The Money Making Expert: Build Your First £1M Business! Start, Fund, Hire & Scale | Daniel Priestley

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1:16Code audio. I've started seven companies that have gone zero to a million in their first 12 months. Some of the businesses I've sold for the most amount of money are the ones I didn't start. Have you seen common traits across entrepreneurs? Yeah, so they tend to be... Daniel Priestley is an internationally recognized entrepreneur, business coach, best-selling author, and keynote speaker. Having built and sold multiple multi-million dollar businesses across the UK, Australia, and Singapore, he went on to co-found Dent Global, a leading business accelerator that has helped more than 5 ,500 businesses grow.

1:49He is the author of seven business books, Key Person of Influence, Oversubscribed, and 24 Assets. Entrepreneurship is a team sport. Here's who to avoid. Anyone who's working currently in a large corporate. If they work at Microsoft, no. If they work at Google, absolutely not. If they work in KPMG, Ernst & Young, those are definitely do not touch. Why? They're spoiled. I'm not a big fan of putting your own money in. You are basically an enthusiastic idiot who's now armed with$100 ,000 and no one had to ask you a tough question. If someone wants to fundraise, what would you say to them? The very, very, very best way of fundraising is...

2:29Daniel, if I had a look at your CV, what would I see? Well, over the last 25 years, I've been an entrepreneur. I started at 21. Since then, I've started seven companies that have gone zero to a million in their first 12 months. I've had three businesses go north of 10 million in valuation. I've done six acquisitions, four exits. I've written seven books on entrepreneurship and worked with about 5 ,500 entrepreneurs to help them to start and scale and exit their companies as well. I've worked with some of the biggest brands in the world. I've worked with some of the biggest celebrities in the world.

3:01And ultimately, I capture that experience and I try and share some of those best learnings with people so that they can learn from all of that experience and I can pass that around. Why is this important to you? I believe that we're living through absolutely extraordinary times that we weren't prepared for. So over the last 200 years, we built up the industrial age system. It was built around standardized parts, standardized people. So the idea here is that we would create offices and factories and people would just slot into those roles and that we would have a very scalable economy. If you just simply learned the functional skills of fitting in with organizations, then you'd be fine.

3:37All of that's come to an end. We're now in the ascension of the digital age, but no one was prepared for it. And what we need to know is how do we prepare for the skills that are very relevant and valuable now? and how do we let go of the things that now can be automated? If we neglect all of this, what will happen? There's going to be a lot of people who feel very disjointed. They feel very rejected by society. They feel that they are doing their best but they can't get ahead. They feel that they're worthless. They feel that society is not valuing them or fulfilling upon the promise that they were promised as a child or as a teenager.

4:17and then they will want to rebel and they want to burn society down and they'll want to act out and be very negative. They'll act out against themselves or against society. We'll see people voting for political systems that we know don't work. We'll see people doing things to themselves that are harmful because when someone feels that there's no pathway forward that they can achieve and success and be fully expressed and fully alive and thriving, then if people don't feel a pathway towards that, then they essentially act out in very destructive ways. So what I really hope is that people recognize that we live in extraordinary times, that you have a very clear pathway to express yourself, to form meaningful relationships and teams, to become valued and valuable, to add value to society, but it doesn't look like the way that we were trained in school.

5:06I'd like to understand you better, to investigate what is that happened in your life that made you see reality in the way that you're describing right now. Talk to me about your childhood. What was it like? So I grew up in Australia and I grew up in beachside communities because everything other than major cities is beachside. So I grew up in a place called the Sunshine Coast, going to the beach every single day. I had parents who worked in businesses and government, but also were quite entrepreneurial. So my father was a schoolteacher, but he also had a little newsletter and a newspaper off to the side.

5:40and he did some marketing consulting off to the side as a solo entrepreneur. My mum was a journalist for a newspaper, but she also did some book publishing and book writing on the side. So I grew up in a home where mum would often talk about news and politics, dad would talk about education, dad also talk a bit about entrepreneurial ideas. So that kind of mindset was present when I was growing up. I was very lucky that I discovered that I found this thing called entrepreneurship at around, through a series of experiences, like around age 10 or 11, there was a small house fire. All this stuff was damaged and I got it in my head that I could sell it and I could clean it and sell it.

6:25And what it spoke to me is that something bad can happen, something negative can happen. But through this thing that I didn't have a word for, entrepreneurship, I could actually do something positive off the back of something negative. So I made$300 selling all this stuff. It was enough to buy a Sega Master System, a BMX bike. And like, it was just awesome. It was great. I did a series of garage sales as a young teenager. I then moved into nightclub parties and selling flowers door to door. And I worked at McDonald's and got to know the owner of the McDonald's who had six franchises. and there was also an experience that I had in school where I was naughty and I got punished and I had to clean out this cupboard and in the cupboard I found these magazines and one of the magazines was called the BRW 200 which was a list of the 200 wealthiest families and individuals in Australia and I sat there in this cupboard I was meant to be cleaning it out but I discovered this magazine and I started reading these stories and I just could not believe that these people came up with ideas, started companies and became worth millions from nothing more than an idea.

7:33And I just read every single story back to back. And then throughout the following 10 years, I read that magazine every single year, like it was gospel. And I just knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. If you were incredibly honest, not with myself, but with yourself here, how much was money, a driver, in those early stages of your life to become an entrepreneur, as opposed to other reasons? I remember many fights at home between mum and dad, really vicious fights, and they seem to always revolve around limitation, lack, a lack of money. In the early 90s, mortgage rates went up very high. There was a recession in Australia in 1992.

8:16I know mum and I've been doing it really tough. And there was all these things that my mum wanted to do. My mum has always been very ambitious. And you could also say a little bit financially reckless, in terms of she doesn't think about the money, she just thinks about what she wants to do. And then my dad has been hyper frugal. He's really overly protective of every penny, every cent. And the dynamic between mum's unconstrained thinking about money and my dad's overly constrained thinking about money caused a lot of fights in the home. And my interpretation as a child was that these fights related to money.

8:51And at one point, I remember thinking, wouldn't it be great if money didn't exist? And I remember just thinking the world would just be so great if we didn't have to be constrained by money, if everyone could just do whatever they wanted to do based without this constraint. It's the same sort of madness that socialists think about, where they think to each according to their values and needs and blah, blah, blah, like this kind of childlike view of a world without money. And then I thought, actually, if you make enough money, then money is just not a constraint. You actually can do this. And then I came to the incredible conclusion that you can do things that you're actually passionate about that you would naturally like doing and do for free and make a lot of money along the way to the extent that it's not a huge constraint.

9:38So as I explored that, I kind of deepened my understanding as to how money and passion can intersect. But I'm not going to pretend that money was not a massive driver because I just didn't want to have those fights. Appreciate the honesty. When I discuss with many of my friends, what are you passionate about? And especially most of these friends that I converse with, they have amazing corporate jobs that, you know, once upon a time they would have killed their grandparents to get that job and right now they don't seem to be very content or purposeful and they do want to do something with their lives beyond the nine to five and that it could also mean opening their own business but then they stumble across the same question which is i don't really know what i like what would you say to these people i would say i'll give you a couple of answers that when it comes to career and business There's a combination of factors that you need to overlap.

10:37And essentially, you need to have a passion for something, but that's not the whole story. And if you only pursue passion, you become very juvenile in your thinking and you become like one of these crazy people who's just running around, you know, and you're like, oh, I love snowboarding, so I'm going to run around being a snowboard. I'm a DJ now, you know, I love DJing. So it's this unbridled, unconstrained pursuit of juvenile passions. And that doesn't work. So we need to combine it with two other ingredients, which the other ingredients is that you solve a meaningful problem in the world and that you actually, you're not just passionate, you are looking at others and saying, what is the meaningful problem in the world that needs solving that I feel called and passionate to solve?

11:22So we bring in this second ingredient. And then the third ingredient is that there is a business model behind it that I can be paid for it because ultimately we live in the real world and you need to earn a lot of money to live in the societies that we've created now. You can't even be in the middle now. You have to – like the middle is – the tide is going out for the middle. You've got to be in the top 10 % at the very, very least. So you have to say, does this opportunity provide me a pathway to some sort of financial affluence? So we need to basically say, will this provide payment, money? Am I solving a meaningful problem?

11:58And am I passionate to solve that? And we're looking for a combination of those three factors. So that's the first thing I'd say. Second thing I'd say, no matter how well you nail that, the human body and the human nervous system is also built to be a parent. And that until you have kids, there will always be an underlying factor that's missing in your life that you feel. And it's like if I said to you, I want to pursue my passion and I don't want to have food. You say, well, there's going to be a hunger, a biological hunger that you have that you need to eat. And it doesn't matter how much you love your job.

12:37You can love your job as much as you like, but you need good food. You need nutrition because there's this other thing called nutrition and food and eating food that satisfies a biological desire that you have. So I see a lot of people, especially young people these days who don't get married and don't have kids until much later, they feel like they're searching for something and they don't realize that what you're searching for is to become a parent. Interesting. Right. So they parent a business, they parent a cat, they parent a dog, they parent themselves, right. But all of that parental instinct goes into other things.

13:09And so obvious to me as a parent of three kids, that you're transferring this desire to parent onto other things that basically is coming out. A business, no level of success will ever allow you to satiate and satisfy that deep desire to be a parent. Interesting. I think right now we live in a world in which we're constantly being told that being a founder would be the answer to all of our prayers. You got to open your business. You got to work for yourself. Everything will make sense. You're going to be happy. Who should become an entrepreneur? How can people understand if entrepreneurship is for them?

13:52So for starters, entrepreneurship is a team sport. Founder is one role on the team, but there are many valuable roles on that team. So it's almost like saying everyone should be a goalie on the football field. It's like, well, the goal is an important role, but you need 10 other players. So entrepreneurship is a team sport. it's a team dynamic. So it's one thing to be the founder, but it's perfectly valid to share in the entrepreneurial experience by being a different player on that team as well. You can be head of growth and you can take some equity in exchange for the way that you hit your targets.

14:28You could be head of product and you could develop an amazing product that scales and also hit targets and get equity if you agree that up front. You could buy an existing business that's hit 2 million of revenue and scale it up to 20 million of revenue. And you didn't found the business, but you scaled the business 10 times bigger than it currently was when you found it. That's very entrepreneurial. I've done a couple of those. And I tell you what, that feels incredibly entrepreneurial, even though I didn't found those businesses. Some of the businesses I've sold for the most amount of money are the ones I didn't start.

15:00So I didn't start my publishing company and I just sold it to Forbes Books in America. I didn't start my IT services company, but I sold it to a publicly listed company in New York. These are businesses I bought and scaled and exited. And it felt incredibly entrepreneurial, despite the fact that I wasn't the founder of those businesses. So it's important to know that business is a team sport. Entrepreneurship is a team sport. But if we want to zoom in on the founder, we're looking for what's called founder opportunity fit. And founder opportunity fit is that we need to find something that is a good fit for who you are, your temperament, your personality, your style, your passions, the types of things that you've got a unique background that lines up with this moment.

15:43We're looking for alignment. And alignment is the past being in alignment with the present and the future. So origin, mission, and vision. If we imagine that there's these three things called the origin, mission, and vision. We love stories like Batman because his origin story at age 10 is that he was the victim of crime. His vision for the future is Gotham City free from crime. And his mission right now is to get rid of baddies who are creating crime and strike fear into their hearts. And because it's so clear that he's aligned to origin, mission, and vision, we love the character. And the character just keeps being an enduring character.

16:22Anytime that we know the origin, mission, and vision of a founder, and we say, because of your background, and because of your vision for the future, and because of what you're up to right now, all of that's in alignment. We feel a natural magnetism towards that person. So we're looking for something that you're deeply aligned to. Your origin, mission, and vision lines up, and then that attracts the other teammates. Have you seen common traits across entrepreneurs? Yeah, so they tend to be rebels and misfits. It's so you'll often find that they have – at age 10 to 13, most entrepreneurs discovered one of two things.

17:05They discovered that they were powerful without their parents and they did something that allowed them to discover that they were powerful independent of their family. So there was this moment of individuality. or at 10 to 13 they suffered a very deep injustice and the way that they felt powerful is by committing to themselves that they would one day right that wrong. And the rebel and misfit comes out where you say because of what happened to me, I am going to take my revenge by becoming wildly successful and fixing that problem at scale. yeah so uh it's it tends to be psychologically somewhere around 10 to 13 something like that happens discovery of power individuality i don't need to play by society's rules i'm going to do my own thing is that what happened to you yeah exactly yeah so um i i had several of those experiences i was always a little bit of a rebel and a misfit i didn't naturally fit in with all any of the groups but i fit in with all of the groups i grew up in a surfing culture but i couldn't surf.

18:13I kept hurting myself and crashing. Like I just, as much as I tried to surf, I was just terrible at it. Um, I, um, I just, so I didn't feel like I was going to fit in with the Sunshine Coast crew, um, because of, because of some of those elements. Um, I put on a lot of weight as a teenager and felt really embarrassed with my shirt off. And it was a shirt off culture. Um, taking your shirt off was, was the normal thing when you're, when you're on the Sunshine coast. And I just always felt incredibly embarrassed because I'd put on this weight. And so it was a combination of those factors that I felt to myself, I'm going to have to find another way to be valuable.

18:55It sounds to me that the reason, the intrinsic and psychological reason why entrepreneurs become entrepreneurs is unhealthy. uh well not necessarily because something needs to jolt you out of conformity and you know because because we live in a society that has a momentum to it especially it's a 200 year momentum that school system and work system and all of these systems that essentially say go to school go to university get a job apply for a position fit in with a role stick around uh suck it up life is not particularly exciting have a hobby um like so there's that momentum pulling you back towards that path so you need something that jolts you out of that conformity where you are going to back yourself to go against everything you've been told to do so you're either going to have a positive experience where you say hey look i went off and did my own thing and it worked pretty well.

19:57Like I achieved something on my own. Or you say, I suffered a major injustice. I'm not going to follow the rules because following the rules led to that injustice. I'm going to break from conformity in order to solve this problem at scale.

20:21If someone wants to start a business today and they have no business experience, and this is going to be their first business? Where should they begin? The first most reliable starting point, if you want to be reliably successful and you want to actually genuinely treat entrepreneurship as a career choice, as a path that you're going to do it for many, many years, I would say the most reliable path is that you do two to three years under the wing of an experienced entrepreneur and you actually do what I would call the entrepreneur apprenticeship, which is that you are a number two to a entrepreneur who's crushing it.

20:56So for me personally, from age 19 to 21, I worked for this guy called John. On day one, we had no business name, no bank account. We had absolutely nothing. We pulled out a big 12-month planner and we planned out 40 weeks worth of repeatable campaigns. We came up with a business name. I went down to the bank with him and we registered a bank account. There were three of us around the kitchen table. and then we launched that business and did six million of revenue in the first 12 months. Yeah, we smashed it and by the end of that year, we opened up an office in Melbourne, we had 50 or 60 employees and then in the second year, I broke off and did a side project for John in a regional area, made about 750 grand worth of sales, 250 grand worth of profit and I was basically running that side project myself with John as a mentor guide.

21:52So age 19 to 21, I do a zero to six million run and then I do my own zero to 750k run under my own steam with a very limited tiny little budget. And I have these two years of mentorship and guidance. and then I'm riding high feeling good because John had actually lost money in his main business. They'd had a loss making year as they were scaling up and my division had made a profit and my profit had actually been very useful to the overall group of the company. John actually had said something to that effect and I went to John and said, hey John, I've been here from the beginning. I've done this profit that it's been really helpful.

22:36I'd like to get some shares in the company. And John said, Dan, if you want shares in a company, you've got to go start your own. And I thought to myself, oh, thank goodness, he's given me his blessing. And he didn't give me his blessing at all. It was meant to be shut up and sit down. Because you would be his competitor. Yeah, he was basically saying, you're not ready. But I heard it as, you're going to have to go start your own. I'm like, oh, okay, all right, cool. My mentor has told me that I'm ready to go start my own company. So I quit and went off and started my own company. And then I did 1.3 million in year one for myself, 10.7 million in year three.

23:14So it was really just down to the fact that John's mentorship and the experience of going through two startups essentially in two years in a row, that doing it the third year in a row was not a big deal. It was not hard to actually just simply replicate what I'd been doing. So I would just call that the entrepreneur apprenticeship. if I was going to start a restaurant, I would want to try and come and work closely with you. If I was wanting to start a media company, you know, I'd go work with someone who's got a media company. I've had about a dozen of my ex-employees go off and become millionaires because they just spent two to three years working under my wing and then they went off and started a business and became a multi-millionaire off the back of that.

23:58And that, when I talk to them and say, how did you do it? They just say, we executed all the playbooks, like all the playbooks that we learned from you. So, you know, it's, so, so step one is an entrepreneur apprenticeship. It's, it's normally the case that it's just too much to go from a corporate to a startup. You know, you, you're in a corporate, you're, you're working in a big building. You've got a, a literally a pass around your neck for going up the elevator. You know, some IT issue comes along, you just ask IT to fix it. You know, some issue that you have in a meeting, you talk to HR. Like you're in a completely different culture.

24:36You know, it's the difference between being on a cruise ship versus rowing a boat. You know, these are not even closely the same things, even though they're both called boats. You know, so the idea that you're going to go from corporate, where it's almost impossible for them to not pay you for the next six months, to entrepreneurship, where you can go broke in a week of bad decisions. Like these are just such different beasts. So the mid-step is to go from corporate to working for an entrepreneur directly for two to three years and then go start your own. A lot of people listening to us right now, maybe in their corporate jobs, and they may be thinking, I do agree with you.

25:17I do feel that I live in a very cushy bubble where I don't have to solve as many problems as opposed to if I was an entrepreneur. And they would be asking themselves, so when is the right moment for me to leave? How can I know that I need to leave or I can leave my job? Normally, it's when you've got the validation and that it doesn't feel risky. It feels totally valid. So like, for example, I bumped into someone. Someone stopped me on the street yesterday. She walks up to me and she goes, you're the guy from the podcasts. I've been listening to these podcasts with you on it. And I said, okay, great.

25:50She said, I want to quit my big corporate job and I want to go start my own. And I said, how does that feel? And she said, it feels very risky. I said, well, then you're not really ready. And I said, I've never started a business that felt risky. So I asked her about what she has in mind. And I said, just launch a wait list. I said, if you can get a hundred names on that wait list and you can do 30, 20 minute meetings with people and find out that they want to sign up and that you've got pre-sale agreements. I said, how would you feel if you had a hundred people on a wait list, you'd met with 30 of them, you had seven people who had signed five grand a month retainers whenever you start.

26:25And they've basically said, as soon as you get started, I'm going to sign a five grand a month for change. She goes, well, I'd just quit right now. I'd be fine. I said, it doesn't feel risky, does it? I said, so it only feels risky because you have no data to support the fact that this would be a good idea. So she's like, oh, I hadn't even thought about that. I thought you had to take a leap of faith. I'm like, no, you don't take a leap of faith. It's your finances. It's your life. You know, business will chew you up and spit you out in five minutes. So we want validation. We want to hit a validation.

26:54there are some simple ways to validate ideas. A wait list is the number one best way to validate idea. So if I was going to, let's see what you think as a very experienced entrepreneur in the restaurant game. If I was thinking about launching a new restaurant in a particular place, I'm not going to get a site. I'm not going to commit to a lease. I'm not going to do any of those sorts of things. I'm going to create a landing page that says coming soon, a brand new approach to Italian food, blah, blah, blah. I'm going to create some images and I'm going to say, join the waitlist to attend our launch event and to help us craft the perfect menu and to meet the founder.

27:33So I'm going to create a waitlist and I'm going to run ads to that waitlist and I'm going to get people on board and I'm going to find out who are the types of people who are attracted to it. I might put some flyers out, I might put some signs up and see if people actually join the waitlist. Now if I've got people joining the waitlist, now I'm getting validation. Now I might discover all the people joining the waitlist are over 60, right? Because I'm going to ask them questions when they join the waitlist. I go, oh, that's interesting. Here I was thinking I'm creating a restaurant for cool, young, hip people, but everyone who says that they want to attend this Italian restaurant is over 60.

28:11Okay. That helps me to rethink, do I want to do a restaurant where the majority of people are over 60? So I'm getting the data and it costs me nothing, almost nothing maybe maybe a couple of thousand pounds but it's certainly a lot less than a lease on a on a space um i'm collecting all the information about what the market wants and um you know i'm able to have those meetings people tend to avoid talking to customers because we don't like talking to strangers and as soon as you start talking to the customers they'll tell you whether this is going to work or not very quickly. It's very interesting.

28:49I agree with you. And you were speaking about validating your idea from a consumer perspective, which to one extent would give you an understanding of the projected revenues. Can you share with me other testing validation methods? One of the best other ways to validate is to validate with your ultimate acquirer. So let's say you've got access to someone in corp dev whose job is to find acquisition targets. So rather than validating with customers, you go to corp dev and you sit down, you have a lunch and you say, tell me exactly what's your criteria for buying a company? Because ultimately I want to build something that you want to buy.

29:30And they say, oh, well, we want to have a minimum of 10 ,000 recurring revenue subscribers. We want the software to have a minimum of a hundred, $100 per month per user. We want to have this quality of earnings. We want this. We want to own the intellectual property. We want to have a scalable database. We want it to fit with one of our other products and platform businesses. They're going to give you the list. And you're going to say, have you got any examples of targets where you've thought that's a really great example? Have you got any examples where on paper it looks good, but you would never touch it?

30:03so you're asking these questions and they're giving you the ultimate design end design as to what the acquisition would look like and then you can reverse engineer and say okay i can either acquire something that can be shaped into that i can start something that can be shaped into that i could buy three businesses that are already shaped like that but don't have scale and i'll just combine them and like i'll let's say if i buy three businesses that are combined 75 of the scale required. And then I just grow them past the, I integrate and grow them past the three. So now I'm, now I'm actually playing a very smart entrepreneurial game because essentially I've started with asking the ultimate question, which is what do you want to buy?

30:46You know, what do you want to pay 25 million for? So, so once we have our idea validated through these two different methods, I'd like to understand if I should have a co-founder, should I have one? And if so, should it be a family member, not a family member, same skills, opposite skills? So I love founding teams. You know, I'm a really big believer in co-founders and founding teams. I love complementary opposites. So in the world of VC, they almost always want two or three co-founders as opposed to one. They love seeing co-founders. And what they're looking for is a complementary set. So the classic VC pair that they're looking for is the technical co-founder and the commercial co-founder.

31:33So what they want is a commercial co-founder who's gonna go kick the door off the hinges and make sales and take it to market and the technical co-founder who's gonna build the product. If we were to think about it, there are four major bases that a business is gonna have to have. So I call it, base number one is leadership or key person of influence or attention, the ability to get attention onto the business. So that is the personal, the big personal brand, the Steve Jobs, the Richard Branson is that key person of influence. They're the face of the business. And their job is high quality attention, disruption, leadership, vision, right?

32:11So that's base number one. Base number two is what I'd call growth, and that's building a growth engine that turns leads into sales. And it's about taking that attention, filtering it into ICP segmentation, and then building campaigns that convert attention into revenue. Then we've got what I'd call product or delight, which is the ability to build something that is a delightful product that scales, that people love, and to build a team around customer service or customer success, build a team around developing a great product. And that's its own discipline. And then the final one is performance, and that would be a person whose focus is running a great business, HR, legal, M &A, financial engineering, IT, building and developing assets, owning intellectual property, all of that sort of stuff.

33:03So ultimately, those are the four main roles on the team. And it tends to be that you want to have – if you're going to have co-founders, you've got complementary that they're playing those different roles. so you might have a growth person paired up with a product person you might have a leadership uh disruptor paired up with a business builder um but when the business really starts to take shape is where you've actually got a head of all four so you've got a head of a key person of influence head of growth head of product head of performance and now you've got those kind of four roles covered and now you're ready to ready to really rock and roll is there an emotional an implication in having a co-founder as opposed to being a solo founder?

33:43Well, the business is very lonely if you are the only person doing it. And if something happens to you, then the business dies. It's done. It's cooked. So the idea that you're going to be the solo co-founder, if you've got a co-founder and something happens to you, then the co-founder is going to carry the weight for a while while we, while we, uh, fix, uh, you know, get things fixed. And by the way, stuff happens, stuff happens. Like, you know, across the course of the business journey, you, you know, one of you is going to lose a parent. One of you might get sick. Uh, one of you might have a accident and spend three months in physical recovery.

34:25Uh, there's a hundred reasons why you are going to have three to six months where you cannot work the way you wanted to work. If you are a solo founder, that's a real risk because very rapidly, you would think surely three to six months, people will stick around and do the job. You would be shocked at how quickly the management team says, well, come on guys, takes all the best team. We're off to start our own. That happens within three months with a solo founder. Would you advise anyone to have a friend as a co-founder or a family member? I've had extraordinarily positive experiences with co-founders who are best friends.

35:08And I've had a really negative experience with a co-founder who's a best friend. It can happen either way. It can be one of the best things or one of the worst things. So quite literally one of my best co-founders I've known since I was 14, Glenn, and we have been through every kind of up and down together. And our friendship has gotten stronger and stronger year on year because we're co-founders from that point of view. I've also had a co-founder who are incredibly great co-founding relationship. We've only ever known each other through a business context, Steve. So Steve and I have never holidayed together or hung out together outside of business context, but we're amazing co-founders together.

35:47And then I've got a best friend who I completely fell out with over business and I wouldn't be in the same room as him now. If he was in this room, I'd leave. So, you know, there is, you know, it can go badly. Probably the safest option, if you can do it, is the business co-founder, that there's not a friendship there because you're evaluating based upon complementary skills. But mind you, there are plenty of people who've got strong chemistry because they're great friends and it seems obvious that we would use that chemistry to build something of value. You clearly have a lot of experience in co-founder relationships.

36:31What are some do's and don'ts that you would recommend people to follow? So the ground rules that I like to set is to set expectations that we're going to have fights and that that's super healthy. And we're going to give it a word. And the word that we're going to give it is that we lock antlers. And the reason I call it locking antlers is because if you look at some deer who are on the same family, they're part of the same family, but they lock their antlers together in order to strengthen their neck and their shoulders and to prepare for fights. And they often bash heads together and they're bashing heads together to strengthen their antlers and their skull.

37:06And they're actually, they're probably brothers, but they're just smashing each other and having these fights. They're wrestling together. So one of the things that I do with all my co-founders is that I say, what I want to do is that throughout the journey, I want to have times where we have a deliberate fight. And the fight is where we say permission to lock antlers. And when we say permission to lock antlers, what that means is that I'm going to fight my side and you're going to fight your side. And then we're going to evaluate. So it's almost like sitting down for a game of chess. You're going to play your best game of chess and I'm going to play my best game of chess.

37:41And I'm going to try and beat you and you're going to try and beat me, but we're both going to be better chess players at the end of it. And then we're both going to be best friends at the end of it, even though we're deliberately playing this little game against each other. So we set a rule that this is a creative fight. This is a creative, part of the creative process is going head to head on things. Now, what I do with all of my teams, especially since I've had a big brand as a business guru, entrepreneur, legend person on these podcasts, is that I deliberately say to my team, guys, I've got blind spots.

38:16I'm an idiot. I get distracted. I'm human. I'm actually not as smart as everyone thinks I am. I need you to help cover my blind spots. So I want you to be able to say to me, Daniel, I think you've got a blind spot around that. Can we lock antlers on something? So what I'm doing is I'm creating this set of language and rules where it's okay to challenge the entrepreneur. It's okay to go head to head. No one's risking their job or their reputation or their friendship through these creative moments. I'm setting expectations that our relationship is going to be rocky, tumultuous, up and down. We're going to have fiery moments.

38:57And I'm going to say there's going to be times that due to the stress of what we do, I'm going to say something that I don't really mean. It's just the stress talking. I just want you to know that if I apologize, I really mean it, that I didn't mean to say that. And also, if we go through a stressful time, you're going to say stuff to me. And if you apologize, I know that you didn't mean it. And here's the thing. If we apologize, we drop it. It's done. It's in the past. So I set these rules. I set these guidelines. I keep in mind that as the entrepreneur, I can't be fired. That puts any senior employee in an awkward position because they have to be thinking, should I raise this or not?

39:34because this guy can't get fired. I can't complain to anyone. He's the ultimate authority. So I have to create safe conversations where people can see each other's blind spots and argue for them. Daniel, what are your blind spots? Some of my blind spots. Well, look, I'm overly optimistic. I believe everything can happen in half the time that it actually takes.

39:58I have real strengths around the big picture vision and the frameworks and the philosophies, but I'm really like the detail, the tasks, the day-to-day running of stuff, you know, I'm detached from that. I tend to over-index on things that I'm passionate about in the short term as opposed to things that make commercial sense. I like to spout my mouth off about politics and how the world should run as opposed to shutting up and just sticking to the script of what I should be saying to promote my businesses. I'd be much smarter if I shut up about some of my opinions about politics and just stuck to the business.

40:46So those are some of my blind spots. One of the things that I love the most about having these episodes with entrepreneurs is that they all seem to know themselves quite well. And I have my own theory of that. I feel like entrepreneurship is a real roller coaster. and you can have the best day of your life and the worst day of your life, both of them on the same day. And sometimes entrepreneurship, if it goes well, it can give you abundance, it can give you knowledge, it can give you experience. But I think the most important thing that entrepreneurship can give you is insight into who you are and who you want to keep becoming.

41:18Yeah. Going back into the co-founder relationships, would you ever build a business with your wife? Well, my wife runs our investments. She's amazing at property and she has this unbelievable ability to walk into a place and just instantly see what it will look like fully renovated. She can walk into a place where I walk in and go, this thing is falling apart. This is horrific. I don't want to even spend five minutes in here. And I'm wanting to leave and she's like, no, this is the one. I'm like, it stinks like piss. Like the walls are falling off. You know, this is disgusting. She's like, no, no, it's got high ceilings.

41:57We're going to put beautiful walls. We're going to have coving. She's like, look at that beautiful big entrance. And she's seeing it completely differently. She's like, that wall's going to come out. We're going to have a big kitchen island. And she immediately goes, boom. So the fact is that I know this is not my domain, but I'm a partner in that business in the sense that I'm a major investor in that and I want to help make the right investment decisions for our family. um but you know we are co-founders in that that business um we're co-founders in three little startups called our kids which which is good but then it comes to like how much stress do we want to put on the relationship yeah you know like do we want every conversation to be about property and kids and all that sort of stuff or do we want to leave some space for for for the fun and the romance um and i quite like the idea that she's not involved in the other side of my my business if someone wants to fundraise they have their idea they validated it have their co-founder they're ready but i have no money and i don't think i have access to capital what would you say to them so the the very very very best way of fundraising is pre-sales pre-sales is where you get people to commit money up front um for something that's coming so some of my first businesses, we had people paying two grand deposits.

43:22We had people paying for something that would be delivered three months out. So like we did a big campaign around pre-sales and like the best fundraising because it gives you very real validation and money at the same time. So anything you can do to get pre-sales is not only going to give you money, it'll also give you validation and it'll also give you valuation. So when you go to investors and say, we have like 150 grand worth of deposits on 350 grand worth of sales, they're going to sit there and go, okay, how much do you need? At what valuation? What deal do you want? When you sit there and go, I've got this big idea and I'm really passionate about it.

44:02They're going to go, yeah, you and everybody else. So pre-sales solves a lot of problems. So I'm a big, big believer in pre-sales. Most entrepreneurs, they freaking hate the idea of sitting down with customers and trying to pitch an actual customer deal. And, you know, I remember as a teenager, 18, 19 years old, and I got stopped in the street by this guy who said, hey, we're opening a new gym. We would love to talk to you about your fitness and give you a really great deal on the gym when it opens. What? And I remember getting invited to go to this thing that was in a shipping container. They turned a shipping container into a sales office and there was just like a row of chairs where they had these sales guys and there was probably four people and you go down and sit down and then the sales guy takes you through.

44:54This is what the gym is going to be and here's how we're going to do it. These are how many classes, all this sort of stuff. He goes, all you have to do if you want this offer is put down a hundred dollars and then that's your first three months and it's going to be 50 % off your first three months. and you're going to also get this and we're going to have a launch party and you're going to blah, blah, blah. And it was like, all you have to do is put down a hundred dollars. I remember, oh, okay. And I put down a hundred dollars and it was like six months away that the gym was actually going to open or close to six months away.

45:20But I remember thinking that that was the first time I'd seen pre-sales being done really, really well. And it was like, of course you can just pre-sell stuff. Uh, people sign up to properties that have never been built. Like there are literally people who sign up to buildings where they buy the penthouse for $5 million and they haven't even broke dirt. So people will pre-sell stuff if you give them a reason to. So pre-sales, best thing, no equity that you're giving up. You're winning a customer, you know, you're getting feedback. So by like a hundred, like number one, two, three, four, five best ways is pre-sales.

45:58And then smart money. Smart money is angel money or supplier money. Supplier money is so good. So for example, when I once set up a, when I was in my early 20s, I stupidly set up a mattress business selling mattresses. It was just a side hustle that I got it in my head that I loved this mattress and I wanted to make more and sell more and all this sort of stuff. Anyway, long story. But the supplier, the manufacturer gave us a hundred grand to go start that business because they wanted a downstream distribution partner. They they loved the fact that we were passionate young marketers. And they said, oh, we'll give you a hundred grand to do all your launch events and we'll give you all this supply.

46:39We'll give you amazing terms. So it was basically pretty easy for us to go launch that. But the best part about that was the supplier was backing us because they saw something in us that they knew the relationship would go really well. We made a hundred grand worth of sales in our first week on our first launch dinner. So they saw that in us and they were willing to fund it. So once again, it's validation that comes along with capital from someone who's smart enough to know whether it's going to work or not. So that's really cool. The angel investor who's done it all before, they're post-exit, they know the value that your startup will bring, but they can't be bothered going through that phase again.

47:21They're happy to put in, you know, 30, 40 grand and they put in a a few friends, you get a few angel investors, they come together, they each put in, you know, 20, 30, 40 grand, they help you structure the deal. They want to make some introductions, they want to give you some mentoring, some guidance. Great, fantastic. That's a great way to make money. Worst case scenario, venture capital, private equity. These guys are sharks. They know every trick in the book to fuck you. They know every trick in the book to screw you over. You can edit that. No, no, we're keeping both. We are keeping all this, let's go.

47:57These guys know how to create preferential shareholding deals with internal rates of return so that if you don't grow at 15 % year on year compound or you have a couple of bad years, boom, they own the business. There are people who have built$500 million businesses and when the exit came, the founder got almost nothing and they built a$500 million business because they'd promised the VC that they'd get to a billion dollar business. So they get nothing for making a$500 million exit. That happens in that space. You are far better off building a$20 million business with a few angels and, you know, rock and roll, like everyone's a winner.

48:36And you didn't have to do the other 480 million of equity, right, of valuation creation. So, you know, the only time to do VC and private equity is where you really, really know that this is like, it's a sure thing. You've got some power to negotiate. You've got multiple VCs, multiple private equity firms giving you their best terms. You're also, you're experienced enough to know the value of what you created. You've got the data to project forward. It's grown up. It's not a fantasy. If you go in there with starry eyes, they're going to win. You're not going to win. I think on the angel investors and the visas of private equity, those are forms that perhaps people don't need further explanation because they can get their heads around it.

49:27But when it comes to the pre-sales, is that sector agnostic? Where's an example that you would not sure how you do pre-sales? I was thinking on consumer goods and services, but perhaps in B2B services, it might be a little bit more challenging to do pre-sales. No, B2B services is easy to do pre-sales. So you go to small businesses and you say, we do AI consulting, we do automation and next available slot to get started. We're actually, the way that we work is that we get an agreement and a deposit and we set a start date. And then part of that is us recruiting and finding the right parachute team to come into your business that have the relevant experience.

50:09So once you commit, we then set a three month start date. And then in between now and the next three months, we bring together the right exclusive team to work on that project. So, yeah, like totally makes total sense to do pre-sales. How does the financial architecture work? So you were using the capital or the proceeds from the pre-sales to fund the whole thing, right? So how does it work? So you make your math in understanding how many pre-sales do I need to have in order to fund the first six months of the business? So the way it typically works is that you have an intense launch period where you do not, you have set up an agreement where you do not have to worry about delivery of the product or service because you're going through an intense launch period.

50:53So what I might do, let's say it's a B2B consulting business. We would actually say that we're launching. So we're recording this in the end of 2026. I'd say we're launching mid-2027. We're an AI automation specialist working with dental clinics or whatever it is, right? and we say we begin the rollout in mid-2027. Between now and then, we actually have capacity to sign up 24 different customers and we want to talk to potential customers to essentially find out whether they want to be part of our initial engagement launch, basically part of our initial 20 customers. So then we have an intense six-month period where we are signing up 20 customers and getting ready for launch, but we've pre-agreed with all of these people that they're paying payment number one or one third of the first 12 months at a special rate, special, you know, like a launch thing.

51:51And then we're basically saying this is the agreed start date, but between now and the next six months, we're in the launch phase. So we're just signing up to 20 clients and then we launch on that particular date. Even if they even just put down a small deposit, it completely unlocks the angel investment. Like, let's say I was doing a consulting offering and let's say it was going to be a hundred grand per customer and I'm going to sign up 20 customers and I get them to put down three grand, a 3 % deposit. But they've signed an agreement and they've put down their first three thousand pounds or dollars.

52:28I go to angel investors and say, I've just signed up a million or$2 million worth of work and I've got 3 % deposits and I've got signed contracts ready to go and I need$75 ,000 to just pay recruiters to bring those kind of people. It's job done. It's easy. It's a powerful position to be in. What are your thoughts on bootstrapping? As in like putting your own money in? Yeah, and not getting external funding and just growing organically and a little bit slower. Yeah. Well, I'm not a big fan of putting your own money in because it can be the fox watching the hen house. So you think it's a great idea.

53:03So like the whole idea that you're going to draw down money from your mortgage and put like a hundred grand, take a hundred grand out of the mortgage and put it into the startup of the business. I hate that idea because there is no checks and balances. You are basically an enthusiastic idiot who's now armed with a hundred thousand dollars and no one had to ask you a tough question. The bank just says, do you have available equity in your home? Yes. Great, here, have a hundred grand. and knock yourself out. Go, go, go, go, go have fun. But when you go to angel investors, they say, how many pre-sales have you got?

53:39How many of this have you got? Have you got this? What technology stack are you going to use? What happens if someone says this to you? What happens if this happens? What happens if this competitor adapts and undercuts you in price? So they ask you a bunch of questions. You look like an idiot and you go away and think about it and sit there with Claude all night coming up with your answers. And then you go, oh, actually, now I've got an even better idea. So I'm not a fan of taking out debt using, you know, using your own money, especially if like any element of this is untested, unproven. We want to be smashed.

54:14We want to be hit in the face with angel investors and customers. We want customers and angel investors and potential acquirers to tell us all the things that we're doing wrong so that we can adapt really fast. So that's the thing. With some businesses, you can bootstrap them. You can, but normally it's actually normally it's pre-sales. It is still pre-sales. Tends to be that bootstrapping is that you are getting someone to pay and then get delivery and pay and then get delivery. It's very rare with bootstrapping that you're able to get a warehouse full of stuff and then try and sell it. It's very interesting because I've always thought that the biggest downside of using your own capital in your business, especially in the early stages of your business, is that you're going to become more emotional about it rather than preserving your rationale and your logic.

55:02But I've never thought about the fact that you're not being stress tested by all of these investors, which then it helps you funnel, narrow, shape your idea into something that is more product market fit. Yeah, exactly. Speeding that up.

55:19Across so many episodes that we've had on this show, with amazing founders and they've built incredible things. There's one common trait or skill that was incredibly important and crucial to unlock what they've built in their entrepreneurial journeys. And that is the ability to hire the right people. What do you look for in candidates, especially in the early stages of a startup? Are you looking more for a skilled person or somebody that has a better attitude, but not so much that vast experience? Thank you. I don't know how this fits with other founders. I'm going to only tell you what I can tell you from my own personal experience.

55:59That is that I look for someone who has a heartbeat, that can breathe, that has time available. I'm looking for rebels and misfits. It's when I first arrived in London, 2006, I'd never been above the equator. I didn't know anybody here, but I was going to launch a business and I needed a team. And in Melbourne, I'd been doing Latin jive dancing and I loved Latin jive dancing. I used to go three or four times a week and it's three hours of dancing. So I used to spend a lot of time dance classes. so I remember when I first arrived one of the first things I did is found a Latin drive dancing class and I turn up and the way it works is the boys stand in a circle and then the girls rotate around and while the girls are dancing with me I'm saying I've just moved to London I'm going to launch a company I'm looking for someone who can help me with event management if you know anyone who does event management and they're looking for something to put some time into let me know I just moved to London I can totally picture you I'm pitching the girls as they're going around and by the time so even I think it was in one of the very first classes by the time the girls have come around this one girl who I first pitched she says you should talk to Joey so I go off and I talk to Joey and Joey says hey look it's a little bit awkward but I used to do a lot of like personal assistant work.

57:27I used to run events and all this sort of stuff. And she said, can I be honest with you? I said, yeah. She said, look, I'm here because my fiancee has gotten this incredible corporate job but I don't have a work visa. I'm not allowed to work. She said, would it be okay if I work for you but you don't pay me? And as a startup, I'm like, hmm, let me think about that. What's the catch? what's the catch and she said i want i'm bored she said i want to work i want to do stuff but i'm not allowed my my husband my future husband my fiance makes tons of money i don't need the money i just want to do something fun she's like can i work for free and do the launch event with you right so the the people that i've always i'll give you some clues as to who i've always found to be wonderful anyone who worked at starbucks mcdonald's or a nightclub or a restaurant Anyone who's been in hospitality, you know better than anybody.

58:22If you work in hospitality, on any given day, you're juggling a hundred different things. You're keeping a smile on your face to the customers. Some person has turned up to work drunk or hungover. Some customer has, you know, made a mess. Someone's pissed off because the food wasn't cooked exactly the way they wanted it to be. You are just, on any given moment, you're just juggling problems. Someone didn't turn up to work today. We need to cover the shift. figure out how to do that right so anyone who's been in hospitality is freaking awesome um here's who to avoid anyone who's working currently in a large corporate if they work at microsoft no if they work at google absolutely not um if they work in kpmg ernst and young those are definitely do not touch why oh because they're so used to they're spoiled they're so used to everything being done around them.

59:17They want to get paid big money. They have all these systems and processes and rules that they follow. And they expect to be put into one role that has very narrow, confined thing. Like it's just, my experience is it's too radical for them to come out of Ernst & Young and then come into a startup. So I stay away from those people until or at least, you know, in the millions. You know, I once got talking to a guy at KPMG and he goes, oh, I met an amazing small business the other day. And I said, oh, yeah, cool. He goes, yeah, they're doing 200 million of revenue, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, 200 million of revenue?

59:55In his head, that's a small business, right? An SME. He's thinking small business. It might have been 50 million of revenue, but it was something like 50 to 200 million of revenue. It's a large. And he says that as it's a small business. Because his whole world is like, how many tens of billions does this business do? Like tiny little divisions of Shell do 200 million. You know, they maybe have a bottle cap division that does 200 million, whatever it is. But so, you know, like these guys, their mindset is so different to the small business mindset. Military can be really good. Ex-military, ex-police.

1:00:34They love following orders. They're task orientated. They get shit done. They deal with stress. Interesting. all of that, but you have to give them rules. You have to say, first I need you to do this, then this, then this, then this, then this. And then they'll go off and they'll do that and you will expect them to do it in 14 days. They'll have it done in 14 hours. But the annoying thing is they'll come back and say, what do you need done now? And you go, oh, shit, I haven't thought about, I don't know what to do next, right? I thought you were going to take two weeks. But anyway, hospitality, ex-McDonald's, ex-Starbucks, ex-restaurants, ex-nightclubs.

1:01:10amazing. An ex-McDonald's employee came to this show. I'm an ex-McDonald's employee. You're the second then. And what is fascinating to see is that, yes, when I asked him, what was the experience in your career that was the most transformative and informative? And he said, working at McDonald's. It's a great school to create amazing employees. And he went to become the CEO of O2, then the CEO of Verizon. And right now he's the chairman of Six Nations Rugby. Oh, I know. Ronan. Ronan. Yeah, I know Ronan. I've been skiing with Ronan. No way. He's got a middle of the whole camera. Ronan's amazing.

1:01:49Ronan is amazing. You know, I didn't know that he was ex-McDonald's. He's ex-McDonald's, yeah. So like I'm ex-McDonald's. I freaking loved McDonald's. Three years at McDonald's. I couldn't believe that I was a 15-year-old running a multi-million dollar restaurant. There you go. You know? Exactly. Like it was epic. Exactly. So good. But the word culture means a lot to some people, but it also means very little to some others. What does culture mean to you in the business context? So culture is an underlying asset that produces a level of performance that is predictable and reliable regardless of who you bring into the company.

1:02:25So some people say, oh, our assets are people. People are our biggest asset. That's not true. People are not an asset, right? People are people. They have their own lives and they have their own hopes, dreams, ambitions. They can get sick. They can change their mind. You know, people are people. The idea of calling people an asset is awfully close to something that's very illegal called slavery, right? What is an asset is a culture. The culture is the asset. And the culture attracts the right people and the right people perform within the culture. So going back to McDonald's, outside of the McDonald's culture, I had no ability to keep my own bedroom clean.

1:03:05My bedroom was a mess. Inside the McDonald's culture, spotless, kitchen, everything running smoothly, like we ran the systems perfectly every single time. And then I take off my McDonald's hat and I take off my apron, go back home, and my entire bedroom's a mess. So why is it that I can't keep my bedroom clean, but I can run a multi-million dollar restaurant flawlessly because of the culture. So the culture was the way they train us, the values, the maxims, right? Maxims are a very important part of culture. So for example, a maxim at McDonald's is if you have time to lean, you have time to clean.

1:03:45So one of the maxims is you're never standing still, you're cleaning. If there's anything, if there's any available time, you're cleaning. Another cultural maxim is we have a system for everything. Everything has a system. I remember day one of McDonald's, they taught us how to sneeze. They actually gave us a system for sneezing. How do you sneeze at McDonald's? You feel the sneeze coming on. You move away from the food, facing preferably a wall. You take these fingers and put them at the top of your nose. You put the palms at the bottom of your nose. You sneeze into your gloves. You take the gloves off and put them at the back bin, and then you wash your hands up to your elbows.

1:04:20You've got training for that. Yeah, and then you put new gloves on, and then you go back to the shift. So you get trained on exactly how to sneeze, the exact step-by-step method for a sneeze. And the reason that they teach you that on day one is they want you to know, number one, we're working with food and health and safety standards at our highest level. And number two, we have a system for everything, including sneezing. This is fascinating.

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1:06:07So yeah, so culture is the way that people are brought in. So values, maxims, origin, mission, vision, training rhythms, routines, Monday morning team briefing, Friday afternoon debrief, three to six things list. So part of our culture is we have a way of doing Monday mornings. We have a way of doing Friday afternoons. We have something called the three to six things list. We have our – in one of my company's dent, the core values is be brave, have fun, make a dent. So we value bravery and we reward bravery. We value fun and enjoyment. We value making impact and getting things done. So Brave Fundent is the values.

1:06:47We have five core maxims that we train our team in. So maxim number one is we get what we pitch for and we're always pitching. Influence flows from output. If you want more influence, you need to create more output. Income follows assets. We need to develop assets if we want a better performing business. So we actually have these maxims that we train our team in, what they mean and how that relates to your role. And we have quarterly offsites. We have our five A's of alignment, awareness, activities, accountabilities and assets. So basically, everything's a poster. Everything's a framework. We have a way of teaching our origin story, our mission and our vision.

1:07:31And then that is the asset, which is the culture. and then you can bring people into that culture and they will perform a certain way regardless of how they perform outside of that culture. How do you reward the employees that are following the values of the business? Are those extrinsic rewards like promotions or bonuses or intrinsic rewards like further trainings? It's a layer, it's a cake. So there's obviously the base financials, then there's financial bonuses, then there's non-financial bonuses or non-financial rewards. What are those? Performance is important, but also tenure, just being around for a long time is also important.

1:08:11So we actually reward certain tenure points with non-financials. So for example, a non-financial would be adding the term senior to your title at a certain point. A non-financial at 10 years, we actually buy a beautiful luxury watch to signify your 10-year anniversary with the company. At a certain point, we have an all-hands dinner in celebration of your five year where everyone gets together and you choose the restaurant, you choose the private dining experience that you want to bring the team together around. So we have certain things that happen that are non-financially related. Because our value is a brave fun dent, we actually do three away days.

1:08:51One is a brave day, one is a fun day, and one is a dent day. So for example, a dent day is we go and work at a charity and we all serve people at a homeless kitchen, let's say we did that one year. A fun day is just getting out and doing something really great and fun. A brave day was a high ropes program course, like getting up in the treetops. So we're doing stuff in alignment with our values. And what is the key performance indicator here to understand if the culture is something that is working well and these rewards and these incentives and all of these different programs? Is it the turnover of staff?

1:09:32Is it just walking into the office space and seeing them happy? So we use external validation. So what we do is we use a framework called Investors in People. Investors in People is an established British framework where they actually have an award structure and they have an independent assessor come in. And you basically, what I will do is I will give to my general manager one of their bonuses for the year is that if they get investors in people award they get a certain amount if it's a bronze award it's slightly higher silver award even higher and gold award it's the highest bonus that they get so the person who's running the company it has a major bonus linked to getting investors in people gold so the way it works is and my company is run on investors in people investors in people gold many years in a row so we have incredible culture independently validated and awarded.

1:10:27So one of the ways that that happens is that they have this long checklist and an assessor will go and talk to the whole team and they'll say, are you clear about the origin, mission and vision? Are you clear about this? Do you have this? What happens if something bad happens? If you felt that your role was in jeopardy and you felt that you weren't safe at work or something like that, how would you handle that? So like all of those things are wrapped up into that independent assessment and then we actually get a report and we actually receive an award based upon the quality of our culture. So what I do is I like to say, look, it's too easy for us to say that we have an amazing culture.

1:11:06Let's give it over to the number one organization in the country to assess our culture and they will tell us whether we are standard bronze, silver, or gold, or below standard. And that's how we assess our culture, whether we're doing it right, we'll do our best job, and then we'll have an independent assessment, and then we win an award. So my companies have had multiple gold investors in people awards year after year after year after year. And that means that we're in the top, I think, two and a half percent or three, maybe it's 3 % of companies in the country that are assessed. So out of 30 companies that they see were the best.

1:11:43As an entrepreneur, as a founder, as the leader of this business, how important is this in your agenda? So there are certain things I should set. I should set the origin, mission, and vision. I should set the values. I should set the

1:12:00maxims. And then once I've done that, that's the unique DNA. And then 97 % of a great company is the exact same for every company. There's just a ton of stuff that is just best practice. So then I just want to bring in a general manager who understands best practice. And there's only a small number of decisions that need to be made. How do we want to run our Monday morning meet? What are the rhythm of, like, what are we doing for away days? What are we doing for bonuses? What ratio of base plus performance bonuses do we want to pay? How So like small decisions, small changes, but most 95 % of it is just best practice.

1:12:42So why reinvent the wheel? So do you know that the difference between a human and a chimpanzee is three or 4%, right? So three or 4 % is important, but 95 % of the DNA of a chimpanzee and the DNA of a human is exactly the same. So what I assume is I bring in a general manager. my job is to do a really good job of the three or four percent that makes us different and their job is to apply 95 best practice and to win awards for it and then the beauty for me as the entrepreneur is once i've told them that your your bonus is linked to winning a gold award for all of these best practices i can just go hands off at that point because it's all documented their job is to interpret those documents and apply them in our company and i don't have to do anything.

1:13:34Yeah, we have a system that is automated and there's a checks and balances. Yeah, super simple. I want to talk about delegation. As a business scales and grows, a founder, an entrepreneur needs to start delegating naturally. But some founders have a very hard time in delegating because they feel like they're the best ones at whatever they're doing. How should an entrepreneur delegate in a healthy and sustainable way? And when is the right moment to start doing it? what we want is we want to have a feeling of control and we want to know that if something's going wrong, that it doesn't go wrong for a long period of time without me knowing about it.

1:14:12And actually what we're trying to attempt to do is control a situation and hold high standards. If you're terrible at running a business, the only way for you to maintain high standards and to have control is through being a micromanaging asshole. And that's your method. But if you are better at running a business, you would have a dashboard that's automated and you'd be able to glance at the dashboard and know whether things are working or not working. You would have checks and balances. You would have ways of keeping on top of things. You'd have little hidden trap doors throughout your business where if those trap doors go off, you know something's not right.

1:14:51So, for example, mystery shoppers, people on the database who are fake email addresses that if that email address gets emailed, then someone's hacked the database. So there are ways to just simply set up systems that you have total control and you know immediately if something's going wrong. But then as soon as that happens, you can disappear, go elsewhere. and it's kind of like you're achieving the same thing but at a different scale. So you could say that there's a thief who steals handbags and that's one way of being a thief or there's someone who works in big investment banks and they steal valuations of entire companies and that's a very high-level thief, right?

1:15:35So you can play at any level you want, right? But the same as entrepreneur, you can be a micromanaging asshole and then you're just not very good or you can be a micromanaging asshole from a distance and no one knows you're a micromanaging asshole because you've got dashboards and you've got triggers. And that just means you're much better at what you do. That's a ridiculous example, but you get the idea.

1:16:05Marketing was traditionally seen as a business unit in the form of a support function. But as right now we live in a world that is more competitive than ever from a supplier's perspective, marketing has become a critical function that will differentiate you from the rest of your competitors. What are the most important do's and don'ts that founders should adhere to? So there's a pendulum that swings where the value is either in the supply or the demand generation. Interesting. So 150 years ago, it was so difficult to manufacture anything that if you could manufacture a thing, you didn't need marketing.

1:16:47You would sell it before you'd even made it. So, for example, if you were good at manufacturing mugs, someone's ready to buy the mugs as soon as you could. If you look all around the UK, we were once upon a time, we were the big manufacturing hub for the world. We couldn't sell stuff fast enough. You didn't need marketing. If you could make beautiful glassware, it's selling. If you could make scissors, people all over the world need scissors and you can't get scissors. So the world had lots of unmet needs and very, very under-resourced ability to produce things to meet those needs at scale. So you didn't really need marketing.

1:17:29Today we have an abundance of supply. We can manufacture anything at scale. if you go online and look at mugs, glassware, scissors on Amazon, 50 different supplies, every different way you could want them, colors, ranges, sizes, shapes, anything you want, right? So the supply side is not the hard thing. The hard thing is getting people to pay attention, getting people to want something. So you're either manufacturing the supply of something, or you're manufacturing the desire for the thing. So what we need to do as entrepreneurs is ask ourselves the question, in my industry, is it hard to be good at supply or is it hard to get people to want something?

1:18:08For 90 % of industries right now, it's hard to get people to want something. It's not hard to supply it. The money will always move to the hard problem. Whoever's better at the hard problem will win the profit. So we have to treat either of those things like a manufacturing problem. So marketing is a manufacturing problem, but what you're manufacturing is desire. So we think about it like a conveyor belt and we say, first, people have to become aware and that's the first step. They have to notice us that we even exist. Then they have to understand and have understanding of who we are and what we do.

1:18:42Then they actually have to prefer us to anything else they could possibly get. So we've got to actually almost think about what are the 10 steps from becoming completely unaware of who we are and what we do to going, that's my favorite. That's what I want. And we've got to manufacture content and journeys and experiences that warm people up to having that level of preference above all others. And ultimately, if we do it correctly, we end up with pricing power, which is people don't even really care about price. They're just happy for this particular brand. So it's like, why can Rolex sell a watch for 10 ,000 and a perfect copy can be 250 because they have pricing power, right?

1:19:24People want the Rolex experience and they've been able to manufacture a journey for you to want the thing. Where does personal branding fit in here as an entrepreneur? So for those who don't know what personal branding is, can you describe it in simple terms? Personal branding in a business context is where people get to know, like, and trust the individual behind the business. And therefore that trust and that awareness is passed on to the business. So if I like Tim Cook and I trust Tim Cook makes great decisions, then I'm more likely to buy from Apple. Or if I like Gordon Ramsay and I've seen Gordon Ramsay, then I go, oh, I'm more likely to buy from a Gordon Ramsay restaurant.

1:20:07So it's that I see the individual and I like the individual's choices and the way that they communicate and what I know about them. And therefore, I'm more likely to buy from that business. In the world that we live in right now, all the attention is on social media. So we spend four to six hours a day on social media scrolling. Every single day, humans watch 500 billion short form videos. That's about 100 per person. If you don't watch a lot of short form videos, someone watches 200 on your behalf. So 100 short form videos each takes about an hour. That's just one hour of our attention per day.

1:20:46And then scrolling through our social networks, that's another hour or so. Watching YouTube videos, that's another hour or so. So, huge amounts of social media is taking up huge amounts of our time. And the one thing that we know about social media is that business brands massively underperform personal brands. A personal brand gets 20 times more engagement than a business brand. So, we know that if we were to start two accounts on the same day. One is called Stephen Bartlett and one is called Diary of a CEO, that the Stephen Bartlett will massively outperform Diary of a CEO. Now, he actually did this on LinkedIn.

1:21:25So he started Diary of a CEO on YouTube, but then he went on to LinkedIn and pretty much around the same time, he had his LinkedIn posts on Stephen Bartlett and he had the same posts on Diary of a CEO. And currently, Diary of a CEO on LinkedIn has 45 ,000 followers. Stephen Bartlett has three and a half million followers. So it's not even comparable. People want the person. Richard Branson has 12 million followers. Virgin only has 400 ,000 followers. So people are just so much more interested in the founder, the person, right? Because our human brain is built for voices and expressions and feeling the passion, and it doesn't get that from a business brand.

1:22:08So ultimately, it's a very simple equation. If you want 20 times more attention, you use your personal brand. If I want to start my personal brand today, where should I begin? The first thing that you want to do is start with what we call the pitch. The pitch is, what's your core message? What do you want to actually say to the world? So my belief is that we get what we pitch for. Entrepreneurship is the journey of a thousand pitches, a thousand average pitches, and you end up with a below average business, a thousand great pitches and you end up with a very great business with great people. So this first idea is that you must craft a pitch.

1:22:43You need to essentially say, what do I want to say to people? Do you remember when Alex Homozi burst onto the scenes and he said, I'm Alex Homozi. I sold my last business for$46.2 million. I'm passionate about business and I have nothing to sell you. So he burst onto the scene with this pitch and every video started that way. and everyone went, okay, I know who he is. I know who he's for. I know why I should trust him. Like he's given me all that core information in under 20 seconds. So that's a really super powerful way to start. Like what do you want to be pitching? Because you're going to pitch it a thousand times.

1:23:22And is quality more important than quantity? Because there's been a debate when it comes to this question. There's a school of thought that says that founders should be posting multiple times on a daily basis across different platforms. and then there's another school of thought that says that quality is more important. So instead of doing it multiple times a week, do it three times a week or perhaps less. I think Dolly Parton wrote three and a half thousand, four thousand, five thousand songs. I don't know where the number ended up. She ended up with about 12 hits. And on any given day, she didn't know which ones were going to be the hits.

1:23:53In fact, some of the hits became hits 10, 20 years after she wrote them. I Will Always Love You, which became a massive hit with Whitney Houston, one of her most profitable pieces of intellectual property. It was the third song she'd written on a Tuesday. She sung it for 10 years. Elvis Presley was going to record it, pulled out at the last minute. It got shelved. 10 or 15 years later, Whitney Houston records it, nails it, and it earns her$10 million a year for 10 years. It's a numbers game. Right? So, yes, you want quality. Where does quality come from? Quantity. Quality comes out of quantity.

1:24:28Interesting. How many albums has Taylor Swift done? I don't know. She's done more albums than she's had hits, but every album on average has 0.8 of a hit on it. And if she keeps putting out albums, on average, every time she puts out two albums, she gets one hit. So, you know, the idea is that you don't get penalized for trying on social media. The good news is if you create a bad piece of content, no one sees it. That's the nature of it. That's how you know it's bad because no one saw it. So who gives a shit? Imagine this. Imagine that there's this amazing nightclub and if you go up to the bouncer, the bouncer looks at your outfit and says you can come in or you've got to stay out.

1:25:15But the bouncer completely forgets every single time you go up there. So you want to get into the nightclub. So you walk up and you're dressed in head to toe in a velvet suit. The bouncer says, no, can't come in. You come back in a black suit. Okay, come in. come back in a white suit. No, you can't come in. You can try as many times as you want in as many different ways as you want. And the bouncer forgets every single time and just simply says whether you can come in or not. You can try as many different attempts as you like. That's the algorithm. The algorithm is basically saying, give me a piece of content.

1:25:48No, terrible. No, terrible. Okay, yeah, I'll show that to 1000 people. Okay, I'll show that to 10 ,000 people. No, that's terrible. right but but you you have a relationship with the algorithm if the algorithm doesn't like what you're posting then no one saw it i love the bouncer analogy next time i go to a nightclub you're the algorithm exactly talking about algorithms um i want to shift the conversation to ai where are the biggest opportunities in that space now for you okay every everything everything is a big opportunity with ai everything because businesses succeed because they're better faster, cheaper, with more emotional benefits than their competitors.

1:26:28So when something comes along like AI, every single business from dog walking to Microsoft is being able to be made better, faster, cheaper, with more emotional benefits because of AI. I could take any business on the planet right now and say, how do we make this better, faster, cheaper, with more emotional benefits? And there are answers to every single one of those questions, better, faster, cheaper, more emotional benefits. And AI can help you with every single one of those things. So every single business, everything is a massive opportunity. Everything's up for grabs. Everything's being disrupted.

1:27:03You could go head to head with McKinsey. You could go head to head with Microsoft on one of their divisions. You go head to head with anyone and anything that you want to go head to head with because of AI. You can get your foot in the door with any business because of AI. So it's almost like a complete reset on the whole economy where essentially the cookie jars have been put up on the high shelf and they're out of reach and they're full of cookies and AI just breaks the shelf and they smash down and anyone can go grab those cookies now. Beautiful analogy too. I'm very happy that you have such a positive view towards AI because there's another school of thought.

1:27:44There's other people that they're very scared about how AI is going to change the way we live, particularly the workforce because they're afraid of losing their jobs. What would you say to these people? When the school system trained you to be like an agent, then AI is terrifying because AI works for free or almost for free 24 hours a day and has absolutely no demands outside of work. It just wants to, all it will do is work cheaply. So of course that's terrifying if you're a school system worker because you were trained to be an agent for a boss. but when you're an entrepreneur AI is awesome because it's just leverage it's just a superpower so the problem that we have is that the school system prepared us for a world of standardized parts and standardized labor and we became standardized parts we became standardized labor if we followed the plan of the school system and now we've been put in competition with something that does it much better than we do it there's this alternative system called the entrepreneurial world.

1:28:46And the entrepreneurial world is, I'm not standard labor. I'm thinking about problems and how to solve them. I'm thinking about outcomes and how to deliver them. I'm thinking about obstacles and how to get around them. AI now helps me to do all of those things. So I'm just a better, I'm a better version of myself. I'm a better creator. I'm better at doing things. I'm more dynamic. You know, so we have to relearn the skill that every five-year-old has naturally. Everyone was naturally a disruptor, a creator, an attention seeker. So we have to relearn those skills and then say, I want to get to the point where AI feels like a tool at my disposal, not a competitor to what I do.

1:29:29Interesting. Large corporations, entrepreneurs running larger businesses can buy expensive AI powered softwares and hire great people with AI skills to enhance their business, automate it, reduce costs. But how can smaller business owners leverage AI into their advantage? Well, I can tell you the big advantage is being small because when you talk to a large organization, it takes them three to six months to make a decision. They actually can't get a lot of great talent because a lot of great talent in AI is just like it's too slow working around here. It's just too like there's too much happening and you guys are too slow.

1:30:12You're talking about something that's a year old. World's moved on. you're just getting your head around prompts and like how you might use a prompting you know framework and it's like we're not even in that like that's a year ago so the the most talented people they don't want to work in large corporations they want to work in dynamic smaller businesses they're starting small businesses and all that sort of stuff or they're working with small dynamic teams the the power of ai is that four people can go and disrupt a company that's got 400 people. That's, that's, if I talk to big companies, that's what terrifies them.

1:30:47Because if they're sitting there saying, oh, we have 600 financial planners and wealth managers, and now four people who have come up with a financial planning wealth management tool that interviews you and spits out like a report that used to take six weeks to put together and it just produces it in six minutes. They're sitting there going, oh, what do we do in order to, you know, like, and they're in corporate, they're just following rules and following orders and they need a top-down approach and they need the boss to understand what's happening. That might take three months. And then they need a committee to form.

1:31:20That takes three months. You know, these guys, they're so slow. They're so fat and lazy and slow. And also they have so much momentum that they don't even realize that their house is on fire. So like, you know, I'm not, I don't ever be worried about what corporates are going to do. Corporates and government are just you know they're going to get smashed by this stuff you want to be four people with a passion and you have really low overheads your superpower is small team low overheads and ability to act fast would you advise early stage entrepreneurs to to buy ai courses um i'm not against the idea i'm not again if you feel drawn to an ai course like if there's like for example anthropic is putting out AI courses all the time.

1:32:09And, you know, it's crazy if you like don't sit down and have a little look at what they're putting out there. You don't have to invest huge amounts of money into these things. Like some of the world's best labs like ChatGPT and Microsoft and Google and all of that start there. I think most of those are free or very, very affordable. And also like the best way to learn AI is to have a discussion with Claude or ChatGPT about how you could use it better, like be in conversation with AI about how to use it better. Ask it the question, do you think I'm, rate me on a scale of one to 10 about how well I use AI?

1:32:46How well do I construct my prompts? What kind of user am I currently? How could I go to the next level of being a better user of AI? What videos should I be watching on YouTube to achieve that? What resources are freely available to me? So just talking with chat and with, with Claude and Chachupiti is a really great place to start. But yeah, look, if you're leaning into AI and trying to understand this new tool, I mean, imagine that it's the year 1900. Everything's getting electrified and you're sitting there going, should I learn anything about electricity? It's like, well, the whole economy is going to run on electricity pretty soon.

1:33:24It's like, oh, I'm pretty good with my candles. So, okay, if you want, it's like, you know, have a think about how electricity might change your industry or what you might do to use electricity within your industry. What about this car thing, automotive thing? You know, I'm pretty good with my horses. I like my horses. Yeah, okay, but horses are probably going away soon. What about steel? Do you think steel is going to play a much of a role? Yeah, pretty much everything is going to be built with steel. Is it worth paying any attention to it? I kind of like my thatched roof and my one-story little…

1:33:57You're good with analogies and metaphors. Let's talk about passive income. For those who aren't familiar with the term, what is passive income? Passive income is a term that is a juvenile way of looking at how wealthy people earn money. And it's like a child trying to understand how parents are making money or something like that. And it's like you're just so detached from the reality that you give it this word that means nothing, which is passive income. So like if you're broke and you look at a rich person, you go, oh, like all this money just hits them and it all just magically hits their bank account and it's like they're a lizard and the lizard just sits on the rock and the flies just fly into its mouth.

1:34:41And like all the lizard has to do is open its mouth, put its tongue out and the flies will just fly in and it doesn't have to hunt anymore. It just has passive flies, right? It's like I can understand that that's how it looks but that is just a completely juvenile way of understanding how wealth works. And therefore, it leads you on a journey towards foolishness because even just that word passive income is like saying passive fitness. Imagine I looked at an athlete and I said, oh, this guy can just eat a cake and he still has a six-pack and all the girls just come up and throw themselves at him.

1:35:23He's got passive girlfriends, right? And it's like, that's not what's happening, right? The guy's an athlete. The reason it looks like that is because he's a freaking athlete. So the goal is not passive income. The goal is asset income. And asset income is that you own and control a number of assets. They're high quality assets. They're curated assets that are best in your hands, not someone else's hands. That you maintain those assets. You develop those assets. You improve upon those assets. You work damn hard to either buy, finance, acquire or innovate those assets and that you are exceptionally good at asset management and asset development and asset innovation and that you operate at a higher paradigm of thought than most people in your industry which allows you to see where these assets are going and how to improve the value of those assets.

1:36:16and the idea that you are passive is a low-level way of thinking but in order to have asset income you need high frequency thinking you got you got to have your head above everybody else your mindset has to be 30 ,000 feet when everyone else is at 5 ,000 feet in order to achieve what looks like passive income what do you mean by that is it having big aspirations or working incredibly hard Well, if we take a, let's say there's a landlord or a property owner in London and they are on top of a extremely valuable property portfolio. They have a debt to equity ratio of maybe 50 or 60 % debt. They own 40 % of the portfolio outright, maybe 50 % of the portfolio outright.

1:37:03They earn really healthy rents that more than cover the costs of running the portfolio and pay dividends out and all of that sort of stuff. Do you think that person has a passive attitude towards London real estate? Or do you think they totally understand London real estate at a much deeper level than everybody else? Yeah, the latter. The latter, right? So they're not passive. They're fucking awesome at what they do. That's the truth. And the truth is that they are not some sort of like passive recipient. They are a high-frequency thinker who understands leverage and trends and can spot things everybody else is missing.

1:37:40they're ahead of the game right and and because of that you know like my wife when she walks into a property she goes she says you can't see it but i can see it and that's why she makes so much money in property because i walk in and go this is a disaster she goes no this is the one i've been looking for so that's not that if your pursuit is passive then you will always fail because passive people are losers interesting we all have different relationships with money because unfortunately didn't teach us how to manage it. That's cool. Yeah. How much of our income should we spend on things like expenses, savings, investments?

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1:39:43It's different at different ages in life.

1:39:48There's a phase in life where you're only going to be in your 20s once and you've got loads of time to recover from mistakes. so why not take more risks why not um you know jump on a plane attend a conference blow your mind come back feel inspired you've got nothing left in the bank but your full tank of energy nothing wrong with that that's great why not um but then you get age 45 you've only got 15 years until you're 60 and at age 60, you don't have the mental agility that you once did. You don't have the energy jumping out of bed and you've got to be a little bit more cautious. And you might sit there and say, you know what, I'm in my peak earning years.

1:40:39Let me put 50 % away into investments because I can. And actually I'm 20 years out from retirement. So I'm just going to like front load my investments right now because that after 20 years, they allow me to retire. So the decisions you would make at 45 should be very different to the decisions you'd make at 25. By 45, you should be in pretty ridiculously high. Statistically, you're in your high earning years from 45 to 55. And statistically, in your 20s and 30s, you're in your relationship forming years, you're in your learning years, you're figuring yourself out, you're figuring out your networks.

1:41:18So anything you can do to invest into your networks, your knowledge, your relationships. You know, like if you meet the right partner who you want to spend the rest of your life with and the right thing to do is to spend five grand on an amazing holiday together where you get into alignment around your future, that's a great investment.

1:41:44What is your relationship with money? It's just a tool. It's just energy. It's a way of, it's just a, it's a, honestly, it's almost meaningless in the sense that, I mean, the US government's just printed another 10 trillion in the last year or two. Like, it's so pointless and meaningless now. UK government is just like, you know, so all it is, is it's just, it is just a, I love how Elon Musk says it's a database. It's just a database entry. So it's like, it's, it's, it's just keeping track of value, exchange, all of those sorts of things. The more you can treat it as a, is it like electricity?

1:42:32Like what's, what's your relationship like with electricity? It's like, I don't think a lot about it. I think about what electricity might do. Like I think about, I want to watch this show on Netflix and I need some electricity for that. I think about I want to have a warm house in winter, so there's got to be some electricity for that. But the more that you pursue electricity, like that's a weird kind of person. So you want to be thinking in terms of, you know, we only get one shot at being alive as far as we know. You want to pursue higher levels of consciousness. You want to pursue creativity.

1:43:04You want to pursue the ability to form meaningful relationships and do meaningful work. You want to pursue solving problems for people at scale. And then the money shows up pretty well. You want to pursue financial understanding. You want to understand the pipelines and the engineering behind it. You want to understand how to wield the force. But, I mean, it's just as a younger guy, I wanted to pursue money. And then it's like a Labrador. If you chase a Labrador, it runs. if you go for a walk through a forest because you're inspired to go for a walk through the forest labrador will follow you when is enough enough for you great question um so i think my definition of success personally is um would be that i am moving towards a compelling future at a speed that's enjoyable with people that I love.

1:44:08So the ingredients there is that I have to feel that the future that I'm moving towards is great and that I'm moving towards it and that I'm very clear about this compelling future, what I'm looking for. So I'm moving towards a compelling future at a speed that's enjoyable because you can go too fast or too slow. So if you go too fast, you burn out, you feel exhausted, you feel like you're not enjoying the ride. If you go too slow, it just feels like I'm never going to get there. So you've got to figure out what is the correct speed. And it changes at any given time. You can go through a six-month intense, fast, kick the door off the hinges, but you know that that's not a sustainable speed.

1:44:46You're going to have to dial it back a little bit and take some downtime. And you feel when it's not enjoyable anymore. You actually say, I've been doing this too fast for too long. I need to take a little bit more of a pace because it doesn't feel enjoyable anymore. So I'm moving towards a compelling future at a speed that's enjoyable with people that I love. I love working with the people I work with. I'm surrounded by great friends and family. So those tend to be my ingredients. Now you might say, oh, what about health? Well, if you're doing it at the cost of your health, well then that's not a compelling future.

1:45:21You're not going to feel good about that future because you know your health's going to break down. So that's not going to work if you do it at the expense of relationships. Well, that's not compelling to end up, you know, that you've done this success, but no one's there to celebrate with you. So you've got to take into consideration, is this producing a, am I feeling that I'm moving towards a compelling future at the speed that's enjoyable with the people that I love? And that tends to be a good definition. and then when is enough enough I guess it's like it's a self-referencing thing that it's like just comes back to am I moving towards a compelling future

1:46:03now if you are just all about the money and like you're missing out on life's great moments because you're chasing crazy amounts of money then this is not producing a compelling future so you've got you've got enough of that you need to balance some of the other elements that would move you towards a compelling future is that making sense yeah according to your definition of success would you consider yourself successful in most things but i think i am not great with my health and fitness i hadn't had an injury this year and it really set me back um so i had multiple surgeries on my hand and wrist um and just recovering from that, like I just took a big setback.

1:46:47I just started making some big gains with fitness and then I injured myself and ended up in hospital and surgery and all this sort of stuff. And so that's not in alignment at the moment. But most things, I'm actually pretty good at it because I'm nowhere near the richest guy that I know, but I'm happier than most of the richest guys that I know. um you know i know some people who are way more successful in business but i'm enjoying the journey way more than they are um so i'm moving at a speed that's enjoyable uh and i'm moving towards a very compelling future i feel really drawn to to my future and i'm excited by all the things to come so yeah by my definition i'm pretty good other than the health and fitness thing at the moment.

1:47:35Daniel, what made you the toughest and darkest period in your life? Well, look at you going straight for, not straight for the jugular, but you waited till this moment. Let me think. It was very, very hard having a breakdown of one of my best friendships over business. That was really hard. And at that particular time, I had a three-month-old or six-month-old baby who wasn't sleeping. So I wasn't sleeping. I wasn't happy. My wife wasn't happy because of just the baby had a stomach issue. And at that particular low point was the point where my very good friend chose to break up the business relationship and leverage that moment to extract as much cash out of the business as possible for the next five years.

1:48:22And basically, I had to sign a document that would essentially put me under enormous financial pressure at a time where I I felt like I couldn't take any more pressure. It would put me under enormous financial pressure for 60 months, 60 payments monthly. And it was just like, I'm going to break. This is just too much. This is too hard. It's amazing when you don't get sleep, just how you can't handle things that you could handle if you'd been sleeping, but just not sleeping and all of that sort of stuff. So that was a particularly dark time. And then just when the final payment happened and I made that last 60th payment, was February 2020.

1:49:02And then when the world went into lockdown and everything that I'd just paid off over the last five years, we had to completely burn it to the ground and reinvent the business from the ground up. We had to take out loans and we had to rebuild the business because we would no longer, we had to become an online business and we had to reorganize the whole team. So everything I'd just paid off for five years was no longer relevant and we had to start from scratch. so that was particularly difficult and then probably one of the darkest moments was this year was probably one of the darkest moments in my life my father had a stroke and profoundly impacted by his stroke so he went from being a great man succeeding in all areas of his life to massive brain injury.

1:49:58Four or five months in hospital and me in the hospital with him going through recovery and seeing him go from superstar to can't speak, can't walk, can't remember anything in an instant. And at that particular moment, one of my senior members of my team decided to steal a lot of money out of the bank account and suddenly move it straight over to Malaysia and the police in this country, they take six months to even think about looking at something. So basically, so here I am in hospital with my dad and at that lowest point, opportunistic, take money and run. You know, it's kind of one of those, wow, okay, I thought I had everything sorted But this particular issue, I didn't have it locked up as well as I thought.

1:50:54And it was a moment where I would have loved to have had that moment of weakness and vulnerability to just get through that moment. But at a moment of weakness and vulnerability, someone exploited it. That was pretty low to see that human nature can actually operate at that level and to see that up close that way. What have you learned from these two experiences? In the first experience, it's the changing nature of friendships after a marriage. The nature of relationships change when there's a marriage or a new child. Around those times you have to either re-establish the relationship and re-commit to the relationship, but just to assume that the relationship goes unchanged after a wedding or a child is naive.

1:51:51So anyone that you're close with in your life, if they have a child or get married, you really either want to re-establish the relationship, re-double down on the relationship, come up with new ideas and terms of that relationship, but just to assume that it won't change is silly and naive. So that's one lesson. um the lesson with the finances is uh almost all banks have really great um checks and balances for a reason and don't turn them off like for me personally i'd turned off some of those uh those i'd actually turned off some of those things so that i could relax uh and just focus on my dad and actually those checks and balances were there for a reason and by switching those off I exposed myself to fraud.

1:52:46So people are good people but don't tempt them because there are people who you don't know what situation they grew up in their childhood which makes them react to the ability to take something is just too tempting. Don't put people in positions where they are tempted for their benefit because, look, she's probably going to get in serious trouble one way or another. Don't put people into situations where for your detriment or their detriment they're overly tempted. The checks and balances are there for a reason. and then the big lesson with with my dad is you know you don't know what life's going to throw you you really don't we assumed he would have had 20 plus years worth of perfect health he was in such great health so you know you really embrace embrace the moments like like don't take it all for granted.

1:53:50Nothing's guaranteed. What's the most important thing for you in your life? Being a dad. Why? I just feel so much joy watching little people grow up with my wife, obviously, being parents. But just the fact that where do they come from? How does this happen? It's kind of, it's still, it still blows my mind that you can have kids, that you can actually just like produce other humans and that they have their own consciousness and they have their own decisions and they have opinions. They send you a text sometimes. It's wild. You know, they watch movies and want to talk about it. But, you know, and it's just, it just blows my mind that you can create people, you know, and then you get to raise them and grow them and see what they do and be, you get to play this kind of weird role of being someone's parent.

1:54:59Yeah. Once your kids grow older, what would you want them to understand about yourself beyond the entrepreneurial figure that the public knows? I don't want them to spend much time thinking about me at all. I want them to focus on their own life and making a great life for themselves. If they were sitting around thinking about me too much, I've done something seriously wrong because they should be looking downstream. They should be thinking about forming a relationship, having their own successes. I would really hate if they felt that they had to live up to some expectation or that they had to walk in my shoes or that they had to live up to this public image or any of those kind of things.

1:55:42That would suck. That would be really suck. I just hope they fully embrace the experience of living and that they spend no time thinking about me whatsoever. They just get on with their own life. I should be thinking about them and making sure that I'm helping them wherever I can, but they should spend no time thinking about me. Daniel, I'm going to ask you our last question, which has become our signature question in Thriving Minds because it is the only question that we ask every single guest regardless of what they do for a living. If you had to compress all your knowledge into one essential piece of advice that we all must implement in our daily lives, what would it be?

1:56:22The first thing that comes to mind is the idea that we speak our lives into existence. so we we end up with the life that we have conversations about so a way of saying this is that we get what we pitch for the power of our words and our conversations it's interesting that in most religious faiths it starts with the god force speaking reality into existence so god literally says, I'm creating this and creates with words. And it's across all cultures. Like a lot of cultures have this idea that you speak reality into existence or that the God force communicates through speaking about reality and then reality is created from words.

1:57:16And I've found that to be true in my life, that the things that I have powerful conversations about are the things that carry me forward into a compelling future. And it works in reverse as well. The things that I complain about and bitch about and moan about get worse. When I overly obsess about a particular problem, that problem expands. When I get excited about a solution and start talking about a solution, start having great conversations about the solution, the solution expands. When I talk like a victim, I become a victim. When I talk like a champion, I become a champion. When I talk in a loving way, love is created.

1:57:54When I talk in a spiteful or resentful way, resentment and spite is created. So I guess this idea that we speak our lives into existence is a worthy thing to ponder. Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you. I've deeply and thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. Likewise. Thanks. I think you have a gift, a talent, a god-given talent to simplify things into into ways that people can digest and understand and then implement into their everyday lives i think entrepreneurship is something that can do so much good for so many people but a lot of people don't start because they don't understand it and i truly believe that in life and this includes in entrepreneurship too going from zero to one tends to be harder than 1 to 100.

1:58:45And we all need a little push in going from that 0 to 1. So I thank you on behalf of everyone that you are that 0 to 1 for them. Amazing. Thank you. Thanks for giving me the space to do that. Appreciate it. Thank you for coming.

1:59:28We'll see you next time. Right now, qualified shippers get a real dedicated person to get you set up and switched over for free. So when peak season hits, you're ready to go. Switch today at ShipStation.com code audio.