Why Dominos gave away free Rolex’s & reacting to cringe CEOs

21 Feb 2025 · 33 min

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Podcast Episode Notes: Secret Leaders - "Why Dominos gave away free Rolex’s & reacting to cringe CEOs"

Podcast Hosts: Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly Episode Date: [Insert Date] Sponsors: Wise Business, Vanta Contact: hello@secretleaders.com

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Episode Overview In this episode, Dan and Chris explore unusual employee perks from various companies, discuss health and wellness trends, and share insights on entrepreneurship. They also react to cringe-worthy posts from LinkedIn and answer listener questions on business challenges.

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Key Themes and Discussions

Unique Employee Perks

  • Domino's Rolex Rewards
  • Domino's used to reward top franchise owners with Rolex watches for achieving milestones; a substantial investment that doubles as an asset.
  • LEGO's Solid Gold Bricks
  • LEGO rewarded employees in the 70s/80s with gold bricks, showcasing a unique recognition approach.
  • Airbnb's Travel Credit
  • Offers employees a $2,000 annual stipend to stay in Airbnb listings, a perk that aligns with their business model and enhances employee satisfaction.
  • Zappos' "Pay to Quit" Policy
  • New employees can receive $2,000 to leave if they feel the job isn't the right fit, promoting a healthy work culture and reducing future HR issues.

Health and Wellness Trends

  • Dan's Health Analysis
  • Dan discusses his full-body health check, including tests for vitamins and cancer screenings. He emphasizes the importance of regular health assessments and personal accountability in health.
  • Brian Johnson's Marketing Strategy
  • Discussion of Brian Johnson’s health supplement "Blueprint," focusing on how it aims to provide better value compared to competitors like AG1.

LinkedIn Reactions

  • Cringe-Worthy Posts
  • The hosts react to various LinkedIn posts, including:
  • A post about choosing between $10 million or $10,000 a week, highlighting the absurdity of some entrepreneurial advice.
  • Overly motivational morning routine posts that may not be practical for everyone.
  • Business and Personal Life Overlap
  • Commentary on individuals using dramatic personal stories to promote business coaching services, deemed inauthentic and ineffective.

Listener Questions

  • Investor Concerns
  • A listener expressed hesitation about bringing in investors while feeling burnt out. Dan advises against taking on investors in a vulnerable state, suggesting a break to regain clarity.
  • Family Skepticism Towards Entrepreneurship
  • Advice on handling family doubts about pursuing an entrepreneurial path. Chris emphasizes that pursuing one's own race is crucial for success.
  • Competitor Launching Similar Products
  • In response to a listener’s concern about a competitor with 10x funding, Dan suggests viewing it as validation of the market and exploring opportunities to learn from their strategies.
  • Struggles with Profits
  • A listener mentioned not being able to pay themselves a proper salary after three years. Dan suggests reevaluating business models and pricing strategies to ensure profitability.

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Key Takeaways

  • Creative Employee Incentives
  • Innovative perks can significantly enhance employee motivation and retention.
  • Health Is Wealth
  • Regular health assessments and a proactive approach to wellness can lead to long-term benefits.
  • Navigate Investor Relationships Carefully
  • Bringing in investors should be a thoughtful process, particularly when facing burnout.
  • Embrace Your Journey
  • Entrepreneurial paths can be unconventional, and doubts from others should not deter individuals from pursuing their goals.
  • Value of Market Feedback
  • Competitor activity can provide valuable insights into market viability.

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Closing Thoughts The hosts encourage listeners to reflect on their own work experiences, the perks that stand out to them, and how they handle the challenges of entrepreneurship. They invite more listener questions for future episodes.

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Next Episode Preview

  • The next episode will feature Danny Buck from Crafted, discussing strategies for building a successful e-commerce business.

Call to Action

  • Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for more insights and episodes!

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Transcript

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0:28Hey guys, and welcome back to Secret Leaders. things that i want to do in life um so the vibe is like get a baseline of how healthy we are yeah which we both did yep and we'll go through that and try and extend our lives a little bit yeah and uh certainly not turn into some like cult like jesus figure because that doesn't look like too much fun although and i know like the team will be like move on and say what's coming up in the episode um i also bought uh brian johnson's new like space dust you know he like calls out ag1 and all that i bought his product i think it's called blueprint is that right yeah it arrived yesterday i tried it yesterday quite nice yeah what else we're going to talk about today anyway we can come on to that we can come on to space dust uh we're going to address the state of linkedin so as the mayor of linkedin and um well i guess what does that make me that makes me like the uh janitor um so as mayor and janitor we'll be discussing the mayor of linkedin i'll just clean up the after after you um and we're also going to be talking about how some companies have got creative with their employee motivation.

1:30Ah yes employees of the week. Love it. Before we do all that hopefully you've seen our latest episode with Scott Davies the founder of Hilltop Honey. He is the queen bee of the UK. He sells 25 % of all the honey in the UK. He's building a company that's you know surpassing 50 million coming up to 100 million in the very near future owns 100 % of it is building a dynasty of runny yummy honey so you like that yeah it really tickled you it really tickled you yeah okay great I mean I think the episode is awesome it's like it's like a real business episode like it's bizarre in that you can make I mean frankly so many people have businesses and so many like founders who are public have businesses he is literally killing it making honey it's wild his secret ingredient other than obviously bees and beekeepers and all that stuff but his secret ingredient is just timing it's just like spending spending the time and just being persistent enough being in the game long enough yeah so he was quite literally a beekeeper though yeah because he was interested in bees yeah because he got an injury at 21 and laid flat on his so this is the other thing um he had an injury he couldn't do what he was doing which was being a bricklayer and someone gave him a book on beekeeping and he happened to read it and i think it's one thing why i love books so much because a book can change your life an idea can change your life a book can change your life that guy at 21 who was going to be a bricklayer that was his path that injury and that person that gave him that book changed his you know entire course forever and now he's a incredible successful entrepreneur so the takeaway for everyone watching is give your friends books about bees yes and also go get workplace injuries to change your life.

3:14Yeah. So tune in. It's packed with information like that. A whopping 93 % of you don't subscribe and we'd love you to. It takes two seconds. Give us some love. Thank you. All right, Chris. So tell us why did you buy Brian Johnson's Magic Dust or whatever it's called? You were giving me so much shit about AG1. Yeah. And eventually I was like, right, I've got to get rid of my AG1, which actually I quite liked. So I got rid of it and And I was like, I can't take tablets. As you know, I struggle with tablets because I'm a baby. And so I like powder in the morning. So I then suddenly saw that he had this thing come out.

3:50And I was like, Jesus, this guy is like the guy. And he's made this like super accessible product. I'm going to give it a go. And so I ordered it. It was alarmingly expensive, I think. Really? Or maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was post and packing. I have no idea. That must be mostly post and packing. It was very expensive though. Oh, that's fascinating. I thought the whole thing with Magic Dust is his marketing campaign that was sort of like the AG1 killer was, as I've been saying for ages, but no one believes me because I don't look like Jesus. AG1 is nonsense. What's in it is average. And there's no evidence, like there's no information about how much they're giving you on any of these ingredients at all.

4:27It's like a proprietary blend, meaning they don't tell you how much you're getting of anything. Yeah. So it's all just like marketing spiel. but obviously no one listens to me and I understand why because I would sound biased. So as in I have an agenda or I have a different supplement, etc. So I get it. It's not credible. Brian Johnson came out and said exactly the same things but because he's a genius he's went one step further which is I'm going to prove it. I'm going to reverse engineer their entire product and I am going to make it for a tenth of the price because that's how much these ingredients cost and I'm going to sell it for a tenth of the price and I'm going to give you basically his whole marketing spiel was buying this kind of product is a waste of your time don't do it it barely works there's not much evidence it's pointless but seeing as so many of you are going to do it anyway and want to have supplements in this form i'll do it and i will make it exactly the same as ag1 identical and i'll sell it for a tenth of the price that was his whole marketing spiel so it must be because you're importing from america to the uk and it's not like it's not cost it tastes very nice i read the ingredients it feels like everything that i would like to take in the morning and i literally just get to chug it before work so kind of perfect for me so does it cost you the same as ag1 buying it here i'd have to look it up i mean it i just felt like it was expensive but that probably is because i like ordered it once or something but or getting ag1 for free i was getting ag1 for anything anything more than free is expensive yeah uh but no so very good uh i'm gonna try that now and try and take that every morning i actually had his team reach out to me yesterday um about heights doing some partnership thing with his don't know community oh wow um yeah it's random um i haven't i haven't responded yet and i it's not really i love brian johnson i actually think he's awesome um he's been a guest on the show as well and i really love his shtick and i love what he's doing and i think the whole thing is awesome that's just not us like as in you know he is up here and like you know when i'm trying to understand like who heights customers are versus his customers you know he is like the absolute optimizers we want to live forever we want to cut out all this other stuff in our life we're like perfect perfect perfect i think that's amazing and people should be doing that and they should be following him but we're like a step down we're like you know brian johnson for normies you know blueprint for normies people who don't quite have that level of discipline yeah sahil bloom who we saw last night he'd be perfect for that like he's got that level of discipline i mean he genuinely is right yeah i don't have that level of discipline before we went on stage i was like you know sipping down a beer yeah and i was like someone get me another beer before i go on stage he was like headphones in kind of like an m &m vibe in the corner like crouched in the corner you know but bouncing his head up and down i was there like swigging a beer yeah and as we went on stage he was like are you taking that on stage i was like yeah of course and he was like right i was like oh i did notice yeah the first thing i noticed i said i was with uh our friend rachel i was like oh look at that beer water very good yeah i know exactly where chris is sitting very on brand yeah um but i mean sahil is you know very very disciplined individual yeah yeah which is impressive yeah but also you know there's something in being people like us i think where like we're more disciplined than like your average right because you know we do good things and like like we work hard and we're ambitious but you know not going to kill ourselves for it so you are taking other stuff as well like so obviously you've got brian johnson's blueprint stuff yeah what else are you doing you did your so at the moment right now i am actually taking heights creatine and brian's new product right every single morning and i find heights obviously challenging because i don't like big pills because i'm a baby but i like the fact that like scientifically the delivery of the the product through the capsule yeah yeah so like it's very hard to get away from that other than that i did actually just do a full body medical examination with the mayo clinic not an ad um and mayo of linkedin couldn't resist i'm sorry so i went to the mayo clinic in london had a full body scan i did one five years ago as well so after i sold verb i was like okay i have a bit of money i have really abused myself for 10 years i would like to get tested and that test was like really good and then five years later i was like i'd like to get the same test and so they were like what would you like to test and i was like everything i want to test everything how much is everything because i reckon i probably accidentally spent more getting things separately and i'm just genuinely curious i mean it was a lot because i was having like mris on old injuries um and you know like proper proper scans yeah okay probably spent like over 10 grand okay yeah but mri would skew that enormously yeah an MRI is like a thousand at least yeah it's more probably but yeah yeah um and so yeah I had every single thing tested I had like every test done I had like my genetics done I had my likelihood of being allergic to medication as I get older like what what risks I might have in the future because I've got a really you know really ill dad who's got lots of you know challenges and so we were trying to see if I had you know proclivities to that stuff came back all good so that's great very happy and healthy interesting uh the advice was always can you please drink less yeah can you smoke less but I mean that has been the advice in every doctor appointment ever and so yeah I'm working on it I had a I did all the scans and stuff so I went to HCA I did a full body check cup thing it's called a reassure um and uh so i had posture um height weight body mass index i did my dexa as well recently so dexa scan for bone density and fat mass which is much more accurate version of getting your bmi um and that was actually really cool the dexa was really really cool um you know big machine isn't it yeah big big machine you lie there sort of like you're getting an mri sort of thing um and and like a few other measurements like all in that room and It's sort of 15 minutes and you get an incredibly accurate picture.

10:36And what's really cool is because I'm like trying to get bigger. So I've gone from 73 kilograms last January to 88 this February or whatever. So like it's a big increase. And obviously what happens with that is you are going to put on fat and all this stuff. Yeah, that's bulking a lot, right? And my target though is like I want to get to 90 kilograms and 15 % body fat, which is about a year and a half, two year plan. God, we really have the opposite weight goals. You're looking to just put on body fat. I'm like, can we have less fat? Can we lose weight? I'm just inspired by Jay. I want to get to that.

11:07Yeah. Jay's not on camera right now. Yeah. Jay's more 15 and a half body fat. You know, physical. 90 % body fat. 90. He's 90 % biceps. That's what he is. He is. So that's what I want to get to. What are you, about 100 kilograms? 105. Yeah, 105. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nice. His arms are like 15 of that. Yeah, but it's 105. He looks lean. Yeah. So anyway, I mean, I'm going to have to do what I can with my jeans. I'm not going to get to that. But I feel like 90 and 50. That is an unfortunate. But what's really cool with like saying, I want to get to that is that you can then use your scan to map out what you'd actually need to do.

11:41So how many calories? So specifically for me, how many calories I would need to eat on a daily basis on average over a period of time. So if I was to do it in a year and a half, it's basically 2 ,900 calories a day if I want to get there in one and a half years. So it's a lot. But like, but that's about 180 grams of protein, which is exceptionally hard on a daily basis. That's very hard to get. Mm. So, you know, you might have to extend the period to be two years and make it a bit more practical, but you can essentially map out what your intended journey is. How much protein is that? A lot. Well, I'll put it this way.

12:13A piece of salmon is 20, a piece of chicken is 30. And you have to eat? 180. A day? Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy. So anyway, the point being, that was really fascinating. I also got blood tests done for vitamins. Yeah. Because obviously heights. So... How did you do?

12:33would you tell us wouldn't it be awful yeah i've got i've got all my results i'm like actually going to publish them all on on social and stuff just because i think it is interesting anyway and this is specifically the protocol that i do you are like brian johnson for normies for normies yeah yeah yeah um and i think it's good that like you know and this is like everything was in normal levels so there you go it's the most normal normie yeah just optimal normie um although like the dexter did tell me that i'm a little bit fat um i'm a little bit weak and my bones are a little bit brittle oh wow yeah a little bit as in i'm just just under on all of them except on body fat you don't come across as fat but body fat's 23.7 so their optimal range is you know like a little lower anyway so uh very proudly uh for valentine's day and it's been to my wife that you know a lot fat a lot weak lucky you yeah fragile bones how do you feel about this babe yeah certainly real catch here oh there is one funny thing that got flagged up to your point of like less smoking and you know do you drink so immediately after the thing they were like how much do you drink a week and i was like i don't really drink at all like once every couple of weeks like oh all right well we're gonna book you in with a hepatologist for your liver then i was like oh okay and so i got something that's like raised um and i went to see the hepatologist yesterday's had some blood tests and stuff and so funny like the liver doctor he's like right lie down on the bed and lie there and stuff and he's like right i'm gonna start like just checking i'm like right here come the needles or the machine or whatever literally puts like three fingers on me is like right we're done you're fine good liver yeah i was like what was that the whole was that the whole test yeah i'm glad that went on an assurance because jesus yeah anyway so yeah i think i think i'm fine but it was just quite interesting raised something i thought i thought for a crazy moment there you're gonna go and they said drink more yeah but they didn't you might as well drink more if you're gonna have these kind of results yeah the sum of it okay so mayor of linkedin janitor of LinkedIn discussing the state of LinkedIn.

14:27All right. Well, the town's a little messy this week. Yeah. What are we looking at? Okay. Let me read you a couple of posts that we found and you can roast them or rate them. Okay. Both. Last week, my econ professor asked me, Jack, would you rather take$10 million now or receive 10 ,000 per week for the next 50 years? Without batting an eyelid, I said, neither. I'd rather pay you$10 ,000 a week. Shocked, he replied, that's insane. no economic model would suggest this insane i replied not at all if you give me money i lose my drive i go soft i might as well roll over and die if i give you money it makes me hungry i have to grind to make more i have to hustle the only thing insane is that more people don't think like me hashtag lions don't concern themselves with the opinions of sheep i mean it's another one of those where i'm like satire is it a meme account it has to be a meme account because people one don't talk like that although people do do some people do mate yeah you've got your little coaster there um people do do that thing where they're like would you like 10 million now or 10 000 and it's about my you know how hard we work and so forth what's your answer to that question obviously i just take the money and run yeah 10 million now 10 million right now yeah stick it in an index tracker and just not bother with anything else yeah i mean that's sort of like wanky slightly educated views 10 mil index tracker paying some divvies yeah that's 700 100 grand a year to just chill on.

15:55Take it. Why not? And 10 grand a week is what? 520? Yeah. I mean, we've just mathed that shit. Post-tax, that's at least 10 grand in your bank. Yeah. There we go. All right. Dummy. Matt Latham, he says, 1 % of the way through 2023. If you're not getting up at 4am, meditating, affirming, hydrating, journaling, reflecting, stretching, exercising, parenting, showering, emailing, and eating breakfast all before 6am, then you may as well stay in bed and wait for 2024. God, he's right. Did Brian Johnson write that? Again, though, that has to feel like a piss take. I know, but just genuinely, Brian Johnson would say that.

16:32Yeah, I mean, I'm finding it more and more difficult to the trend of content in general, which is like the amount of morning routines that I've seen. Especially, and this is the thing, especially with founders where like the morning routine seems to be taking them like two hours. Whereas if I'm really honest, in my early days of entrepreneurship, and now again, because I'm busy again, annoyingly like you just have to work quite a lot and so like if you're crushing two hours of fucking joe what's interesting there was like richard harpin who's like he told us about his morning routine i'd always got up at like 4 30 and got that that cab straight to the gym and then worked there for a couple hours and kept straight into the office and did that for like 20 30 years that was actually quite inspiring old guy and you know like successful and all this stuff but it was actually inspiring to see someone disciplined like that throughout their life that built a multi-billion dollar business that's the flip side that was cool i mean he is a he is a machine that man but again like he's not doing that for views he's not doing that for like you know people to you know thirst over his morning routine like he's doing that because for him that's probably when he is bothered the least yeah you know get up early go to the gym work there get to work and do the work yeah but i mean i bet he's the sort of guy that also goes to bed at about seven oh 100 yeah so yeah i mean it checks out but yeah i feel like people are so obsessed with like the perfect morning routine and like doing all of these things whereas actually some sometimes the advice might just be get up and get into the thing that's the hardest thing for the day next up my daughter walked away from this car crash last week with only bruises on her leg she was she was being driven to work by a colleague who didn't know the roads and was driving too fast It's a miracle she's alive.

18:14And it got me thinking about business I see daily. Sorry. And it got me thinking about businesses I see daily who are heading for a car crash in 2025. Barely surviving. No systems and no guide with experience leading them to a better place. We all need a guide or a coach. They see what we can't see and make sure we drive our business in the right direction. I've been growing businesses for almost 25 years. If you need help or a friendly chat, reach out and let's make sure you don't have a car crash this year. That started off thinking that was a piss take can i finish i actually think that's real yeah that sounds real see that's the worst that is the worst type of post because the other two are clearly post takes whereas that actually might be that sounds real i mean it's so ridiculous but it might be real you do see a lot of like that's that's yeah that would go on linkedin lunatics um but you do see a lot of people do that like uh take really really dramatic personal thing and try and relate it to business and they get slammed these days thankfully because that's a crap post shocking yeah all right that's one for the janitor to clean up i'll tidy that up for you mayor so scrolling through the internet last week as i as i do i say internet mostly twitter but uh you are twitter obsessed obsessed yeah i might actually delete it off my phone because it's too bad me too anyway uh best employee rewards i was finding um i stumbled across uh domino's pizza who give free rolex watches so they used to give rolex watches to top performing franchise owners and executives as a reward for hitting milestones i mean that's pretty pretty sick that is pretty sick i i don't know enough about watches like is our rolex is super expensive even at the bottom end yeah i think so and i also don't know but i think they are and they hold value and they go up in value so it's like an investment you're giving someone so someone just shouted at us that uh the bottom end rolexes are going to be like 10k and they grow over time so actually a brilliant investment so that actually is one hell of a fucking perk but i suppose franchise owners are like business owners that's a pretty intense job it's cool though yeah it's cool so i went down the thread and i was looking found some other ones so lego in the 1970s and 80s lego rewarded employees with 14k or 18k solid gold lego bricks as recognition for their surface in the company jesus that's how yeah how many people like how many people 14k or 18k solid gold lego would be bloody heavy as well i wonder i wonder how many people were getting that i mean it doesn't sound like they've done that for a while yeah not since the 1980s the gold price was a profitable or sensible yeah yeah um but then then companies did actually used to have way better benefits really like got like golden pensions like my When my grandpa was like 20 years after leaving Chrysler, he was still getting a pension from Chrysler.

21:00That's wild, isn't it? It's just crazy. That shit doesn't exist anymore. Yeah. Less interesting, but cool. Airbnb,$2 ,000 travel credit. So employees receive an annual$2 ,000 stipend to stay at Airbnb listings anywhere in the world. I guess what's cool about that is all employees. It's not like just the best one. It's just like across the board. So that is pretty cool. And that's an easy perk for them to give. Feels aligned, probably doesn't cost them. They've probably got thousands of employees. so it's loads of good PR. Yeah, probably didn't cost them too much. Probably not allowed in the most busy houses either.

21:28Yeah. This is probably my favourite one ever. Have you ever read Tony Say's book? Yes, I have actually. Yeah? I know this one. Was it called Selling Happiness or something? The Happiness? No. The Infinities? This is where he gives people money to leave. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Paid to quit. Paid to quit. Yeah, so new employees who decide that the company isn't the right fit within the first few weeks are offered$2 ,000 to just quit. That's pretty good. if you're on the edge of leaving you're like this place isn't for me they're like here's two grand you could have like a month off so cool i'll do that yeah it feels a bit like a pr exercise i wonder if there was like just some hr loophole where they were like probably we have to do that anyway legally and so i'm doing this new thing at the moment yeah uh which i haven't been doing for very long but in my new company if anyone leaves i've been giving people a leaving bonus um and it's because i what i hated about my past in some ways is that if someone left the company even with the best intentions in the world it's always a bit of a sticky one you know it doesn't feel amazing and so now i'm like if i just lead with an unbelievable gesture of like positivity then even if they do have bad negative feelings like okay they really wanted this to end well and reputationally i think the best staff come from recommendations of existing stuff yeah for sure and so i feel like it's working that is a good idea also sounds like uh one of those reputational damage control things you're like yeah well to an extent i suppose it is yeah you know but it's proactive yeah and actually the point the point that it's proactive and it's across the board means it isn't selective to or there probably was a bit of a difficult time with that one it's like hey everyone got the same exactly it's like not one it's not one employee it's all the employees and it's like it's like a quarter well it's like a third of someone's salary yeah on top of like any notice or anything yeah yeah yeah i like that that's good actually reminds me of scott galloway uh on this podcast he said that uh whenever it gets pre my time pre your time just pre your time actually um he said just uh anytime he gets four employees that want to go out and do anything together um they can just take his card and do whatever they want and one time they all booked like a trip to hawaii or something and he was like well okay fair enough i mean the policy is the policy wow yeah crazy wow but cool yeah and his whole point is i wonder how much he spent but his point is like it makes people love his company and want to work there more than anywhere else because they know that that's such a unique part they're not going to get anywhere else that the best people like he can still let go of whoever he wants but the best people are going to want to stay because like what a random great perk and he's not telling them how to spend it they just have some common sense of how much the money is making and what is reasonable to spend and even if it's hawaii it's like his point on that was but they don't know that that is within the realms of good reason because of how well they perform that year cool huh very cool yeah so you should do that anyway this is a new segment where people are sending in their questions predominantly so that dan can give them some advice on life and business um and so i thought i would ask you one of the audience's questions so i've been bootstrapping my startup for 18 months and i burnt out as fuck that's what af means uh my co-founder wants to bring in investors but i'm worried about losing control what do you think dan take your time quite tricky isn't it because taking in investors when you're burnt out as fuck is not a great idea at all no and at the same time they need investors because they need to you know fundamentally give themselves some some space and time to you know live and be able to get back to normal um without knowing all the ins and outs of it i would just stick with my first instinct which is like reading that made me massively uncomfortable and it doesn't sound like a good time to bring in investors at all um also with all things investment business planning like any expansion for growth you kind of want to be putting your best foot forward and that sounds like your lowest moment so it sounds like a disaster waiting to happen and i would say avoid yeah let's say take a holiday and if you can't then you don't have a business fair all right chris how do you handle family who think you're crazy for starting a business my parents keep sending me job listings for real jobs I mean I genuinely don't think I'm the best place to answer this just because like at a young age my dad was an entrepreneur at a young age my dad got us all to do goal setting and new year's eve's revolution resolutions together and my dad was the genesis of my brothers and I becoming entrepreneurs and so my parents were you know conscious that they wanted us to go to university but were fundamentally the driving force for why we believed it was okay to become entrepreneurs and so unfortunately i can't really i mean what i can say is that when i started my businesses my friends thought i was fucking insane and like called me out and were rude about me behind my back and all the rest of it and i think to some degree like you have to race your own race and like i in the early days i was like i don't want what everyone else wants like i want something slightly different and so I'm going to have to pursue that against the grain.

26:29Yeah, I think in recent years, there's not a huge amount of evidence that having a real job or being an entrepreneur is more or less risky than each other. They both carry their own risks, and you should row your own race, and you should do the thing that's right for you. And if you can't handle the idea that other people don't agree with your view of the world and think you're weird, if you can't handle that, you're not cut out to be an entrepreneur anyway. Yeah, that's basically the summary of being an entrepreneur is kind of walking a slightly different path yeah and everyone's going to tell you all the things you don't everyone thinks you're rubbish at it until you're successful and then they will be like oh they got lucky and then it's not until you have like a compounded amount of a lot of successes over a variety of different things that people start to be like oh yeah he's quite good at that so true all right help just discovered a competitor launched almost the exact same product as us but they have 10 times our funding do we pivot compete or cry i'll cry you can definitely cry about that i would say like is is that not like an unbelievable sign that what you're doing at this point in time is resulting in that sort of funding like i would say like if my competitor got funded i'd be like okay this is good because like probably i'm in a market where it's not like one company you know it's probably not two companies probably multiple companies and so we are all going to build the category or the product together and them having so much funding means they will spend so much money on things without thinking about the pennies which means a lot of the time they'll spend really ineffectively and so in many ways you can learn from them but you could use it as a case yourself to raise money um and so i personally would be like oh that's really interesting that people think that this is fundable to that degree and so you've opened up your funding doors but also unbelievable to learn what your competitors are doing as well yeah yeah i think that's a great answer um been running my business for three years and still haven't paid myself a proper salary what is this ramen when does this ramen profitable phase actually end ramen is in uh there's that phrase isn't it the early stage of startups rum and noodles yeah yeah um is that what ramen means yeah yeah yeah i suppose so yeah uh so i would say this is a pretty brutal view okay this is a pretty brutal view but um i've been running my business for three years and i still haven't paid myself a proper salary i would say there's something wrong with the business i would say that the product that you have the service you have the way you're running your team there is something fundamentally wrong maybe the way you're selling the value of your product yeah maybe the product itself doesn't have the margin maybe you're not asking your customers for enough money like i spent a long time in the agency service space which is basically like you have 99 of agencies that don't charge enough for their time and don't protect their time enough and so they never make a margin so at the end of the year they might make two million quid but they're actually spending two million quid and so they've done this you know heroic year and they've seen barely any growth and no profit and so i would say that you've really got to think about where the profit comes from in the business and how you can replicate that activity more and that's a wrap thank you very much for watching if you have more questions please do send them in quite enjoyed that little segment there could have done that for longer next week we have the incredible danny buck from crafted who has built an enormous business and has like very strong views on effectively being in the game long enough working incredibly hard like not over glorifying entrepreneurship and so i can't wait to talk to him about building what is now a very big business with so many different avenues now which is going to be really exciting craft is now one of the fastest growing if not the fastest growing men's jewelry brand like in the world yeah uh he's going to give us a master class on e-commerce on d2c brands so if you're in the space of building a business if you're building online it's going to be a fascinating episode on like how you draw traffic to a product, how you monetize that and how you do that at scale.

30:15It's not easy. Like e-com direct to consumer, not an easy space. Okay. So don't forget to please, if you've enjoyed this, hit subscribe. 7 % of you do, but that means 93 % of you that watch this don't. So do us a favor. That's Mathen. Make us, that's Mathen. Please make us feel good about our lives and our energy and hit subscribe. See ya.

From the publisher

Did you know Domino’s used to give out Rolex watches to top-performing franchise owners? Or that LEGO rewarded its employees with solid gold bricks? Some companies go above and beyond to take care of their people. In this episode of Leaders Chat, we break down some of the most surprising employee perks—from Airbnb’s $2,000 annual travel credit to Zappos’ bold “Pay to Quit” policy.

Dan also shares his full-body health analysis, covering everything from vitamin tests to cancer screenings. How does this all tie into Brian Johnson’s quest to live forever? Watch to find out.

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