through 2023, a really tough year, I had to fire half my team and everything went to shit. Was a sense of purpose, was a sense that like, I still care about what I'm doing. And I still care every day if we're helping some people, I still care about our customers, and nothing went our way in 2023 at all. We got like hit with fines and just all sorts of stuff went wrong, like everywhere.

4:48And the only thing that really got me through that was just, I still loved the core purpose of why I'd started this business and what I was doing. So knowing that for most, especially consumer businesses, but most businesses, you're in it for like a decade at least typically. So knowing that that's going to be the case, can you start a business that you will still care about in 10 years? that's very hard. Like most people don't know how to answer that question properly. And a lot of people start businesses on fads, right? I've been guilty of it myself, which is I'm interested in this thing today.

5:18So I'll just start a business out of it. And it's like, yeah, cool. But will you still be interested in that in two years when it's hard? Or will you have moved on from the fad? Yeah. So then I guess the question is like, what am I really interested in today? And arguably I'm really fascinated. I think all parents go through this. I'm interested in what education looks like, the future of education for young kids. I don't have any good answers to that question, by the way, at all. Like I'm not an expert in this. I'm learning a lot from other people. But I think that education is probably the space that's going to go through one of the most forced transitional experiences of our lifetime.

5:54because there's always been this long, you know, this longstanding belief, which is so poignant, which is our education system was designed by 19th century people being taught by 20th century professors to 21st century kids. So it's like so archaic. And the difference now is that AI, GPT, etc. will just force kids in a classroom with a smartphone to outthink their teachers. like the teachers and the curriculum is not going to control how kids access technology that moment has gone so it isn't about what's in textbooks so i guess all of this is to say what kids are learning how they're interacting with smartphones how we protect their mental health and breed the next generation of healthy people in society i think is what i find so fascinating i'd find a way to build in that space if i wasn't doing heights i'd find my way in that space because it's the question that i know could sustain me over a decade interesting what about yourself i think like so many people don't have that moment where they're like wow i have a business that i'm so passionate about that this is going to like change and conquer the world most people don't most people don't yeah and i think to the vast majority of entrepreneurs i speak to who are more attuned to the relate more to the thing which is i want to work for myself i want to have a disproportionately good outcome for myself i want to make a lot of money and in this country especially we're not actually not that au fait with people saying i want to make a lot of money i would say to all of those people my key takeaways from all my years of work if i was to start a business now the thing i would focus on more is margin like ease of scalability because you know this being a product business like scaling your business is kind of nice on the front end but operationally hard on the back end because you're delivering putting together ingredients packaging product and sending it out and for so many businesses i often think to myself wow i would not want to run that like i met someone the other day when i was on holiday and it's so funny like he literally came up and we were chatting away and he was like yeah i own this food business it's frozen we deliver frozen chicken and i was like wow who is this guy and then he was like yeah so we did 120 million last year in turnover.

8:11I was like, fucking hell. But like, I was thinking to myself, my God, I wouldn't want to run that business. Like the operations behind it. So my advice is focus and think very, very hard about this sort of scaled version of the product. And because if you can think to yourself, I can achieve X margin and X scalability on this thing, then I often think that's a great way of thinking. If you can be passionate about business, often doesn't matter what the you know the true change the world passion is because i've done lots of variety of businesses right and i'm on a new one now that i remember designing on a piece of paper not because i was like brutally passionate about it but because i wanted it to be a brutally efficient business which is infinitely scalable product like no angst with scalability and then the ability to always achieve a good margin and so i think we don't teach that when we talk about business we often teach like be passionate about problem but like how about like be passionate about your outcome you know like i think the thing i'm truly passionate about is spending time with friends and family yeah and so like all the thing i do at work is just to provide myself the ability to do the latter thing well and also you know you're a classic entrepreneur in that yes you do want to design more for our work we've started lifestyle but not zero hour you'd be bored stiff if you were just hanging out with friends and family.

9:32You need a bit of something to go after, like all entrepreneurs do. Yeah, and I think my book focuses on that conundrum a lot, which is I definitely am not preaching the four-hour work week. But I do think that Tim Ferriss and what he said is genius about the fact that we all prioritise the wrong thing in our lives. I know so many people who really don't need to work as hard as they work because they've got loads of money. So why are they doing it? So I think you should be intentional about, I'm going to work this amount of my life, I'm going to enjoy this amount, and I'm going to make some rules and some intentions about my free time.

10:03And that will take up time. You know, whereas a lot of people get to the weekend and they're a bit empty on what to do. So I would just say like there is, you will never regret sitting down in a room with a piece of paper and just thinking about the perfect, brilliant outcome for yourself because it will force you to think, wouldn't it be amazing if I had a business that made X a year and took X time a year? Yeah, but then saying that it's so simplistic that you'll just get some people listening to this and being like great I'll write down a piece of paper I'd like to get to 10 million pounds next year do you need 10 million no but I'm trying to say can you give a bit more structure to what you're saying because otherwise you'll get some like really stupid answers do you know what I mean as in what is a practical way of doing this well I'd say like most I'd say business generally if if you're achieving above a 25 profit margin I would say those are the sorts of businesses I'd start to look at right so you have to like really study what's out there you think just if i want to scale my business maybe it has to be more like uh you know a digital product as opposed to physical product because a digital product can be scaled and delivered to hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands of people without operationally increasing my team massively if you're smart about the way you think about ai you think customer service has changed fundamentally in the last few years i can build a chatbot that is better and more efficient than a whole customer service team and so you think to yourself okay i can kind of put those two ideas together and then you think where does like my marketing and distribution come from can i build a product that naturally markets itself so you think about viral loops before you build the product and so if you sit down on a piece of paper and write that then you start thinking okay i'm gonna out of all the businesses i could build i know i can't build these ones and so you start thinking okay i can start looking at these ones that i can build that honestly i went away after i left lotty and said what are the businesses I can build?

11:51What are the businesses that will serve me the most? And that's the exact exercise I did. And I found four or five models and eventually I ran with one. Because I think what is important is, you know, we both got experience in building different kinds of businesses. And actually, for people to build a business like Heights, most businesses like Heights actually come from a pretty dark, difficult place. Mine came from my lowest place, right? insomnia chronic anxiety you don't wish that stuff on anyone no and you are forced to find a solution out of it and so to your point most businesses don't focus around a big solution and a purpose like that because most people don't actually have to go through that much suffering yeah some people come from a good place and they do exactly what you've said which is wanting to design a product or service that's going to give them an entrepreneurial lifestyle in conjunction with Yeah, exactly.

12:46In conjunction with your life. Yeah. And so I think that's the key. Like I think that in entrepreneur folklore, social media, it's all about like the big idea and the big passion. I just think that you can be slightly dispassionate about the way you choose your business. Yeah. And therefore give yourself a better... I know people who run businesses that they work 60 to 80 hour weeks on and they might take home a mid-level salary from because the companies don't make enough margin. Yeah. And they're great businesses. They look quite big on the outside, but they might be achieving three to five percent margin and so you think for that business to meaningfully make a lot of money it's got to be fucking huge and do you really want to run a fucking huge organization because there's an interesting thing where i'm really passionate about what we do you're much less passionate about what you do and yet we're both just as happy as each other in terms of actually running the businesses sure yeah and you work much less than i do as a result of it because you don't need to but it's really interesting but we're actually both really happy i'm quite passionate about the impact my work has on people but what are you more passionate about from an outcome point of view this or lottie the impact it can have on people on the early days of lottie i can say that my brother and i and he is still like he is an absolute like passion mission warrior like he will take that company to the next level i believe that in my bones but like the first few years of that the thing if you do find a passion business it's different to what i'm saying if you do come across a problem like we had a problem with our family couldn't find care we started business four years later it's like 100 people working in the company valued over 100 million solving a real fucking problem lived and breathed it worked every hour there was of the day and then i got to a point where i was like i feel like we've made a dent in this mission it's probably his to carry on and so i wouldn't say i'm like unbelievably passionate about my work now but as you as you know i take an enormous amount of time off work yeah and and don't work as much and i think that's the key is that my business provides me exactly what I need for my life.

14:43I think one reflection I've got on my last year so 2024 like I said I'd fallen out of love with heights and one of the things I had as a goal for 2024 I had various goals you know I had egotistical goals like grow LinkedIn to whatever you know the boring sort of you know setting myself a target but they're kind of meaningless one of the goals I had was uh fall in love with heights again and I think it's really really important and I absolutely did yeah and more to the point you know I did this word of the year thing and like last year my word of the year was creativity um I think what's really important there is I you know oh like become sort of over analytical about everything and like missteps and you know just nerves nerves on what happens if we can't grow and you start to get defensive rather than offensive and you're worried about your cash because it's a cash intensive business and all of this stuff and actually setting out the word creativity was because I'm a creative person at heart and I really enjoy the creative process and entrepreneurship can really be a creative process like for some people it is a mathematical or engineering process but like it's hard it's a creative process you're creating something obviously like over the last couple of years you've you've really leaned into this personal brand thing and i think actually being one of the best examples of looking like fun like a hobby like you were trying to learn from the ground up the ins and outs of how it works and really having fun with it you've turned it into a business yeah is that true like what do you think what's where's the line between hobbies and turning them into businesses i mean i've definitely got an opinion on that i don't know if mine was a hobby turned business i think it was very intentionally trying to build a real unfair advantage for myself in the world and i feel like i've got to a point now where we never need to spend money on marketing never need to spend money on recruitment all those things flow to us and the compound effect of having like optionality is amazing and then the compound effect of having so much inbound is amazing and so like having a big audience led to doing a big book deal which i'm sure will lead to having a bigger audience which will lead to more and more you know and so that work isn't hard if you systemize it it's not hard and so that was always part of the puzzle which was like how do you build a business that doesn't require loads and loads and loads of hours um but i do think that like if you're really passionate about fishing or you're really passionate about something i wouldn't necessarily think to start a business in it personally because it might kill the passion for you and two you have to question is it a good business like is the thing that you're passionate about a good business or is it a good hobby because i think again i know so many entrepreneurs who end up running like three or four companies and they're not great companies and they're super distracting and i think the skill as you get older we were speaking about this at lunch the skill as you get older and you have more optionality in life and business is saying no to shit yeah like have a hobby the amount of entrepreneurs i know me included who's like oh i love that hotel yeah i would want to run a classic one isn't it or this restaurant.

17:49Exactly. We've both been tempted to invest in or start a paddle club. Exactly. And you've got to be brutal with yourself about focus. Yeah. Because 10 years focus energy on a problem is the only ingredients to a great business. Unless you're like Richard Branson. He did such a good job of having a spread of interest and hiring other people to do that. But not at the beginning, he didn't. No, true. He had the records business. Yeah. Built that for basically 10 years, sold it. Then he licensed the brand. That's true. Yeah. But you won't find, I mean obviously there's outliers to these rules but like you won't find many entrepreneurs who out the gate a few years in were super super successful I suppose like what is the definition of an entrepreneur slash creator because like you look at these twitch streamers and gamers on youtube and stuff and they're essentially making more money than most entrepreneurs yeah but how quickly I don't know as in like I'm I don't watch any of them I used to be really into gaming and watching streamers yeah and most of the people who made loads of money were in the game for a long time right and even the youngsters who are coming up they're not making money from streaming they're making money from competing and then maybe they can turn that into a streaming career yeah but i guess my point is that those are hobbies the hobbies turned into professions well i think most people now who are gaming early know it's a profession now so i don't think it's different but i also do think that like the like we've spoken about many times if you find a great business and you are someone that makes loads of money and you're quite public about it you like the wave of people who flock to it will be massive and so in streaming and and gaming and so forth the saturation levels must be doing that as in like the amount of people flocking to it and therefore the amount people can make from it going down must be happening and it's obviously like a great great example there's so many of these like this is basically the the definition of like overnight success but jinxie the streamer who became like the top streamer in the world there's a great clip of him calling his dad he talks to his dad about like you know becoming the biggest stream in the world but he also talks about how for three years he streamed to one viewer and so it's like can you call him you know an overnight success it's like no he was honing his craft for years and years and years totally and you know there's the you know the other side of this is if you do professionalize your hobby you risk falling out of love with it because it becomes a business all businesses have stresses.

20:09The ups and downs and you get obsessed about the metrics and numbers and you need to professionalize it. It's not really a hobby at that point. Yeah. You know, that's the argument against it. Like all of my hobbies are really nothing to do with my business. Yeah. And I think that's really healthy. Like at the end of the day, the things that I love creatively outside of work, I keep outside of work and there's definitely a temptation to merge them. I've always been fearful that i'll just fall out of love with them and you need an outlet i'm so glad i never did anything with paddle and i'm tennis yeah yeah i'm so glad i did nothing with tennis and i really got close to i think it would have killed it i'd stop loving the tennis and i think about like the tennis club operations like who gives a fuck yeah do you know i mean and it's the same thing with like travel i love travel and i love hotels i reckon if i ran a hotel it would just be an efficient business yeah and boring yeah and i certainly wouldn't want to stay in that fucking hotel and when you go to other hotels you would just be thinking about all the things yeah exactly and you wouldn't actually just be able to just enjoy being in a hotel exactly yeah as a good example i used to really enjoy talking to you and now it's work so yeah so obviously like i i knew you from watching this show but i also knew you as the guy who ran the kind of like unknown secret founders uh club is kind of what i thought from the outside never got an invite can you believe that unbelievable i can believe but yeah exactly and as i've got to know you over the years obviously now finally got invited when we started doing a podcast together my god um i now know what founders is and it is the most phenomenal community of like genuine transparent incredible founders who try and help each other and like not too woo woo but just very nice and if you are a founder it's an unbelievable community part of but i would say for you that like is passion crossover business territory for sure because i can't imagine you're like fans is my most successful business ever but it is a business and you own it and it's like a passion project yeah that's the really challenging and interesting one because by design unfindable we don't market it on purpose impossible to get into whole and i'm i'm on purpose disintermediated away from the application process so i can't personally invite people anymore there's a memberships committee um the guy that runs the memberships committee runs a you know 70 million pound a year like tuition education business essentially oh yeah he's a dude yeah he's awesome yeah um we have like exceptional people at every level like the person who runs product and founders was the managing director of stripe in europe the first ever employed for stripe in the whole of europe like it's just insane entrepreneurs like you know as you've met as and you know and i'm not naming them on purpose so it's been an incredible experience of finding i think britain's most inspiring ambitious scale-up entrepreneurs who have tons of heart and i think you know being really honest you know when richard harpen was talking to us about what he's doing with business leader and stuff there's a lot of crossovers right the stuff that he was talking about like it was essentially tribes as a product, you know, eight people meeting once a month, yada, yada, yada, we have a product like that, et cetera, et cetera.

23:24But his is all focused on money, 8 ,000 pounds to join, and this is the outcome that you get, and et cetera. So I think it's very good as well, by the way. I think the whole thing makes loads of sense. And ours is not about money. It is about who you are. And once you make things about money specifically, you kind of lose your opportunity to be like, yeah, but what's your character like? Are you actually someone that's going to help someone else? So we are insanely cagey. about who we let in. We only let in, I mean, in the last three years, we've let in 60 founders in three years. Wow. And so that gives you a good idea of like, we're just not interested in having the world's biggest community or anything, but we are interested in having a phenomenal group of outrageously cool people.

24:07What I will say about it though, is it's in its 12th year, 11th year, 11th year wow yeah and it all started like innocently as a dinner um it's a not-for-profit so i've literally never taken a penny out of it like not a single penny ever um you put a lot in i put a lot in so me and my best friend uh rob who now lives in la we started it together we both put him you know at one point we were both down about 20 grand um and over time you know that sort of evened back out he i've i've now been paid back fully he's still owed about 10 grand um so to give you like an idea is not exactly a good business um and it's never been about that at all it's literally always just being super focused on purpose so the question of like you know turning a hobby into okay so for me that's literally where i spend all my time someone literally messaged me on instagram a few days ago being like do you want to catch up for dinner in a few weeks whatever I was like I don't have time in 2025 the only things I'm doing are founders related things or stuff for heights of secret leaders like I'm not because I don't need to I've got hundreds of friends like literally hundreds of amazing friends and you know these guys as well now right you know how great they are they're the people we want to spend time with anyway they're like super inspiring really authentic very funny don't take themselves too seriously doing incredible things they're the people I want to spend my time with anyway I don't have time for like loads of other lunches or dinners or schmooze like forget it so actually for me as I go through a period of my life where I'm scaling businesses I have less time I want to be a more present dad like all of the things it also helps focus so it's interesting because it's a bad business but it's actually a really helpful uh way to frame how I spend my time and where I spend my time and who with so I think it's been a really meaningful use of my time but my god is that not a good business we were talking about this at lunch uh you know we both said so i'm sure you'll say the same thing the art of saying no you know i felt so empowered to just look at that message i got on the dms and be like no sorry i'm not doing i'm not doing that like i'm just doing founder stuff this year and um the essentials for my business other than that it's a no yeah so i think what i'm going to try and leave behind just this year doesn't mean every year but this year is that people pleasing side of me where i'm like oh i should see them i should go and do that i'm gonna sort of just leave behind the should and just focus on what i need for this year which is just as much of my time back as possible yeah that is i i can't not agree with you i'm leaving behind like my previous life of entrepreneurship which sounds really silly and like dramatic but no that's an amazing statement i have a rule now which is i work four days a week no more than seven hours in a day and i work 10 months a year and then that takes quite a lot of organization to do that and to do all the business commitments and everything but i feel like at the moment that means taking wednesday off which is very strange for an entrepreneur to be like i'm off on wednesday and like what are you off doing i'm playing paddle playing tennis seeing friends running hanging with Lou and like I feel like those things are so important to me now that my business is going to work around me whereas I have worked around my business for 16 years and so I want the businesses to work around me I'm unapologetic about it I'm thankful because obviously I own all the companies I work for yeah so that helps um and so that is going to be my main focus this year like I still think I can build probably the best business I've ever built this year and I feel like by the end of this year I'll have surpassed anything I've ever done before I've just had a book deal but all of that stuff has to fit the framework otherwise I just don't feel like I'm going to enjoy it yeah I think I really respect that I think that's great we'll see it up hands out yeah of course and like there will always be exceptions there will be the occasional thing you have to on a Wednesday and all of that stuff of course but I think if this is very similar to when my daughter Margot was born I was like I'm doing bedtime and bath times 6pm comes I'm no matter what yeah I'm done I'm done So 6.15, I'll start to do her dinner and I'll do her bath time.

28:26And I'm with her till nine, basically. She goes to bed later and later because another story, another story. But like, whatever, from six till nine, I'm with my daughter. I never said I'm not going to work again after nine. I wasn't saying I won't. Some days I need to, but most days I don't. And the work gets done actually by six. But there are always going to be exceptions to the rule. And I think what's important in the journey of entrepreneurship as you go through life in different seasons, as they say, is that you're not a slave to your commitment, but the commitment is a framework. So I've done 95 % of all the bedtimes and bath times as a result of my commitment.

29:00And the 5 % that I'm like, you know what? I've got too much on tonight, babe. I am just going to work for it. That's a one-off. That's a one-off. I know it's a one-off. Otherwise, you know what we're like, without the rules, it's just going to be 100 % 24 seven. Yeah, totally. And it doesn't help. It doesn't make you a better entrepreneur. I would actually say that that is, and I actually don't think entrepreneurs are that unique from each other. I think that if left to our own devices, you'll just work all the time without good framework, without good work will be shit. Yeah. But you will just work through.

29:26And I am that person. I have been that person my whole life. And I know that if I don't like a big part of the book I'm writing is about intentionality around frameworks. It's about like putting systems in place in your life so that you have boundaries. And I feel like this year coming is me really putting to a test my boundaries. Cause otherwise I know me, Like I can get caught in work and not because I'm have to work, but because I'm obsessive about work that I'll work. You love work. Yeah. From 9am through to 3am and be like, Oh fucking hell it's 3am. Yeah. And I will have that all the time.

30:00And so now it's like putting alarms in place. The alarms will have like names, like having focused days, days where I don't work. And if I can stick to it, I feel like I will be a better entrepreneur because it makes you think more as opposed to work more. And I think that's a way better outcome. Yeah. I love that. What's something you're leaving in 2024? For those very close to me know that I managed to wrap up a big legal case I've been working on forever. And it was to do with my exit. I was a bad leaver and now I'm a good leaver. It's an incredibly complex long case that I cannot talk about.

30:29But leaving that behind for me, I can't even tell you that that was something that lived inside me. It was something that just lived deep inside me about a fight I was having. It went on forever. And now that it's done, the moment it finished, I remember going and lying on Peck and Rye and being like um what am i going to do with all this free time and i recommitted to can i play sport every day and i pretty much play sport every day now that's amazing which is amazing and it can be anything as simple as on the days i struggle to get a game together i'll ask one of the coaches in my local tennis if they're free and on whatsapp and they will just play with me for 45 minutes and it's like i'm very very committed to exercising every day and only 45 minutes and at the moment I'm doing it I'm probably doesn't show but I eat a lot but I am actually keeping to exercising every day and if I could keep that up for a year I will be so proud of myself I can't even tell you yeah okay so mine will probably have to be especially relevant because it's January and how much I struggle with this at the end of last year I decided I was going to start bulking I've read all the books on longevity and stuff and basically I'd got myself into just too weedier position from doing too much cardio and too much yoga and not enough strength training and lifting and then when i do do that so i got myself into the gym side of it i just can't get myself into the diet side of it because i grew up fat so i find it very uncomfortable and you don't eat meat and i don't eat meat so i started at the end of 2024 eating chicken um which has helped a lot with the protein yeah just for that wow really yeah yeah yeah um and um i my big challenge is just trusting the process because i've been putting on weight and admittedly like i'm stronger in the gym and it's working but i'm also getting fatter yeah and there's nothing someone who grew up fat hates less than seeing that right and so i need to just power through the little negative voice in my head and remember the longer term reason why i'm doing it is about often looking a bit fatter isn't it no i understand that but like i can barely handle that psychologically yeah yeah i do remember that from like i used to play a lot of rugby and if you were in pre-season you everyone was was was quite they were very stocky very unesthetically pleasing but and you see this in professional sport before the season of something like tennis they all get much bigger much musclier because throughout the year it's impossible to keep up the that amount of bulking so i think the the acceptance that if you are bulking up you can't look to find at the same time yeah so i'd like to carry on that process but also commit to you know five days a week in the gym we should talk to jay have you seen jay's arms jesus christ yeah it's a good example of someone who looks good whilst bulking yeah is he permanently bulking um i've been talking for years yeah this is natural baby i tried to i tried to cut once yeah uh it was so pain it was so arduous yeah lose weight i find it so difficult i'd find that a lot easier psychologically honestly can't handle not eating really and you do oh i love i love the fast it's called um exempt exempt right i was thinking about that recently i was like it'd be so nice if i wasn't like you know like roundish you know i would like to be really lean for a bit and then i read that one of the one of the side effects is that you no longer taste the food and you no longer feel hunger oh i didn't know that and i was i was saying like what's my favorite thing in the world my favorite thing fundamentally is eating i love eating and drinking with friends i think it's my favorite activity there is my wife always mocks me for it and if i took that drug i would trade to have maybe a more skinny lean physique but i would lose like being hungry and eating and i just don't know if i could make that it's kind of stupid isn't it i'm with you what's something that you want to bring into 2025 i i think um it's definitely worth saying i've got like three businesses that i'm the founder of right um so at the start of last year i'd fallen out of love with secret leaders i was until now exactly let me say it though yeah you said uh i was really struggling with founders mostly from a financial point of view it was just a black hole that i kept on having to pour money into and heights wasn't going well and if i look at what happened in 2024 literally restarted secret leaders with you my friend and like we're having loads of fun we're in a studio it's kind of an amazing turnaround like i'm so motivated and fallen back in love with it which is so nice um heights tripled so like unbelievable heights is phenomenal yeah so unbelievable success last year and uh founders is being run by an exceptional team we're finally back in a very healthy position i'm not personally having to fund it in fact i i just get to sort of turn up and enjoy it now it couldn't possibly be in a better space for me like to enjoy so i think it would be greedy to ask for anything more in 2025 than those three businesses continuing in that direction whatever it works out because yeah i would have traded anything a year ago to feel good about any one of those three to have all three in such a good spot I just want to continue that feeling without kind of jinxing anything yeah I like that what about you continuation yeah continuation of appreciation for how it's gone I guess if I could ask for one thing yeah it would be um tons more subscribers on YouTube so breaking the fourth wall pretty please yeah subscribe to us on YouTube and also another reason that uh you know you should subscribe is to obviously follow Dan's bulking journey yeah and the camera adds 10 pounds so as he bulbs up.

36:08Yeah, you can just add a few more cameras so it looks like I'm bulking. So thank you very much for watching. Happy New Year's to everyone that's watching. Thank you very much for supporting the channel. Make sure you subscribe to YouTube and give us five stars on all the audio channels. And in the new year, in looking to be your best self, make sure that you're very deliberate about what you choose to do with your time. And if you're looking for business advice, obviously you're in the right place. Yeah, you should be following every word on secret leaders. But obviously, if you've got specific questions, then, well, probably don't message us.

36:43Message Simon Squibb. He always seems really open to having those thousands of DMs. Ask him, but subscribe to us. Yeah, that sounds about right. Thanks very much.