Money Making Expert: All Millionaires Have This One Trait (E281)

0:28Watch it early on the High Performance app. customer relationships, AI, and data. Salesforce facilitates stronger connections, enhances productivity, and makes every customer experience more impactful. They believe that we need to own the trust of our customers, our employees, and extended family through transparency, security, privacy, and compliance. And that's why they deliver the industry's most trusted infrastructure. In this mini-series, we bring in experts from across various industries to focus on one vital topic each week. And this week, Salesforce has set us up with an entrepreneur, best-selling author, and international speaker who's about to share with you a clear framework for building your own business.

1:08You need to stick with this. It's amazing. Daniel started his first company at the age of 21, built a multi-million dollar enterprise age 25. He's gone on to grow multiple businesses in the UK, the US, Singapore, and Australia. And you're about to hear why trust is so important in entrepreneurship. People don't want to do business with people that they can't trust. So how do you build trust? How do you maintain trust? And how do you grow trust? A lack of it undermines everything. And it's why for Salesforce, trust is their number one value and runs through everything they do. So enjoy this amazing conversation with so many takeaways for you with myself, our expert Damien Hughes, and the brilliant Daniel Priestley.

1:50Hopefully it'll get you thinking about the role that trust plays in your life and how you might look at growing or maintaining it in the work that you do.

2:02Daniel, thank you so much for joining us. I'm feeling good about being on this show. I see that you had Keir Starmer a year earlier and then he became Prime Minister, so high hopes. Which country do you want to rule is the question. Yeah, I've got to decide. I've got to figure this out. Absolutely. Well, good luck with that journey. Let's talk then about high performance. When I say high performance, particularly in your sphere of business and entrepreneurship, what do you think about? So entrepreneurs have three definitions of high performance. You've got a lifestyle business, you've got a performance business, and you've got a unicorn.

2:35And essentially, when you talk to entrepreneurs, their definition of high performance will fit within one of those three. And what are those three? How would you explain them? So lifestyle business is geared around fun, freedom, flexibility. It's doing things on your terms. It's having a business typically of three to 12 people on a team. You take on high-value work that you enjoy doing. You deliberately say no to things that take you out of that, and you have a great, enjoyable, fun time. But what you do is you limit the upside. So you say, we're not going to try and do everything that makes money.

3:05We're not going to take on shareholders. We're not going to take on debt. We're just going to have a good, fun, freedom, and flexibility-orientated business. So that's lifestyle. Performance is what we think of as building a company. It's you're probably going to have an executive team, have 30 to 150 people. You're going to try and ramp up those revenues. You'll probably take on some debt or some investment. You're really shooting for a business that could be sold one day for maybe a life changing amount of money. And then a unicorn is where you really get the wind behind your sails. Or if you're American, you actually try and go for it deliberately.

3:39And you go out to big venture capital firms and you say, we're going to change the industry or change the world in some way. Are we going to build a multi-billion dollar business? You know, it's what we think of when we think of Silicon Valley startups, these unicorns. So high performance, I think any of those three is a perfectly valid thing for an entrepreneur to want. Why wouldn't you want to actually a lifestyle business? It's a great decision. Why wouldn't you want to have a performance business and have a life-changing exit? Or why wouldn't you want to change the world some way through a unicorn?

4:10So either of those three can work. And do you believe that anyone listening to this can be an entrepreneur? and find their thing? I certainly believe that anyone can and even should be part of an entrepreneurial team. So not everyone's suitable to be a founder. Founder is a certain role on the team, which is the person who starts with a blank page and does a lot of ideation, comes up with potential business models. And they're very good at pitching ideas into existence. And they're good at putting together that very first team. That very first team, that startup team, is a temporary organisation designed to find a business model that could scale or that could achieve its performance.

4:49And it's often going to change. It's often going to be a team of rebels and misfits and they're looking for a product, they're looking for a market, they're looking for some ways to sell something. And once they find that thing, it's often the case that the founder or the startup team may lose interest. They may find that their work here is done and the business now takes on a bit of a life of its own. I've got eight different companies, and the reason for that is I really love founding companies. I love starting businesses. I love being part of that first 12 people. I get, strangely, I get pathologically disinterested once it starts to work.

5:24Wow. I know that's weird. Go on, explain more on that, though, Danny. So I'm really drawn to starting with a blank page. I'm really drawn to creating a new product. I get, you know, when just a conversation starts to feel electric and you get butterflies in your tummy and you feel like you could sit up all night, that feeling of having unlimited energy reserves. I think for each person, there's different phases of the entrepreneurial journey that brings out that excitement, that feeling. So for my CFO, he absolutely adores dealmaking. So he's a deal-making CFO. He loves transactions, buying and selling companies.

6:06If ever I go to him and say, hey, I've found an acquisition, right, suddenly he comes alive. Now, if I say to him, I've got a new idea with a blank piece of paper and we don't need funding yet and we don't need any deals yet, we're not trying to get investors yet, oh, okay. If I go to my co-founder of ScoreApp, Steve, and I say, Steve, I've got a new idea, secretly we secretly squirrel off to the side and we natter away and we go, ooh, right, because we both love new ideas. We love new products. So the founder and the founding team, you know, they're very much at that early, early stage. But entrepreneurship is a whole journey, right?

6:43So entrepreneurship is not just like founding a company. Entrepreneurship is getting that first team together and then nattering together and working together and solving problems together and then hitting these kind of milestones where it's like, oh, we think we've figured out the ideal customer persona. We think we've figured out the revenue model. Oh, we think we've figured out the product and it's not what we originally thought. We think we've figured out how to fund this thing. Okay, that's really cool. Oh, we've met an ideal partner. So that's all that entrepreneurial team. You ask the question about can anyone do that, anyone can be part of that early stage team before it turns into a corporate, before it turns into a kind of a repeatable, a bit more of a boring business.

7:23But not everyone can be a founder. And we want to talk about trust with you today because it's so important in every walk of life, founder, not founder, entrepreneur, doesn't matter. How important do you think it is in your world, trust? In the world of entrepreneurship, it's the underlying, underpinning thing that makes everything work. So, you know, you're not going to take on an investor if they don't trust you. You're certainly not going to get a customer buying into a brand new business if they don't trust you. It's a really awkward situation because, you know, you've had experiences where you thought you had trust with your ex-colleagues and then they said, oh, you're starting a new business so we're not sure if we can trust you anymore for five years.

8:04We have to wait. So, you know, suddenly it's like, oh, actually, I thought I had this trusted relationship but now I need to, you know, kind of rebuild that trust so that they can then spend money. You know, we're talking about transactions. We're talking about people buying and selling stuff. You know, I want this service, I want this product. It's underpinned by trust, isn't it? So how would you define trust, Antonio? So trust, there's this research that I enjoy by a guy called Robin Dunbar. He talks about people getting to know, like, and trust. And he talks about something called Dunbar's Numbers, which I'm sure you've heard of.

8:38It's kind of like how many friends can you have? How many acquaintances can you have? How many people can you put a name and a face to? And he sort of like has found that there's these common numbers that humans can manage mentally. and he basically says that for a stranger to enter into your awareness where you kind of get to know them and recognise them, you need about seven hours of contact in order to get there. So if you sat next to someone on a long-haul flight and you get talking and you're interacting, by the end of the flight it's like, hey, it's good to see you. If a day later you were walking down the street and you saw them again, you'd go, oh, hey, we were on the flight together.

9:21How are you? So the connection's there. But it's seven hours just to get that. Now what happened with digital is digital transformed everything because the brain doesn't know something is digital or not. So when we interact with celebrities or influencers on digital platforms, we start to feel like we know, like, and trust them. And when someone like David Bowie passes away, we feel a sense of loss. Not that we knew him personally, but the guy that we interacted with on digital environments has gone. So what's interesting is that there are certain people who have figured this out early, and they've created a know, like, and trust relationship with millions of people.

10:06We call them influencers. So it's an interesting, you know, it's the ability to scale influence in a way that it never could scale before. Given that we've got a maximum an hour to establish trust here then, I'm interested in... But you've been watching my previous podcast. Yeah, I have, so I feel like I know you. But I'm interested in how would you like people to feel when they turn off this episode? I believe we're living in the most incredible times in history where some things have happened technologically that make it possible for anyone to have a very different career than what my grandfather or even my father would have had.

10:46And we live in this time where there's an entrepreneur revolution taking place. I want people to feel a sense of hope and optimism. In the world of media, we are often exposed to negativity because negativity sells and scales really well. We're often exposed to a lot of ideas that it's a terrible time, there's no opportunity, people are suffering, people are struggling. Well, there's this other side to that story. And there are plenty of people in their 20s who are making a million dollars a month as YouTubers. There are plenty of people who are under 30 who have started a fashion business and they're scaling on Instagram.

11:24There are plenty of people who left their corporate career and they're making 10 times as much money consulting and working with clients all over the world on Zoom. so you know I want people to what I would love is for people to watch this and feel like hey wait a second maybe I've tuned too much into the negative yeah and there's this whole other side of the story over here I am so pleased we started the conversation with that level of positivity and optimism because I spend my life with people coming up to me going hey you were a sports presenter kids tv presenter did football did formula one I wish there was opportunities now like there used to be and i'm like hold on can i just point out what's in your pocket yeah your mobile phone this is the greatest opportunity a broadcaster has ever been given so the only way i could be a broadcaster when i was 18 was get a job there's no there was no other way to do it and now i explain to people on here like probably three quarters of the people that have sat in the chair that you're in at some point have picked up a mobile phone or got a camera and they've started to create a brand.

12:27They've filmed themselves. They've shown passion. They might have found a tiny niche. No permission. You had to have permission. Exactly. At 18, there were probably 45 different other 18-year-olds who missed out on that opportunity. They auditioned, and because they were told, no, you got it, that's great for you, but what about for them? Well, there was no other avenue. Whereas, you know, I'm friends with a guy called Mr. Who's the Boss. His real name's Arun. Mr. Who's the Boss at 15 goes into his bedroom with some camera equipment that's lying around and mobile phones and he does his very first mobile phone review and he just talks about his brother's new mobile phone.

13:07This is now, he's got 19 million followers on YouTube. He's got millions of followers on Instagram. He's got a successful business with 10 full-time people. He's in his 20s. Wildly successful. No one had to give him permission. He just did it. Which then leads me to want to explore the topic of talent then. Because I like the fact that people can act without having permission, but where does talent come into the equation of entrepreneurialism? Well, I guess there's two sides to talent. I think we all have some natural skills and some natural energies that we can leverage. Everyone's got a natural talent and it's not always in the front of the camera.

13:51Some people have got the talent in the back of the camera. so entrepreneurship's a team sport and you need talented people you know in the full team so there's I've noticed that there are four types of talent that we want to leverage so everyone's got a starting point and then really talent just comes down to doing the reps you know like last night I was at the Killers concert and you know he had everyone eating out the palm of his hand He was just effortlessly raising the energy in the room of 18 ,000 people. But it was his sixth night that week, and it was probably his thousandth performance in the last few years.

14:33And, you know, he's done the reps, right? Obviously, there's talent at the beginning. In fact, if you look at the Killers, they were a church band, and they played every week for church, and then that gave them a lot of reps that most people didn't have at their age. Then they popped, and then they toured and toured and toured and toured and toured. So to get to that level of mastery starts with that spark of talent, but then there's the reps. So tell us about the four types of talent. So four types of talent. Think about it as the four suits of the cards, the deck of cards. So you've got clubs, which at other points in time has been berries or clouds, which represents spring energy.

15:14You've got hearts, which represents summer energy. You've got spades, which is autumn, and you've got diamonds, which is winter. And the four types of talent is essentially ideas or strategy, which is the big picture, people and networking and brand and stories, hearts, tasks, getting the work done, organizing work, making things happen, GSD, spades, right, picking up the spade and digging. For those that don't know what GSD means. Get shit done. and then diamonds, which is systems, refinement, data, structure, diamonds energy. So if you take the classic executive team, you've got your CEO who's the big picture visionary, which is clubs energy.

16:01You've got your CMO who's out to market, hearts energy. You've got COO getting stuff done, who's the spades energy. and you've got CFO or CTO who's structuring it and organising it and all of those. So you've got to have those four energies on a team. If you don't have those four energies, essentially it all falls apart pretty quickly. So then tell us how Trust combined those four different cards together to create success. So in our teams, because we've just come off a three-day team retreat this week with one of the companies, it's about all of our team understanding each other's strengths and where we play at our best.

16:43And then it's the ability to let that person get on with their strength, knowing that if they're stuck with anything, they're going to come to the rest of the team and ask for help. So we set Trust up as a game. I'll tell you some of the things that we do. We create some language in our teams that is like it has meaning and we can say it quickly and it means something. So one of the things is permission to lock horns. So permission to lock horns is like if you imagine two deer locking horns to practice fighting with each other. It basically means, hey, we're on the same team. We want the same thing, but I want to fight with you.

17:25I want to have a fight. I want to take the opposing position. So on our team, we maintain trust while having a fight by saying permission to lock horns. So that means we can take completely opposite points of view. and it also means that I'm going to hammer it up a bit. I'm going to exaggerate. So you're going to say, you know, I think that we should go down this path of action. I'm going to say, can I lock horns with you on that? And you say, sure. Now this means that I can now go full force in the other direction. So I want to just say, I don't think that's the right direction. Here's what I think.

17:58Boom, boom, boom. And then you've got permission to bat heads again, right, and to come back. So that's an example of how we set up our teams to maintain trust and fight well. And I'm interested if we could go back to the first point you said about recognizing that we all have different strengths. So how do you go about creating a climate where that diversity can be recognized and, by definition, trusted? We talk about the four energies with our team. So we always say, so we draw it as a cross and we have head in the clouds or clubs. Opposite of that is getting stuff done spades, hearts going out to people, diamonds structuring things and data and systems.

18:43And in the middle, we put the why, our purpose, our shared purpose. So what we will actually do is identify on the team who do we think sits in those energies and where does each person sit? So we know that when Glenn is speaking, he's speaking from heart's energy. He wants more people to know about something. He wants to make sales. He wants to get a good marketing message out. But we know that when Chris is talking, he's talking from how do we systemize it? How do we scale it? How do we pin it all down into something that's scalable and systemizable? So he's coming from that energy. So by just simply understanding where we all come from on that grid, we recognize that each of us is speaking from an energetic place.

19:35Now, I think this is really valuable for people that are already in business, already have a team, maybe they're hiring. But I know lots of people will listen to this and they won't be in business yet, but they will dream of it. And I, knowing we were having this conversation today, I went on to my LinkedIn and I just posed a question to people. have you always wanted to be an entrepreneur? And if you're not doing it, why? I would love to put some of the answers to you. Oh, I love that. So the first question, actually, is something that we've spoken about, which is, I don't feel I have enough talent.

20:07So I guess that leads me to asking, if someone feels they don't have enough talent, what could they do to kind of find what they're great at? I would try and replace your doubts with data. So when we doubt, it's often because we don't have enough data. We haven't done the reps. We haven't checked it out. In corporate environments, they have this idea called statistical significance, where they have to sample a certain number of people. Let's say I want to launch a purple toothpaste, right? And I think, I wonder if anyone's interested in purple toothpaste. So they ask the question, well, how many people do we need to ask in order to figure out whether people like purple toothpaste or not.

20:53So it typically turns out that for a large population, you need about 150 samples. For a niche product, you need about 30 samples. So you go out and get the data and you go ask 150 people, would you prefer a purple toothpaste to the white toothpaste that you currently have? And show them some photos, show them some examples. And they go, no, I prefer this one, prefer this one. and what you find out is that, oh, 3 % of people like purple toothpaste and no one's offering purple toothpaste. We can extrapolate that data out. So you start out with doubt. I don't know whether this is going to work or not.

21:29And then you go get the data and then you replace the doubt with the data and then you can talk about the data. So a lot of the time when people have these kind of things, I ask the question, well, how many people have you asked? A great position is to assume you don't have talent. That's fine. It's not required. You can get talent. You can bring talent on. But just focus not on how you feel about something because how you feel is completely, it's only relative to the data that you have. Okay. The next answer that I got from quite a lot of people, I don't know anyone in business that's not a mentor in my life.

22:05And I suppose this speaks to people who are on their own, maybe living in a city or, you know, where I come from in the middle of the countryside. I grew up in a small village in Norfolk. If I was listening to this conversation and wanted to be an entrepreneur at 16, 17, 18, I honestly would have no idea. There's the guy who owns the pub. There's the hairdresser. There's the drug dealer. That's all the entrepreneurs around. Jess, but what you're really saying is that maybe you go and speak to those people. Maybe not the drug dealer. But you have to just try and find someone. So zooming out a little bit, environment dictates performance is a great principle, which is when you're in certain environments, there's normalized behaviors in that environment.

22:52So you guys have come from the world of sport. In the world of sport, there are times that you wake up in the morning, there's morning routines, there's things that you do around your diet, and all of the teammates are doing the same sort of stuff. I mean, if you were to rock up in a high-performance sporting environment and start smoking a pack of cigarettes, I'm pretty sure the teammates are going to say, you know, that's just not what we do around here. Or it's going to feel very different. If you were to turn up to a big match hungover, oh, I was out last night, I'm pretty sure that doesn't fly at the level of high performance.

23:25Maybe I'm wrong about that. But, you know, there's certain things that environment dictates performance. I've done work with young men in prison who got arrested and prosecuted for drug dealing. And I often go into prison and we do Dragon's Den and we talk about legitimate business after, you know, they're going to be released. And what we discover from talking to these guys is that in their environment, the only people they knew who were successful and who had nice cars and who had nice things were drug dealers. So they just went, oh, I guess that's how you do it. So environment dictates performance.

24:03So I would say, you know, you can always move to a bigger city, right? That's not a bad thing. I did. I moved from Australia to London. You know, a lot of people are like, oh, but I live four hours from London. I'm like, I came from the other side of the planet to get to London. So you can always move. And today we have accelerator environments where you can join an accelerator. Four startups, four ideas. There are entrepreneur meetups. You know, it's a little bit like saying, you know, I really want to dance, but no one I know dances. Go to dance class. That's where everyone who wants to dance is.

24:39So go to the entrepreneur meetups, you know, listen to the podcasts, join the Facebook groups, follow the accounts, go to the events, join an accelerator program. You've got to take that first step of enrolling yourself into the group. But then can I ask you about the second step once you've put yourself in the environment? How do you go about choosing the right people? You mean on your own team? Yeah. You don't. You don't choose the right people. You work with whoever shows up because you're an idiot entrepreneur. You're at the very beginning of your journey. You've got no proof. No one's quitting their job at Microsoft to come and work with you.

25:17Here's how you test whether someone's the right person. Oh, there's a pulse, right? You've got a pulse. Fantastic. What, really? You're willing to join my team? Okay, fair enough. I guess we're working together. Every business I've ever started, I've started with completely the wrong people. But that's who's willing to show up. Mate's big sister is willing to do our event registration. Fantastic. That's helpful. I've got a friend who's got a graphic design, who's in year one of a graphic design course and they're willing to design some of my brochures. Oh, amazing. I know someone who used to run a McDonald's and they know a bit about managing things and they're going to help me manage a few things.

25:58Oh, amazing. I think it plays back into the answer from some of my followers saying I don't know anyone in business and I don't have a mentor it's almost like they're waiting for the perfect person to appear before they do anything and actually what you're saying is anyone will do just sit down with anyone, just have conversations have some chats the one thing I'm going to say is if you're in that starting point you're not going to be going off and starting a business you need to join an entrepreneurial team first so I did two years working for an entrepreneur from 19 to 21 it was his third startup we went from sitting around his kitchen thinking about the name of the business and you know someone go down to the bank and register the bank account and like literally right at the beginning year later we had 60 people in an inner city Melbourne office we had millions of revenue I was employee number three so I watched that whole thing unfold and so you want to be on someone's team.

26:58You want to be a direct report to an entrepreneur before you become an entrepreneur. What was the biggest thing you learned in that period? Oh, so many lessons but John says to me one sentence which I use all the time, everything's downstream from lead generation. So lead generation is the ability to capture the interest from the market. So John's whole thing is like don't start a business until you can prove that you can generate leads. So let's say you've got this idea to do space tourism. You don't buy a rocket and you don't start with rockets at all. You start with a very basic landing page that says, would you be willing to pay$50 million to go into out of space, join the waiting list and tell us what are your main concerns or buying criteria?

27:42And you just set that up and it costs nothing. And now you've got a waiting list and then you send it out to all the people who might be able to afford space tourism and you say, we're looking at launching a space tourism business. Are you interested in that? And they click the button and they register their interest. Yep, Larry Ellison. Yeah, I'm interested. How much would you be willing to pay? Ooh,$50 million,$75 million. What's your biggest concern? Oh, I'm finding the time to do the training. Okay, boom. So you start getting all of that on the waiting list. You don't do any business stuff.

28:18You just get the leads. so John was big on this idea of you only do a business if you can do lead generation biggest mistake early stage entrepreneurs make is they think that a business is the supply of something and a business is not the supply of something the business is the generating of the demand for that thing you see because this is so perfect because the final point that my followers are saying is how can I possibly quit my job to pursue something that people may not want or may not buy Well, definitely don't. That's it, right? You know, like 150, 200 years ago in the industrial age, the hard thing about business was making something.

29:01And we even have words like gross domestic produce to signify economic activity, which essentially implies that if you produce it, someone will buy it, right? And these days, it should be gross domestic demand, right, if someone actually wants the thing. So here's an example. If we were to go back in time, if you could possibly set up a factory manufacturing scissors where you're getting steel, somehow doing whatever they do to it to make scissors, if you could get 80 people in a room and the steel comes in one end and out the other end comes nice sharp scissors, if you could do that, you would sell those scissors all day long, right?

29:43You would just have them going out the door and historically you'd have 40 % profit margins if you could make something, like massive profit margins. Today you go on Amazon and just do a search, scissors, and look at hundreds and hundreds of different types of scissors, giant novelty scissors, tiny scissors that fit in the purse, medical scissors, craft scissors, just hundreds of versions. The hard thing today is not the manufacturing of the thing. The hard thing is getting someone to pay any attention, to want it, to trust it, to know about it. That's the hard thing. So when we think about business today, we've got to stop thinking about making something, which is the supply side.

30:24We're going to start thinking about, can I generate the demand for that thing? So the job of the entrepreneur is going to the market and asking, do you want this thing? Or can I get you to want this thing? Can I influence you? Can I be the key person of influence who gets you to pay attention to this thing that we're going to do? And if the answer is no, then great. You just saved yourself a ton of time trying to set it up. What's the trick, though, to getting people to want what you have?

30:52The trick is to meet people where they are and to speak their language and take them on a journey. And a few things. You've got to be seen as a key person of influence in this space. Everyone has to turn up their ability to influence. right? So an entrepreneur today is largely a person who has the ability to influence and they can influence someone to come and join their team, influence someone to buy. And the real trick to it, if you want to know the trick to it, is that there are these markets out there that are called problem-aware markets and there are markets that are called solution-aware markets.

31:30Problem-aware market is where they have a problem but haven't settled upon a solution and a solution-aware market is someone who is aware they have a problem, they've found the solution and now they're trying to shop for that solution. Those markets are tiny, like tiny, tiny, tiny, and problem-aware markets are massive. And the best key people of influence, they don't go after the solution-aware people, they know how to go after the problem-aware people. So if I went to Wimbledon and there's 16 ,000 people in the centre court and I say, who here is currently looking for a CrossFit gym? You want CrossFit, you want to join a CrossFit gym?

32:08Three hands might go up. I say, who here is not 100 % happy with their fitness and they're looking for something that could improve their fitness? Everyone's hand goes up. So that's the difference between problem aware and solution aware. So the greatest entrepreneurs are the ones who know how to meet people at the problem aware phase, take them on a journey to the solution aware phase. And that ties in really beautifully, Daniel. in one of your books you speak about the triune brain model, the three brains in one system. Because I think that ties into the language of being able to understand what language we speak in.

32:42Would you explain a little bit more for people? I feel like you would know more about the three brain model as a professor in this. But I've enjoyed hearing your definition of it. Yeah, I feel embarrassed being in your presence on this one because I created a very simple way of explaining it And it was based on how I was feeling on any given day. And I just kind of gave it a label of reptile mode, autopilot mode, and visionary mode. So reptile mode was freaking out, having a tantrum, feeling stressed, feeling exhausted, on the edge of what I was capable of, feeling like I was either going to collapse or boil over.

33:20So that's reptile mode. Not a good place to make decisions from. Not a good place for anything, really. Not a good place to live. And also I noticed that reptile mode was very susceptible to, you know, wouldn't it be nice to get some passive income? Oh, yes, please. Right. Reptile was so stupid. It's like, oh, look at these quick wins. Oh, OK. I'll go for that. So reptile mode is not a great one. And then autopilot is like these modes where I'm doing stuff I know how to do and I'm repeating it. I'm just in the I'm in this I'm droning on. I'm just doing the thing and I can like fill a day pottering.

34:03But I'm not changing my life in any way. I'm not changing anyone else's life in any way. I'm just going through my tasks. And then visionary mode was this mode that I discovered where I was like anything's possible. I can access any resource on the planet. I'm here to make a dent in the universe. I'm here to do something big and important. I'm here to have powerful conversations. I want to reach out to the people who have the resources and talk to them about what I'm up to and see whether they're open to it. I'm going to be quite fearless in my approach. I'm going to be very big picture. It's almost like it feels like flying up to 30 ,000 foot, looking down, seeing the world as a big pool of opportunities and just feeling a sense of abundance and gratitude and just being able to move effortlessly.

34:52And it's strategic thinking. it's compassion, empathy, love, all of those sorts of places. So for me, I noticed those three modes that I could be in and I realized that part of the battle of high performance is being in visionary mode more often than not and also trying to desperately avoid falling into reptile mode. Does this measure up with that? No, no, that's fantastic. You've impressed the professor. That's always a good moment. Have you got my marks? I've got an A on my paper. Well done patronising me. But I was really taken where I've heard you talk about a study that was done with some Indian farmers and understanding the difference of these three types of thinking and how it manifests itself in performance terms.

35:41So in the Indian farmer example, they used to get a year's worth of their income in one hit. So you can imagine what it would be like for any of us if we got our annual profit or our annual income on January the 1st and then we had to kind of budget it and make it last until December 31 before we get anything again. So this is what it was like for these particular Indian farmers. They sell their stuff and then they get a year's worth of income. What they discovered is that during the periods of time where they were flush with cash, they did these IQ tests, cognitive tests, and they scored the equivalent of a standard deviation higher on these IQ tests compared to when they were skin, where they scored a standard deviation lower than their high score.

36:32So there was a full IQ deviation, a standard deviation of IQ between the high point and the low point, and it was very much impacted by their sense of abundance. So when they had a sense of abundance, they were smarter. They made better decisions. They made more strategic decisions. When they had a sense of scarcity, they did short-term thinking. In every way, their EQ is down, their IQ is down. Everything's down when they feel like they're running out of cash. Sorry, can I ask how people get from one brain to the other? Then if they're listening to this and they feel like they're in reptile brain, because they're just trying to get by.

37:10They're trying to make enough money to feed their family, feed themselves, pay their bills. Yeah. How can they find the space or the opportunity? You just need to get your annual income in one hit. Oh, great. Great advice from Daniel Priestley. Thanks for joining us on High Performance. Yeah. Just have minions lying around in the bank. So there's a few things. Number one, stop watching the news because the news is designed to get you in reptile mode. So get off any of the news platforms. We all know the news platforms that drag us straight into the reptile mode. So stop watching it. Just ban the news.

37:48Delete it off your phone. Delete it off your daily routine. Unsubscribe to all the news sites. All of this news, this is stuff that you can't – you're not built to handle this stuff. It makes you feel powerless. It doesn't make you feel abundant. So you've got to get rid of the news. You need to – I know this is silly, but you need to get rid of any rotting food or any decaying stuff that's in your house. You need to, if your reptile brain keeps track of how many calories are available and if your fridge is empty or if your fridge has got rotting food or unhealthy stuff around, it triggers the part of the brain that says, I'm down to the last bits.

38:28Is that right? Yeah. Which then influences your behaviours. It does. Wow. So you need to clear out all of this stuff that's lying around. In a lot of people's cupboards, they've got stuff that is past its use by dates. So you've got to get rid of all that stuff. You know when you have a big detox of your wardrobe and you say, because this feels so cathartic, I feel cleansed, I feel like a new beginning. I'm down to my last 44 black T-shirts. Exactly. I've run out of white trainers. So is it that same feeling of getting rid of it? It's part of it. And this is evidence-based. When people have flowers that are wilting, when they have food that's rotting, this actually brings people down.

39:09And as opposed to when there's a feeling that there's food around, we tend to not worry about the basics. Hydration, sleep, sleep hydration, you know, those sorts of things are big ones for reptile mode. So if you're tired, you'll go into reptile mode. If you're dehydrated, you'll go into reptile mode. you need to remove things like anything that is offering you quick wins so don't be around anything that looks like gambling passive income you know winning lottery those sorts of things you got to get rid of all of that because it triggers the reptile um here's a really I'm going to share a really weird one that's going to make some people feel like what is this guy talking about um if they haven't already felt that way my mentor John he made me carry um a large amount of money in my pocket at all times, which was transformational.

40:03So he asked me the question. He said, Daniel, what do you consider to be a large amount of money? And I said, there's nothing you can't do on$1 ,000 a week. That was my answer. Like$1 ,000 a week is astronomical. Bearing in mind I'd been delivering pizzas for$3.25 a delivery and I'd been working at McDonald's for$4 an hour and that sort of stuff. So I thought$1 ,000 a week is just absolutely astronomical sort of money. He said, you're going to be joining my sales team. You're going to be on a commission structure that means you have to be earning$100 ,000 a year or else I'll fire you. $2 ,000 a week.

40:36I'm like, I couldn't even get my head around that idea that I could earn$2 ,000 a week. So I was just like, what? And he said, you need to change your beliefs and attitudes around money. So he made me, sent me a challenge to get my hands on$2 ,000. I think it was$2 ,000. I had money. I'd been running nightclub parties, so I had a little bit of cash, and I had some money on a credit card, and I pulled$400 down off the credit card. And he put this$2 ,000 in a bulldog clip, and he said, I want you to carry that in your pocket at all times. You know, walk around with two grand in your pocket, which was, like, mental.

41:17So suddenly I'm, like, walking around, like, nervous. Nervous. Ninjas are going to come out of the woodwork. within a few weeks, my entire attitudes and beliefs around money had surfaced. They all came to the surface. All the negative stuff I felt about money just came straight up to the surface. And then it got dealt with. So, for example, I thought I was going to be attacked. John had told me, write down anything that comes to mind when you're carrying this cash. You're going to be attacked, right? So he said, your belief around money is that having money means that you'll be physically assaulted, right?

41:52You got to make a decision. Do you want to continue believing that or do you want to change your beliefs around that? I thought, oh, what if someone sees me like if I'm paying for something and they see that I've got$2 ,000 in my pocket? I'll be judged. So you got to deal with that one. What if a girl thinks that I've got money and she wants to date me because she sees that, okay, I'm only valuable because of money. So it was like all of these kind of things just start coming up, bubbling to the surface. and then I dealt with those and it was very, very interesting. About three months into this exercise, I had a completely different attitude to money.

42:30It's just a tool. It doesn't have any great meaning attached to it. It's something that I went from thinking$2 ,000, I'm here and$2 ,000 is here to complete other way around. that I'm here,$2 ,000 pocket money, no biggie. You know, when I ask someone for a sale, I confidently say, yeah, it'll be$2 ,000, whatever the number is. And it's just for me, it's like my nonverbal communication. It changed your behavior, not just the way you were thinking. Total behavior change, energy change, yeah, beliefs, all of that sort of stuff. So I confronted my issues around money. Can I borrow two grand? Yeah, sure.

43:16Yeah, no problem. I love that, though. Yeah, it's really interesting. And it's a good, you know, like this idea of changing the way people's brains are operating or taking them out of, you know, the swamp of having a certain set of beliefs that I don't even realize are limiting the way that they operate. Can I now talk to you about other people being excited? It's your podcast, mate. You can go wherever you are. I want you to be happy. I want you to be happy with this. This is brilliant, though. Thank you. Really good. So I want to just tell you something that I struggle with, right? I struggle with getting other people as excited as I am about the thing that I'm excited about.

43:51And sometimes it might take them a few weeks for them to go, I'm really excited as well. I wish you'd have made me feel this excited at the very beginning. So trust is the focus of this conversation. How do you get people to kind of, it's not about getting them to trust me. I think they trust me, but they don't trust the thing I'm as excited about or they don't trust the thing I'm excited about they should be excited about. So how can we start to share our excitement for things and kind of sell our dreams and our ideas and ourselves to people? There's a few answers that spring to mind here. So Google's research says that people warm up to stuff across 11 interactions.

44:27So 10.7, right? It's called Zero Moments of Truth was the research they did. But they basically said that people need to go on an 11 interaction journey for them to warm up to stuff. So keeping that in mind is useful. Like the idea that someone's going to hear about something and just go fall off their chair on the first interaction, it's not how it works. People, they have education and entertainment in 11 different doses. So if you're in a medical environment, you'd say there are 11 doses of this medicine required to treat this condition, right? So let's say we're on a course of antibiotics.

45:02You take the first dose and nothing's happened. Yeah, that's because it requires 11 doses. So the first thing that we need to know is that it's 11 interactions that causes just the warm-up phase. So if you were going to buy a significant purchase, one of these cameras, let's say, you're going to research it 11 times. You're going to look at different pages. You're going to hear about what people might have a conversation here or there. So there's this kind of like journey of like warming up. So first one is having expectations that are in line with reality. You cannot expect people to get excited on the first interaction.

45:35That's just not how people are wired. So budget for 11 interactions. Tap into what people already want. So there's a mental model that I use over and over again. I refer to this internally in our companies as what we call the situational model. And it's basically all people have a current reality which is less than perfect. They have a desired reality that they're trying to achieve and they have obstacles and criteria and constraints that sit in the middle. and when we want something to feel exciting, we have to first tune into where are they now, which is their current reality, their desired reality and their current constraints and then we have to present what we offer as a path of least resistance.

46:21So it's like I'm here, I want to be here and this person has just showed me a path of least resistance for getting what I want and anything that genuinely feels like a real deal path of least resistance for where I'm trying to get to is exciting. So, you know, there's this massive business success around a drug called Azempic. And Azempic is like, you know, it's more successful than everything other than NVIDIA at the moment, right? So it's a hugely successful business. Why? Well, because people want weight loss to be easy. I'm feeling that I've got excess weight that I'm carrying. I would love to lose weight.

47:02I've tried lots of things and I keep hitting my constraints. And then all I have to do is inject myself with this drug and then I won't be hungry anymore. And then I get what I want in about three months. I just lose weight and it doesn't feel like any pain and it just happens. So as soon as people, like the reason people get excited about that is my current reality is less than desirable. My desired reality is clear, but I've got all constraints. A ZenPix seems to be a path of least resistance from here to here so then it feels exciting so basically you know that that's when you're when you're presenting your ideas budget for 11 interactions yeah and and and only expect it to be exciting if it lines up with people's situation model did you like that yes before we get back to our conversation with daniel we're just going to take a really quick break to look at how Salesforce are building trust with their customers in real life.

47:59So for Salesforce, when they talk about trust, especially in AI, they're really focusing on four key components. The first one is Salesforce status, which provides transparency by disclosing when an AI function on their platform has been used to generate content. And look, as someone who's a business owner, but also as someone who works in the media, I think it really matters because AI is brilliant, But I just think we need to know when AI is being used. It's all about, I think, just being open and clear with people. The second thing is security, which is vital. Salesforce ensures that data stays yours and that your privacy and your security are protected at each and every step of the generation process.

48:40Totally vital for all of us in the modern day and age. Thirdly, Salesforce maintains a comprehensive set of compliance certifications, giving customers peace of mind. And I just think it's really important that you and I can trust the tools that we're using. And the final point is that Salesforce is committed to software and solutions that are used ethically, particularly when it comes to data and AI. And I don't think we're talking about this often enough. But Salesforce have developed an AI acceptable use policy to address the highest areas of risk. And I just think that peace of mind is absolutely vital for all of us to know that the AI, which is so cool, is being used in the right way.

49:22Anyway, thanks for listening. Let's get back to the episode. There's another set of questions that I know you ask other entrepreneurs that I'd be interested to explore as well, Daniel, which is about the origins, the mission and the vision. Yeah. Because they're intriguing topics, but I wonder if you'd explain more of what they are and why they're such important questions. Yeah, so this goes to something called founder opportunity fit. So founder opportunity fit is this idea that there are businesses that would be good for you to start, which would be disaster for me. Businesses that you should start, I definitely shouldn't start.

50:05So it's not that there are great opportunities that are just out there and whoever discovers them is the person who discovers them. It has to be the right person for the right opportunity. The idea as to how do you get to founder opportunity fit is through a framework called Origin, Mission, and Vision. So origin story is that there are clues in your past that will tell you about the things that you're always interested in, the recurring themes, the types of challenges that you keep overcoming, the types of stories that you keep getting pulled into. And if you go through your origin story, in fact, I'll get very specific.

50:50For most entrepreneurs between the age of 10 and 13, there is a moment of empowerment. And in that moment of empowerment, they discover their individuality. So up until that point, they were part of a family or part of a team, part of a community, and they relied upon that family for everything, for their survival. And then between 10 and 13, we have an experience where we do something on our own and it's valuable to the world, and then we go, wow, I'm an individual with my own agency. So that happens. There's a set of circumstances around that experience, and those circumstances get ingrained in our head and in our nervous system.

51:31And we look for ways to replicate that. So we look for ways to go, oh, that's my winning formula. So we try it again and it's not that it's exactly the same, but there are hallmarks and we do it again and it works again. And then we do it so something happens around 15, something happens around 18, something happens around 23, 24, and we do it again and again. And then whether we're aware of it or not, an underlying theme or a recipe for success starts to form deep in our subconscious. And then what we do is we subconsciously go chasing that recipe wherever we can. So for example, you may have discovered that through sport and helping people in sport, there was this magic moment where you helped people and they achieved something.

52:19And it's like deep in your head of like, actually, that's part of my winning formula. I don't know if that happened, but it's like, yeah. And then it's like, I want to play that game again. So what was your moment? So there was a fire in our house and everyone was safe, but we damaged all the stuff in the house. And I, at 10 years old, I got some methylated spirits and I cleaned it all up and I put it in a big pile and I took it upon myself that we're not going to throw all this stuff away. We're going to sell it. I'm going to sell it. So I host this garage sale. I put everything out on the table, realize I don't have enough stuff.

52:52So I roam around the neighborhood and I invite all the neighbors to put their stuff in my garage sale. And I basically, and then I promote the garage sale. I go to the off-license and put up a poster and I put a little ad in the paper and I host an event and we sell all the stuff. And there was a magic moment where this guy comes up to me and he says, how much for the microwave? I said,$20. He says, I'll give you$10. I said, no, no, it's$20. And he says, can I talk to your father? Okay, go in and get dad. Dad comes out. He says, can I pay$10 for the microwave? And my dad just looks at him and goes, well, it's my son's business, so you have to negotiate with him.

53:32And he turns around and walks back in the house. And I'm standing there with this grown-up and he's like embarrassed and he says, you know, can we get it for$10? I'm like, no, it's$20. And he pays me$20. and I have this moment of it's my business. So for me, this entrepreneur thing runs real deep and also promoting events where people show up and buy stuff and launches. I mean, that fits with like Sigmund Freud talks about the golden seed, doesn't he, that at some stage in your life, that golden seed has to be there. So I'm interested in, again, in this conversation around trust, when you're getting people to trust themselves even, What kind of questions do you ask that allow people to go and explore their own origin story to recognise what might have been unconscious?

54:23What we're trying to do is we're trying to create an alignment between origin, vision and mission. So think Batman, victim of crime at age 10, but he's a trust fund kid and his family business is a weapons business, right, military stuff. So he's got this incredible origin story where there's this thing that he wants. In the future, he has a vision of Gotham City free from crime and that he would love to see Gotham City cleaned up. But his mission is different to Commissioner Gordon. Commissioner Gordon runs the police officer, you know, police force. He has a way of going about free from crime.

55:01But Batman's like, based on my origin story, I can apply this differently. I can do something different here. I can use my family money and family business to play a different game to clean up the city. So Commissioner Gordon and Batman are very aligned. They both have the same vision, but their origin stories are different and therefore their missions are different. So they can be aligned on vision, but they've got different mission. So our origin story informs and our origin story and our vision inform what role we can play, our mission. I know this is all like a bit kind of woo-woo. So what we're trying to do with entrepreneurs when we really want to hone in on this is we're trying to figure out what's your origin story, what's your vision for the future, and what unique role can you play that very few others could play in this.

55:49So other people will be aligned to you, but you're going to play something unique based on your origin story. So that's what we're trying to shoot for. So we ask a lot of questions around moments of empowerment, problems that you've solved, recurring themes, all of this sort of stuff. So if we can use you as an example, sorry, Jake. So we understand a bit of your origin story of growing up in Mooloolaba. Yeah, that was in a place called Redcliffe, but yeah. Okay, so you're growing up on the Sunshine Coast. Yes, yeah. You've done the fire sale. You've had this moment of empowerment. Yeah. So take us to the vision.

56:25Oh, so my vision is entrepreneurs solving the world's most meaningful problems. So entrepreneurship solved a problem, right? So a bad thing happened. There was a fire. And then through entrepreneurship, it turned into a good thing. My vision for the future is that businesses solve bad problems. So all the bad problems that are out there, I think business can solve it. I think entrepreneurs are well-placed to solve it. So you take anything plastic in the oceans, right? There's this young entrepreneurial kid who's building boats and pulling plastic out of the oceans, ocean cleanup. We just did some fundraising for.

56:58You know, so I love my – the thing I'm most called towards is not entrepreneurs making a ton of money. It's entrepreneurs solving the world's most meaningful problems. So it's like that fits very much with the starting point. Thank you for sharing that. Brilliant. What I really enjoy about this conversation is it's very human. I think sometimes when we talk about business, it becomes so much about the financials and the money and the transactions. But you've spoken so much about the kind of heart rather than the head. So how do you view business now with the advent of AI? Is it going to be harder to trust with the advent of AI?

57:35Are you excited about what AI can do for the world? Are you wary of it? Is it going to erode trust? I'm excited and terrified because it's a general purpose technology that's going to divide society. and the analogy that I would use is that we've lived in this kind of society before. We've lived in a society where most of the value is automated and it's called the agricultural age. So in the agricultural age, you plant a seed and then some intelligence that you don't understand grows the seed into a tree or wheat and we don't know how that works. We call it God and then out comes this wheat and then we harvest the wheat and then we go off and do something with it.

58:18But there's this huge link in the chain which is automated by an intelligence we don't understand. And that was the entire agricultural society. And it's very similar that AI is like digital soil. You plant a little seed called a prompt and then it spits out using an intelligence we don't understand. It just goes and then out comes like a contract, a legal contract or out comes a website copy or an answer to a really complex question. And what happened last time we had this society is we had kings and queens and dukes and then everyone else was a serf, peasant. So it didn't matter if you were Einstein or, you know, Cindy Crawford or, you know, it didn't matter really who you were.

59:04If you weren't born owning land, you were going to plant seeds and pick wheat, harvest wheat. That was going to be your whole life. Or you were going to turn that wheat into something, you know, and that was kind of the vast, vast, vast majority of society. So we had this two-tier society. So my concern is that AI doing a lot of the value in society will turn a lot of people into digital serfs and digital, you know, it will erode their value and that there will be a very small number of people who are digital kings, queens, you know, you've got King Jeff Bezos and King Mark Zuckerberg and then you've got all of their dukes and lords around them and then you've got a merchant class of people who own little plots of land, but the vast majority of people who don't understand it end up in digital serfdom.

59:57So I'm very worried about that, this reorganising of society. Does it have to be like that though? There's billions of us and there's only a few of them. There's a terrifying thought, which is that there's only really 25 years of an actual emergent middle class in all of human history. So we basically, we start the 1900s with massively wealthy people and the vast majority of people poor. And then we have two big world wars. And then after World War II, for about 25 years, so I think 1946 to the early 1970s, we have this golden period of like an emergent middle class where suddenly everything, you know, people can buy property.

1:00:43And then it kind of from the 1970s to now, it kind of slowly splits again where some small class of people continue their wealth journey, but most people come off the boil. And then fast forward to today, people can't get on the housing ladder and all of these sorts of things. So the terrifying thought is that for 25 years, we did have an emerging middle class and we kind of orchestrated it and somehow it happened. But for all of human civilization in history, you basically had tribes of no bigger than 150 people who warred with other tribes. And then you had agricultural age with kings, queens, lords, the feudal system.

1:01:28And our 5 ,000 years of civilization is pretty much marked as all haves and have-nots with 25 years of something different in a few pockets. So it's obviously possible to engineer it and orchestrate it, but you have to have a collective awareness that the default is not what we're used to and that it has to be engineered and that there has to be very smart engineering as to how this happens because otherwise you do just go back to the default. I mean, that's really, it reminds me of, I don't know if you've read. On that happy note. Yeah, but I don't know if you've read Morgan Housel. Thanks for that.

1:02:09In Morgan Housel's book, his latest book about why things stay the same, he writes really interestingly around that period you described that Trump taps into it now about his make America great again. And when you go and ask, well, when was America great again? Most people's memories around that golden period where there was more equality. People lived in houses that roughly looked the same as each other. They went on holidays, it was similar, drove similar cars because there was an equality there where people felt they could trust other people around it. So I think there's a vision. I'm going back to your OMV language.

1:02:50I think there is a vision of people recognise that that was really important, but our origins maybe let us down on it. yeah um i can't tell you exactly why it happened um i have a hunch that we needed a lot of compute power in the economy but we didn't have computers so we put humans into computing roles and then we invented computers and now the computers do those roles yeah so um so i think that there was just a there was a lot of use for brains uh in that period of time and then as soon as we invented computers. Take a waiter. Being a waiter used to be a career, and it was a very complex role.

1:03:34You had to remember a lot and calculate a lot, and mathematics and all sorts of things. And you could essentially say it was a profession. Being a maitre d' was the most senior role, and it was quite a profession to do it, and a very proud profession. Now you can throw any 15-year-old in and the computer system does most of the decision-making, most of the work, and essentially, you know, it's mostly automated. So if you think that humans get paid a lot for decisions and we get paid a lot for what I would call vitality versus functionality. So we get paid for our vitality. We don't really get paid a lot for our functionality.

1:04:12And the problem is the schooling system prepares us for functionality and wants to try and turn us into a large language model where we can prompt a child and the child will hallucinate an answer. that's approximately correct. And we're training LLMs in the school system, large language models. And we need to recognise that we've already now solved that problem. We don't need children to be large language models anymore. So what is a lawyer at the moment? A lawyer is a highly trained language model where you prompt them with a problem and they then internalise that and then regurgitate some sort of legal document and they are performing the role of a large language model.

1:04:54And then we say, well, the entire system, the schooling system and everything is based on treating humans as what we would now call an LLM, generative AI. And what we don't get paid for very much is functional stuff, so performing functionality. What we get paid a lot for is vitality. So vitality is making things happen that wouldn't have otherwise happened. being an irreplaceable life force in something. So, for example, this podcast wouldn't have happened unless you guys made it happen. So you're the life force of the podcast. And then as a result of that, suddenly everything starts springing together.

1:05:34So we've got to ask ourselves, every single person has to start to understand and the school system has to start to understand that it's our vitality, not our functionality that we get paid for, and that the layer of functionality is always rising and it just rose quick. And that if you're still swimming in that pool of functionality, your value just drops right down. You have to rise to a new level of vitality. But we don't have a school system that educates based on those principles and that's the hard thing that we're going to have. Can I ask yourself this question? Do you have children? Yeah, three.

1:06:11So how do you, are they school age? Yeah, six, seven and ten. So what are the conversations you're having with them about having to play the game of learning the large language models at school while still retaining that vitality? Yeah, so for starters, we have an agreement around school, which is that the agreement around school is that this is a system that exists that is designed to build certain strengths, that school is about learning basic skills, but life is about learning things outside of school and we talk about the agreement that I have with my kids is that it's on them to get as much out of that experience as possible, to meet people, to learn, to understand how things work but it's also on them to recognise that the school system is not there to make them successful.

1:07:03The school system is not there to give them an amazing life. It's there to set a minimum benchmark, a minimum standard around functionality. And then you've got to build on top of that functionality. The danger with school, I'm fine with everything up until that point. The danger is when we beat the life force out of the kids. When you take someone who's a happy little rebel and you make them feel really bad for some of the things that are their natural strengths. So I'll give you an example. Being disruptive in entrepreneurship is a huge strength. If you can disrupt people, if you can capture their attention from whatever their attention was to whatever you want it to be, That is a massive strength.

1:07:41They'll put you on the front cover of Forbes magazine and call you a disruptor. But if you go into a school system, they're not calling that a positive thing. If you get the smart kid to do your maths homework, in school that's called cheating, and in life that's called having a CFO. You know, so the idea here is that we have to, so the conversations I have with my kids at age-appropriate levels is that some of the things that happen inside the school system are designed to reinforce that system. They're designed to work in that system, but they don't work outside of that system. Outside of that system, it's almost the opposite that you would expect as a result.

1:08:21So interesting. Before we move on to our quickfire questions, I've got a couple of other questions about trust that I'm really personally interested in. So for someone like me who owns not just one business, but a few different businesses, and they're very different. You know, Whisper Group, it's all about working with broadcasters and rights holders. You know, we're not trying to gain the trust of the audience. We're actually trying to gain the trust of the people who are broadcasting to the audience. This is very different. On High Performance, we want the trust of the audience. And we realize, as you've been on most of them, there are hundreds of incredible podcasts that they can go and listen to instead of this one.

1:08:56And I personally believe, if we were to break it down, why would you listen to High Performance? I believe because I trust them, is the most important thing that people can say. So what advice would you give to me and to other business owners for how we can go around building that trust with people?

1:09:19So consistently showing up, which you guys do great. Yeah. And bringing something, like trust is about what do I go to you for? Because people actually trust McDonald's. They trust McDonald's for Big Macs. You know, they trust McDonald's for being cheap and fast. So there's a huge amount of trust. They don't trust it for Michelin star, you know, fine dining, six courses. And we trust Claridge's for a super high-end experience. We have very British dining and hotel and all of that. But we don't trust Claridge's for cheap, fast McDonald's type food. So consistency is like a lot of trust is about being consistent.

1:10:01And it's interesting that there are certain people who get away with things because that's just what they're known for. So swearing, for example. There are certain people who swear a lot and everyone knows, well, if you're going to hang out with that person, they're going to swear a lot. That's just how they are. And then if you heard the prime minister swear, you go, oh, well, that breaks feeling of trust because I've never heard them swear before. So something must be, you know, must lose. So being consistently who you are, showing up consistently, doing the thing consistently, I think is a big part of building a trust with an audience.

1:10:43And do you measure personally how well you're doing in an area of trust with your teams and with the people you work with? Because like when you're in business, well, your turnover tells you how you're doing financially. Your EBIT tells you how you're doing regarding profit. You know, those are clear metrics to understand. I think trust is a kind of this ethereal thing. So is it something that you hold a lot of sway by? Well, in business, you measure it. We use other words, but we measure similar sorts of things. We call like conversions and lifetime value of client, cost to acquire a client, those sorts of things.

1:11:13So in tech companies, you go on things like churn, so how many people leave, which obviously means they wanted something that they didn't get. So you interrogate that. Lifetime value of a client. you look at and, you know, once again, that is about an ongoing journey with a customer. Cost of acquisition. So if you can bring the cost to acquire, we call it CAC, cost to acquire a customer or customer acquisition cost. So these are things where you go, okay, this is our ability, like our CAC comes down if our trust goes up. You know, if we're a trusted brand, we know that that brings down the cost to acquire a customer.

1:11:56And in many ways, this is further down the line for a lot of people listening to this who are maybe at the beginning of their entrepreneurial journey and trust with the customer is something they need to be worrying about in three or four years' time. I feel what they need to be worrying about today is finding people that go on the journey with them. And I would just, before we move on and finish the interview, I would love for you to explain to people the very best way to ask for help.

1:12:23Well, I thought where you were going with that was asking for sales. Well, maybe that's what they need if they're looking for something. The best way to ask for help, I think help is within an environment. So get inside an environment. I'm a big believer that we put people into accelerator environments and then they hang around in groups of people who are entrepreneurs and the help just happens. It's as if by magic. It's like joining Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and if you're doing the move wrong, someone just says, hey, you're doing the move wrong. Like it's so just ingrained. So once you're on the inner circle of a helpful environment, which for entrepreneurs is largely called accelerators, accelerator programs and accelerator environments, those are the environments where high-performance entrepreneurs hang out, they meet up regularly and they talk strategy and they talk about helping each other.

1:13:17So get into an environment where that's just the fabric. After a certain age, asking people to be your mentor just doesn't work. It's absolutely fine up to about 25. You can say, oh, I need a mentor and someone will take you under their wing. But the shimmer comes off at about 45. It's like somewhere between those two points, you pay for advice. But you can get into accelerator environments and that's fine. But asking for sales is even better. So when you're starting a business, you need to be doing something called laps, leads to appointments to presentations to sales. And you need to be measuring how many leads did I generate this week?

1:13:59How many appointments did I book in the diary, into the calendar? How many presentations did I present them with something that I do? And how many proposals? And then how many sales got made, right? And essentially, your trust framework is like just looking at laps, right? It's like I generated this many leads, appointments, presentations, and sales. And you just see. And a lot of people are looking for this holy grail of like, I want to be able to talk to one person and they always sign up. Or I want to be able to tell my story once and suddenly that builds the business. It's like it doesn't work like that.

1:14:38It's every single week as a business you do laps. Like, you know, I've been going 20 plus years as an entrepreneur with dozens of different companies. Every company has a LAPS dashboard. Every single company, I mean, we're down the street from the Apple store. They measure how many people walk through the door, how many people talk to an Apple representative, how many people get presented with a solution, and how many people walk out the door with a bag. They measure that stuff. And it's not high numbers, by the way. So it's like for every hundred people who walk into the Apple store, a few people walk out with a purchase.

1:15:14Now, if Apple can't do it all the time, no business can. So what we have to do is get used to the idea that it falls off a cliff. You generate 100 leads and you make a few sales. And that's every week and that's 20 years into the journey. So we've got to have low expectations around what customers do and how they behave. We have to have painfully low expectations. We have to basically say, like, I'll give you, In one of my businesses that's wildly successful and profitable, one in 63 people buy. So for every 63 leads we generate, we make a sale. Now we generate leads for£9 a lead. So call it£600 or something like that for a sale.

1:16:00And the sale is lifetime value of a client is somewhere between $12 ,000 and$15 ,000. So that's a wildly successful business. £600 to generate a sale that's going to be worth£15 ,000? You know, that's epic. But it means one in 63 people are buying and, you know, 62 out of 63 aren't. I think that is such a valuable way to look at it because I think so many people would go, my business is rubbish. I have to speak to 63 people before someone buys something. Yep. Because they're not looking at it in that way. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's an epic result. I run tech companies and in these tech companies, you've got to put something in front of hundreds and hundreds and thousands of people before a few people click.

1:16:49Like, you know, when you run ads, like, you know, single-digit click-through rates are massive. Like, that's great. And then single-digit conversion rates on landing pages, you know, a lot of landing pages perform at like 2 % to 4%. Great landing page. We've got some landing pages that do 20 % to 40 % click-through rates and conversion rates. These are industry-leading. These are like world – if you can get 20 % of people to click through on a landing page, world-class. You can't expect much better than that. I love it. I think the final point I would love to just talk to you about very quickly before we will finally get on to the quick files, but I'm finding this so interesting is that I think people look at something like – let's say high performance is very interesting because it's got a public-facing side to it, and then it's got the non-public-facing side.

1:17:38And people go, oh, the amount of effort you put into interviews or lighting the studio or putting on these mics, making it sound good, making it look good. This is about 5 % of what high performance is. The other 95 % is getting in the weeds of the algorithms and trying to work with YouTube and speak to Spotify and have a conversation with providers and all the things that you've just spoken about. hours and hours and hours, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of data points to work out whether we're doing the right thing, which then leads to us sitting here having a conversation like this. And I think that's something that I want people to understand when they look at business.

1:18:14Yeah, that's the stuff. Yeah, exactly. So if someone's running down the rabbit hole of like, oh, how do I have 100 % conversions on this thing? Yeah, it doesn't happen. People have wildly unrealistic expectations as to how businesses will perform and how and how long a successful win will last. You can hit a home run. You have to replicate that every three months. And is the truth that the stuff that really matters is the unsexy bits I've just spoken about, doing them consistently, doing them forever? So I said I was at the Killers, right? When you look behind the scenes, like last night, it's a great concert.

1:18:51When you look behind the scenes on any big band that you love, and if ever you've been to a concert and you've just thought this was a great concert, Go look at their touring schedule. Yeah. And then you realise that being on stage is 5 % of being the band. I watched the Netflix documentary of James Blunt. Brilliant documentary, by the way. Yeah. And I looked at his touring schedule and he's done 1 ,183 concerts in the last 10, 15 years. So it's like 100 concerts a year. So he's doing two a week, every week. for 10 to 15 years. It's wild. And when you look at it, it's like he's in the Isle of Man and he's in some town that's two hours out of Boston and he's in some place in Canada that's, you know, and every single one of those places needs a marketing schedule and, you know, all this stuff.

1:19:52They tour around on these buses. now when he delivers his live concert he's brilliant because he's done it 1 ,100 times but like just it's the unsexy stuff by the way same thing people think I spend my whole life on podcasts because I'm on a few but actually the vast vast vast majority of my time is not doing podcasts you know we've built a high performance app which you'd love actually Check it out. It goes deeper into the world of high performance than just listening to the podcast. I like it. And Damien yesterday spent some time with the British diving team ahead of the Olympic Games to find out how they do it.

1:20:34And we were just talking before you came in, actually, that these guys are working for five years, six years, 20 years to try and get ready for an Olympic Games. When they're actually competing at the Olympics as a diver, the dive is so fast, your entire Olympics is about five seconds of work. Yeah. And then the whole world judges them on the five seconds of work and determines if they're talented. They probably don't even remember that five seconds. There's probably... Well, part of it is they're actually getting to the point of your middle brain where you just go and execute. Do it on autopilot.

1:21:05Yeah, yeah. Yeah, wow. It's wild when you think about it like that, isn't it? Yeah. But the truth is, for any entrepreneurs that want to get into this world, that's actually what it is, isn't it? That's the reality. Lots of sales. Lots and lots of sales. Right, quick five questions. By the way, have you ever read a book called The Go-Giver? I haven't read the book, but my co-founder, Glenn, loves that book. And he's brought the best bits into the company. Yeah, you should read that book. I should, yeah. This is the book I've, you know, for people listening to this or watching this, and they're thinking, what is that?

1:21:39So the word, you know the word sell, you know, really being an entrepreneur is about selling stuff. The word sell comes from the old English word sellen, which is translated as to give. To give, yeah. So selling is not getting. Yeah. Selling is giving. Yeah, serving. It's the ability to give. Yeah, I love that. Right. Quickfire questions. What are the three non-negotiable behaviors that you think are most important for you and any other entrepreneurs? Presenting, like getting your value out to the world, selling, and enrolling or recruiting, like recruiting team members. And we should break away very quickly from the quickfires for you to explain your capstone principle of presentation.

1:22:20This full-day workshop that I normally do. And you're going to do it in six seconds. When I'm in front of a pitch situation, we want to hit the basis of clarity. What is it we're doing? Authority, why should you listen to us? Problem and solution, what's the problem we see and how do we solve it? What we call the why, which is the big picture, or the purpose. Opportunity, so explaining the opportunity of solving that. Next steps, what do we have to do now? And then the essence or the emotional high, the finishing, like finish on the essence of what we're really saying. So Capstone is a pitching framework.

1:22:58And you created that to help you remember the framework. Yeah, and the idea here is that people think that a great pitch is something that is like kind of intuitive or like some people have it, some people don't. I've worked with entrepreneurs who just have zero understanding of how to pitch and we do the Capstone framework and then half a day later they can pitch like they're ready for Dragon's Den. I think the bit that I loved in it was the essence, the final E. Would you just tell us a little bit more about that? Well, the research says that people remember how you left them feeling. So if you finish on next steps and it's like a to-do list, it will be remembered as flat.

1:23:37It'll be remembered as a very kind of boring presentation or very technical. If you end something on an emotional high point, if you end something on a big picture, actually the pitch can be quite boring and if you end it correctly, you'll leave people feeling uplifted. They will remember the whole pitch is uplifted. So there's a lot of research. Hotels, for example, should put way more effort into the check out experience than the check-in experience. The check-in experience is important and every hotel in the world does it as best they can. No hotels in the world do the check-out experience.

1:24:16And yet that's how we remember things. That reminds us of Gary Barlow from Take That and he spoke about the journey of the audience and he described the last half hour is just hit after hit after hit. And it's that big, they always, if the band has had a big hit, it's always the last song. The last song they play has to be Mr. Brightside, if you're the killers. Have you heard our episode with Will Gadara? No. You would love it. He created the world's number one restaurant. And his way of, his checkout was a small bag of granola. Because he said the last thing you want at the end of an amazing meal is more food for that evening.

1:24:53So what they would say is, here's a small bag of granola. Tomorrow morning when you wake up, you can extend your restaurant experience to the following day. Genius. Genius. Genius. Have a listen to it. And you're going to be talking about that to your friends that day. Of course you are. Watch out for Brett as well. Taking your Instagram pictures. Yeah, yeah. What's the single best piece of advice you've ever received and why? The single best piece of advice that I've ever received is a reminder that kids grow up fast and to treasure those moments. That you spin around and they've gone from babies to school kids and next thing you know they're 10 and then teenagers and all that sort of stuff.

1:25:32life moves fast life you know uh and and success without that stuff isn't isn't very fulfilling what's your biggest strength and what's your greatest weakness uh i have a real strength around getting people excited around ideas and putting together teams um i'm i'm well aware that i have no skills i'm not qualified for anything other than i've got a driver's license um so That's my big qualification. And that means that I am completely reliant on the skills of others and that I have to enrol developers and I have to enrol finance people and I have to enrol anyone technical, anything that I need, I've got to get someone on the team who can do that.

1:26:15So enrolling people onto my teams is something that I've had to become stronger because I don't have any skills. and then probably my biggest weakness is I'm terrible at saying no to stuff. I just want to say yes to everything and I don't want to let people down and then by saying yes to too many things I end up letting people down. So that would probably be my weakness. When you started out on this journey, what do you wish that you'd known? From a business and entrepreneurship point, I wish I'd known that there are pre-existing playbooks that produce way better results than non-playbooks. So a simple example is that if you build a recurring revenue technology company, it's going to be worth tens of millions very rapidly.

1:27:02And if you put the same energy and effort into a coffee shop, it's not going to be worth tens of millions rapidly. So there are certain, there is actually a certain set of behaviors and playbooks that massively outperform the same levels of creativity, energy, effort into those businesses will give you a disproportionate result. I was talking to someone who worked in wealth management in J.P. Morgan and she said, like you hear the same stories over and over and over again and you also, there's an absence of certain stories that you don't hear over and over and over again. But she said one of them is technology, recurring revenue, subscription revenue, you know, scalable tech, you know these people end up in jp morgan wealth manager's office interesting final question um after this brilliant conversation what you'd like to really leave people just thinking about your one golden rule if you like to living high performance life um every industry revolves around key people of influence there's three layers to every industry There is newbies, worker bees, and influencers, key people of influence.

1:28:16And everything, everything becomes easy when you're recognized as a key person of influence in your industry. It's very easy to mobilize resources. It's very easy to launch ideas. It's very easy to seize the moment that we're in. We live in the most incredible time in history. Had you been born in any other time in history, there's a very, very high chance that you would have a very limited set of options. and because whoever's listening to this was born when they were born, they are alive at a time in history where the options are very, very wide. You can live and work from anywhere. You can launch a business and scale it with very limited amounts of capital.

1:28:53You don't need huge numbers of people on your team. You can do enormous amounts of work with less than 10 people, enormous amounts of work with technology that comes off the shelf. don't watch the news and listen to the news and feel like this is a terrible time get involved in the entrepreneur community and recognise that this is the greatest time in history what a lovely way to finish Daniel thank you so much and can I just say a personal thanks for the information you've put out there you know this is a conversation about trust and I a few years ago seeing and hearing the things you were saying decided to trust you and it's been revolutionary for me so thanks so much amazing thank you cheers

1:29:35Damien Jake what was your biggest takeaway from that conversation well it was so rich but there was a couple of things that really resonated the stats that Daniel shared with us that Dunbar number of people trust you after at least seven hours in your company yeah that other stat around you need at least 11 interactions before people will buy off you so that probably equates to seven hours in total so it's more about spending time with people the face-to-face, the eyeball stuff, and the value of that building relationships is what leads to eventual trust emerging. And that was a really good lesson for me because you know when we were talking, I said to him, I'm not very good at getting people to buy into what I'm excited about.

1:30:15Maybe I am. I'm not very good at realizing how long it takes. So I really, you know what I'm like, I suddenly get so excited about one thing and then I kind of, I find someone that might be able to work with me on it and I think I'll have one conversation with them and see if they buy into it. and if they don't, I think, oh, I'm rubbish at selling that. I kind of now realise, well, hold on, I've been thinking about this for six weeks and I've spent it for 20 minutes. Why on earth would they be as excited as me? Daniel said a few times there, didn't he, about having to adjust our own expectations.

1:30:44We expect that sales will happen immediately when we tell people we expect that trust follows from our first meeting and we have to adjust our own expectations and accept. It's a process. It's a journey that people have to go through. And that idea about sales, I love this conversation saying, I've got a brilliant business, but we sell one of our item for every 68 attempts to sell it. Now, everyone would go, well, that's not very good. 67 people say no. Like, that's an awful number. But you've got to go deeper. You've got to actually ask yourself different questions. You know, you're a master of this.

1:31:18Ask better questions and you'll get better answers. So it isn't about the fact that it takes a long time to sell something. It's the fact that when you sell one thing, you make such a great number. It doesn't matter how long it takes. I think that was a real eye-opener for me, rather than just looking at the sort of standard number. And I think the biggest thing that I will take away from that conversation, and I will repeat to people everywhere, is now is the greatest time to be alive. The opportunities now are better than ever before. Technology has democratized content creation. But I think it probably does, to the point of the whole conversation, mean that trust is more important than ever because it's so easy to mistrust the things that we see and read.

1:32:00Yeah, definitely. And if there's one bit of advice I'd encourage anyone watching this or listening to it, take away his advice about that, that our mental diet, what we're feeding ourselves, including the news, including the people we listen to, the environments we surround ourselves with, and make sure that we're feeding ourselves good stuff that allow us to get into that higher brain purpose and be visionary rather than survive it. Thank you so much, Damien. And don't forget that this miniseries was made possible by the world's number one CRM, Salesforce, a business platform for change. And with their leading platform, Einstein One, your company can connect with customers in a whole new way.

1:32:40Thanks for watching.