The Money Making Expert: The Exact Formula For Turning $100 into $100k Per Month! - Daniel Priestley

I've started seven businesses that have gone zero to a million in their first 12 months, three businesses that went north of 10 million, but here's a crazy thing, anyone can do this and I'm going to take you step-by-step through the best ways to start making that life-changing amount of money. Daniel Priestley. Money and business expert. That's helped thousands of people start, scale, and grow their own multi-million pound businesses from scratch. These are the best ways to start a business. We start with an idea, but we need to sharpen our ideas in the market, not in our minds. I see so many people they raise money, book an office, buy computers, but after all of that no one's interested in their idea. So, we have to conduct tests where we fail fast and fail cheap. If for example, waiting list is one of the fastest ways to test an idea. And this is what really smart entrepreneurs do. Like Elon Musk launched a waiting list for the Model 3, he launched a waiting list for the Cybertruck, validating the idea. In fact, Rolex had a massive breakthrough when they stopped selling Rolexes and they started selling the waiting list. But if it's crickets, okay, fair enough, let's have another idea. But what if someone steals my idea? Ideas aren't worth anything. The value is for the person who does it. What are the fundamentals of being an exceptional salesperson pitcher? First, you will have to you said business is a team sport. Is there anything you found that is consistent across all of the best people you partnered with? So, here's what I'm looking for. And there's a lot more to go through, but one of the other strategies for building a business is And that should get you into the six figures of revenue just by doing that. It's shocking because it's so simple. Let's talk about money. Let's talk about it. If someone's out there and they've got 100 pounds or 1,000 pounds worth of disposable income, what should I be thinking about to make myself financially free? The truth is that there's incredible wealth to be created and one of the biggest opportunities in the world at the moment is It's absolutely crazy to me that so many of you have decided to watch our show um and so many of you have decided to subscribe to our show. We now have 5 million subscribers on YouTube, which is a number that I just can't comprehend and it's a dream that I absolutely never could have had. We started The Diary of a CEO just over 3 years ago now and in my wildest expectations, we might have had 100,000 subscribers by now. So, you can imagine how shocked I am that so many of you have chosen to tune into these conversations every week um and spend some time with us. So, thank you. And I made a deal with you. I made a deal that if you subscribe to this show, that we would continue to raise the bar and in 2024, we're going to raise the bar like never before. I've been working for the last 9 months on a surprise for all of you that have subscribed to this show and I'm very excited to deliver that for you. The production's going to change. We're going to go even further with our guests and we're going to tell even more global stories. So, as always, if you appreciate what we're doing here, the simple, free favor I'll ask from you is to hit the subscribe button. Let's get on with the episode. Daniel, if someone has just clicked on this podcast, can you tell me the reason why they should stay around and listen in what you think they're going to get from this conversation? I think we're living through the most incredible time in history. Never before have people had the opportunity to build something that is a global business full of fun, freedom, and flexibility, full of passion and purpose. And today that is accessible to almost anyone who'd be listening to this podcast. The baby boomers, they got access to affordable housing. We get access to affordable global small businesses. Now, the entrepreneurial journey is scary to a lot of people, but if you conduct the right experiments, have the right mindset, follow the right process, it's really predictable and safe for people to get involved in entrepreneurship. And I think anyone who's listening to this is going to see that it's a lot more process-driven than they think, that we can go step-by-step to build a business that you absolutely love. On the other end of this conversation, in an hour's time or 2 hours time or, you know, whenever this podcast finishes, what are they going to have that they didn't have before this conversation? We're going to talk about the entrepreneurial journey as a set of steps, predictable steps, and they're going to be able to have a map of how do you move through that entrepreneurial journey? Like, what do you do first? What do you do next? How do you go to the next level and scale up and who do you contact? Uh and it's based upon literally coming across thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs at each stage of the journey. So, ideally what I want people to walk away with is just that clarity around how this entrepreneur thing works. And who are you? What's your experience? So, my background is over 20 years of entrepreneurship. I started my first company when I was 21 years old. I did 2 years working for a mentor from 19 to 21. Uh we built a business from scratch to millions of revenue. I then left that mentor. I went out on my own, started my own first small business. Uh it grew very rapidly, went from zero to a million in the first year and then 10 million in year three. I started uh seven businesses since that have gone zero to a million in their first 12 months. I've done three businesses that went north of 10 million. And what about this accelerator? I I read that you have an accelerator where you have thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs who come to your accelerator for business advice coaching from getting from zero to, you know, up on that um up to that trajectory. Yeah, so 12 years ago I noticed this trend um around this idea of global small businesses and I basically saw that technology was making it possible for anyone to do the things that multinational corporations were doing. And I started an entrepreneur accelerator designed for people to position themselves as a key person of influence, to build their personal brand, to build a core team of people around them, to digitize the value that they offer, um and to take the most or make the most of the times that we're living in. And since then about 4 and 1/2 thousand companies have gone through this whole process. Um we've seen people go from zero to multi-multi-million pound exits. We've seen people build the business of their dreams where they get to live and work from anywhere. And you know, we've also seen what people struggle with and what they've found difficult. We've gone through pandemics and global financial crises and all of this sort of stuff with our clients. It's dancing classes for entrepreneurs. It's it's a high-performance environment where you get to be around people who want the same sort of things that you want. Uh you get to have some accountability, some best practices. Uh you get a community or a network around you. Uh and you go through that entrepreneurial journey with other people who who are going through it as well. Do you think anyone can be an entrepreneur? I think entrepreneurial spirit is something that we're all born with. Um entrepreneurship is this idea that we want to create value for others, that we want to take a little bit of a creative risk, that we want to do something that represents self-expression. There are different stages to the entrepreneurial journey. And everyone can go through those stages. Um there's also not one type of entrepreneur. There are people who are very good at finance. There are people who are good at operations. There are people who are visionaries. There are people who are doers and get stuff done. And there are businesses that suit those types of people. So, it's about finding out who you are, finding out what kind of business would actually be well suited to that person, and then making sure that you're doing the thing that you're you're well suited to. How does one know that a business would be suited to them? Cuz if you you know, gauged on the the people that come up to me in the street or the taxi drivers I speak to or my friends or the DMs that I get, everyone's got an idea. Nobody seems to be short of ideas. Mhm. But so many people seem to be stuck at that moment of making a decision to pursue a particular idea that they almost get like paralysis. Like sofa-preneurs, you know, all of their ideas stay on the sofa that they were um conceived on, but they never seem to get out of the sofa because of like that paralysis. I don't know if this is the one. Mhm. I get that all the time. Is this the idea? The The thing is we need to sharpen our ideas in the market, not in our minds. So, what we have to do is go make contact with other people and see what they say and see what they think. So, we have to conduct uh tests where we fail fast and fail cheap if we fail at all. So, here's an example of what I like to do when someone has an idea. I say set up a very simple waiting list landing page and essentially let people know, I'm thinking of starting something in this particular space or we're launching something in this space later in the year. If you're interested, join the waiting list. Now, that waiting list concept, essentially, if people will join the waiting list and if you get hundreds of people joining a waiting list, it's pretty good indication that it is a good good idea. Uh if you launch a waiting list and you message 3,000 people and say, "I'm launching a I'm launching this thing. Do you want to join the waiting list?" and no one joins, then it's a good indication that's not the idea, right? Cuz we have to have a good marriage between what we're passionate about, what we want to do, and what the market wants. Um there's 6 million businesses in the UK, 30 million businesses in the USA. And that basically means there's a lot of businesses doing a lot of things that already exist. So, the market might not have an unmet need. The market might say, "Hey, I already have a great cupcake supplier. There's already someone who makes great coffee in my neighborhood. We don't need another one." Okay, fair enough, let's have another idea, right? You can always have plenty more ideas. So, you got to test. The faster you can get on with conducting a fast and cheap test, the better you're going to, you know, go with your entrepreneurial idea. Cuz that's one of the big sort of mental barriers that people have is they see that committing to any of these ideas is going to cost them 3 years, their reputation, and potentially hundreds of thousands of their money or or an investor's money. So, that again creates paralysis because the discomfort associated with being wrong when you think there's so much on the line will hold you in place, but your idea there of just throwing up a landing page immediately kills the paralysis. And also just a landing page of a waiting list. Yeah, we So, you're not even saying that this thing is a dead certain. You're just saying, "We're going to be launching something if we get enough interest." Um and here's the waiting list. And by the way, this is what really smart entrepreneurs do. Like Elon Musk launched a waiting list for the Model 3, he launched a waiting list for the Cybertruck. Uh I think he launched a waiting list for a flamethrower. Yeah, I I joined all waiting lists. Yeah, and he he's, you know, he's essentially what he's doing is a very smart process of validating the idea. One of the best mindsets that we have as an early-stage entrepreneur is the mindset of a scientist conducting a little experiment. And what we're trying to do is not be emotionally attached to what happens one way or another. What we What we want to do is we want to say, "You know what? If people don't like this, okay, I'll have another idea. If people do like this, I'll go to the next step." Um so, a scientist is just kind of like conducting an experiment. And the best experiments are cheap and fast. A waiting list is probably the most powerful early stage experiment you could um you could go with. Elon Musk, when he launched the waiting list for Cybertruck, I don't think there would have been an investment bank on the planet that would have backed a factory for something that looked like Cybertruck. But when he walked in and said, "I've got a million people who have put down a $100 deposit," if only 5% of them go ahead, they can crunch the numbers on that and say, "Yeah, okay, we'll fund that. Fair enough, let's build it." Um so, it's very powerful. I did this recently. I I had my team come up to me and say, "Hey, we could do a startup around um an AI that helps people write a book." And um I said, "Well, I'm not sure if anyone would like that, but let's launch a waiting list." So, I launched a waiting list, put one post on LinkedIn, 750 people joined the waiting list. I was expecting 150. Uh and in the waiting list, we actually asked questions like how much would you pay for it per month? And how many months do you think it would take you? And what would success look like? And what would failure look like? And what else would you try instead of this? If this didn't exist, what would you use? So, we asked all these questions. We collected a ton of data. Uh and then off the back of that, we specked out the product. I also went to angel investors and said, "Do you guys want to come and invest in this one?" We raised £300,000 on the SEIS um scheme uh at a £3 million valuation for an idea, no lines of code, nothing built, nothing designed. Uh and essentially, we got ourselves ready to to launch in a couple of months just simply off the back of that waiting list and all the data that we uh that we collected. So interesting. The The other point you said within there was about You said there's kind of two things, what you're passionate about and what the market wants. Now, on the point of passion, it's so cliché. People say, "Follow your passions, do things you're passionate about," etc. How role How important do you think the role of passion is in actually succeeding at any of these ideas? So, if I've got four ideas, cupcake business, floristry business, soccer business, and I don't know, AI business, what role does my own intrinsic passion of any of these areas matter in the chances of success? Passion matters a lot because business is hard and you have to stick with it through the downs. So, the reason passion is valuable is because you are going to go through valleys um and they're going to be painful and they're going to be the the gratification is going to be very much delayed uh in any business journey. So, passion is the thing that gets you through. It's not the thing that you ride high on, it's the thing that you get through the hard times with. Um I have a very weird definition of passion. I kind of like tried to strip it back to its bones. And I look for an alignment between origin, mission, and vision. So, I essentially say, "What is your origin story? What's your background?" I want to see that you're doing something that aligns to what you've always been doing. I want to see that this goes back to age 10. Um for me, when I ask people about why you're doing this thing, I want them to start the story a long time ago. And I want them to tell me about little wins that they've had along the way that have led to this moment, which is why they're starting this business. To me, that's That's great. Because anything that we keep coming back to as a recurring theme is what we're meant to be doing. So, for me, I've going right back to age 10, I have experiences throughout um my teenage years and going back to age 10 that were about business as a force for good. Um and it goes right back to a garage sale that I did when I was 10 years old. We had a house fire. It was a horrible experience, but it turned into a positive experience because I set up this garage sale and made some money. And something bad happened and I turned it into something good through business. And for me, there's this recurring theme that all of my little wins line up to these these themes. So, the origin story is really powerful. The vision for the future is what do I want to see happen in the future? If all of this goes well and other people are doing it, too, what would this look like in the future? What would 10 years from now, 20 years from now be if we were celebrating? What would we love to be celebrating? And then the mission is what is the most high-value thing that I could possibly do that's in alignment with that vision. So, essentially, if there is a strong alignment between origin, mission, and vision, something happens where you're you you carry yourself in a different way. You you you sit differently, you speak differently, you're you're in this alignment. Other people pick up on it. They want to quit their job and come and work on your team. Um they hear about the vision, they hear about your origin story, they hear about the mission, and they go, "Oh, I'm going to leave what I'm doing and come and join that." And that's the magic of entrepreneurship. So, for me, that's passion. It's not about like superficially, I like snowboarding or um oh, I've always enjoyed baking a cake. It's the uh alignment of origin, mission, and vision. Interestingly there, um I was trying to think about what the opposite of everything you've said just looks like. What's the opposite of passion in your definition? What's the misalignment look like? So, can you give me a an ex- an example of what the opposite of that definition looks like? The opposite is I heard about some guy who pumped a crypto coin and made millions of dollars, so I want to go and find out how to pump crypto coins. Or uh I heard someone who made money flipping property, so I need to flip property and I'm going to do a a course on flipping property. I've got no interest in property. Uh I've never been interested in property. I've never shown any interest in in any of these things. I just want to make money and it's got nothing to do with my background. I've got no little wins in this. I I I have no real vision for the future other than being rich. Um so, essentially, this is of no value to anyone listening. No one cares. In fact, when people hear that, they're repulsed by it. In most cases, just hearing someone talk about that makes you feel, "I definitely don't want to see you for the next 2 years." Why are they destined to fail? Because they can't attract a team. Uh essentially, all of business and life is a team sport. And it's your ability to attract great talented people around you who want to work with you that is ultimately the reason we succeed. And it's ultimately the reason we feel good. So, if you're saying things that repulse people, then talented people leave. Talented people don't want to be involved. If you're saying something that feels resonant, that it feels aligned, and it feels like um something's happening, it feels like this guy's up to something. Or this you know, this woman is up to something. She's enrolling people in this vision that she's got, and people love her story, it's destined to succeed because good people are getting involved and more and more good people are getting involved. Do you knowing what's a good opportunity and what's not a good opportunity, do you think that when you're younger, you should be saying yes to more stuff? Cuz like in the position you're in now, you're bombarded with opportunity. So, you have to use a kind of a different mental framework. Yeah. Do you think when people are younger, they should have a different bias towards accepting opportunities or [ __ ] around and finding out? Yeah, definitely. We We should definitely go through that phase. Um and also be willing to say, "Oh, that wasn't it. I'm going to stop and go try something else." So, you dropped out of university, I dropped out of university. I was so excited to go to university, and then as soon as I realized it's this is not going where I want to go, I had to make the decision to leave all my friends um and walk away from university. That that sort of dark valley you have to walk through of uncertainty when you make the decision to leave the um well-worn track of university or a corporate job or the 9-to-5, that How How does one prepare mentally? Like what's the mindset of someone that goes, "Do you know what? I'm going to go through the stinging nettles, through the bushes, and be lost and find my own way"? I always enjoyed all of this, by the way. So, the my mindset was that I was always quite excited that um being lost I felt was probably going to be part of the process. I have a simple view around mindset, which is you're either being a reptile on autopilot or a visionary. What's that reptile thing you mentioned? What's the definition of that? Oh. Well, reptile mode is fight, flight, freeze, freak out, um throw tantrums, be angry at the people you should not be angry at, um feels unfair that the world's against you, um all of that. And the visionary? What's the definition of that? So, the visionary, I don't know if you've had these moments where you feel anything is possible um and you feel very expansive. Um you think in long time frames. So, you think in maybe 10, 20 years out. You also might see the world as one small place. So, you might um mentally, your mental model might be that the world is just one little ball that flies around the sun, and there's markets everywhere, and that there are opportunities everywhere, and that there are people trying to get stuff done, and I could have a business that's anywhere. And you feel a sense of love and compassion and optimism uh and you typically uh become more influential in your circles. The other strange thing about the visionary mindset is that um they did some research with Indian farmers, and they found that uh these particular people, they got paid their yearly salary in one lump sum, and then they had to make that last for the whole year. And as they were getting close to the end of that cycle, they had uh an IQ test which showed that they were 15 points of IQ lower than when they'd just been paid the lump sum. So, the lump sum allowed them to think long-term. It allowed them to feel affluent and abundant, and their IQ the scores on the IQ test went up um as a result of feeling good and feeling amazing and feeling affluent. And then by the time the money had run out and they were, you know, not sure whether they're even going to make it to the next one, their emotional intelligence, their actual IQ intelligence, had dropped significantly. So, one of the things that is a real challenge that if you're doing it tough, is that you're essentially regularly putting yourself into these uh situations where your IQ is right down. Your your emotional intelligence and your IQ suffers as a result of being in reptile mode. I remember a time where I got a parking ticket for $40. And I I freaked out. Like I flipped out. I had a massive fight with my friend and you know, like I I was in a place where $40 was was seriously an issue. Um and I remember thinking I'm just going to eat cereal for weeks um to try and get through this. Um and so full reptile meltdown mode. What would the uh visionary have responded to the parking ticket? Well, the visionary has a different view of life. And the the first thing is that if a resource exists on the planet anywhere, that resource is really just a couple of conversations away. So, essentially a visionary would say, "Well, someone's got $40. I'll just have a talk with them and and see what they need and I'll help them with whatever they need and they can help me with the $40 that I need. Um maybe I need to wash their car. Maybe I need to, you know, help them with their video editing or something." So, the visionary is all about the idea that there's really not a lot of boundaries between the resources on the planet, that it's just a gray zone around who owns what and who's got what and we can just have conversations about that. So, visionaries can easily raise money and raise funds because they just think, "Well, someone's got the money and they want to put it to use, so I'll just give them a plan as to how we're going to put it to use." There's a great story that I love, which is I think it was the producers of Top Gun were creating these little models of airplanes and boats and they were trying to figure out how they would do like a Star Wars style Top Gun movie. And someone said, "Have we actually called the Navy and asked whether we can use their planes and their boats?" And everyone's like, "No." And it's like, "Well, they've got planes and boats. Let's see if they want to do it." So, they ring up the Navy, as you do, and they speak to the general and the general says, "Oh yeah, we want to enroll more people in the Navy, so we would love for you to make a Hollywood blockbuster film. What do you need?" And they basically say, "Well, here, have the jets, have the boats, have the aircraft carriers, whatever you want to do." So, it's kind of weird to think that someone woke up this morning with the resource that you want. And if you have a conversation about how that resource gets used, right? Essentially, you are now as it's as good as you having the resource. Someone woke up with an aircraft carrier. If you've got a good use for that aircraft carrier, why not have a conversation about how that aircraft carrier gets used today? It's shocking because it's so simple. And and but it's so resonant with me. There's two examples I'll give. The first I've talked about many times is when I was 16, 17, in sixth form, saw Carly Stokes sat in head girl, but she was picking the vending machines we were going to get in the school. And in my brain, I thought we have 2,000 paying customers here. Surely there's a vending machine company that would love to put that these machines for free and give us a cut. Went to the computer room, sent five emails based on Google search rankings. By the same day, and Mr. Sprinkle, who was our head of Key Stage 5, has confirmed this on live TV, someone showed up with a tape measure to fit the machines because one of my emails had gone to a former student who was now the CEO of a vending machine company and he'd been looking to give back to the school. Example B comes In in that one, Yeah. did you feel what it felt like to be a visionary where it's like anything's possible? Like, why are we not just Of course we've got 2,000 clients. Like Like it Did you feel cuz you must have felt reptile versus visionary in your life. You've had reptile moments where you're like 100%. I hate everyone. I want to kill everyone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, and then you've had moments where it's like, "Oh, you know, You can bend the world. Yeah, we can we can bend reality. Exactly. We have conversation about how reality works and we'll just, you know, bend it. Yeah, and so my question has always been like, where does that come from? Because I view our beliefs, all of our beliefs, as a stack of evidence we either have or don't really have. And for me, the youngest of four siblings, I had so much space compared to my siblings when I was young that I got to like we said earlier, like [ __ ] around and find out. I got to conduct experiments. And that led me to believe that the world is bendable. I used to say when I was 14 that if someone said to me that we need to go to the moon next week, I believe there's a way. Cuz I think there's probably a rock rocket going and all I need to do is contact the person and make a compelling pitch. That's how I get to the moon next week. that at 14? Yes. I used to say this all the time. Like, my my difference between myself and my peers, they were academically better, but in my head, there was the only thing that stood in the way of where I am now and where I want to be is a bunch of people. Bunch of conversations. Yeah. And pitching. Essentially, pitching is enrolling people into new ideas. So, what entrepreneurs do to advance their ideas is we pitch them into existence. We start with an idea and we pitch it and we pitch it and we pitch it. We sharpen our pitch by talking to people. But what we're doing that's different is we're not just explaining the idea to people. We're trying to enroll them into that vision. We're enrolling people into this vision that we've got for the business. And that um process of getting people to do something that they didn't wake up thinking they would do that day is pitching, right? That's And that's one of the first tools that you learn as an entrepreneur. And actually, on Dragon's Den, that is the main tool that people are given in order to enroll the dragons into investing or or getting involved or not. So, um where does it come from, I think was your question. Uh I believe it's built into every single individual, that it's an evolutionary function, that essentially, at the very base of our brain is this reptile mode, which is fight, flight, freeze, which is rarely appropriate, but in a survival situation, probably is appropriate. And then there's autopilot mode, which is essentially just do what you've always done, repeat the past, you know, just get into a loop uh if it worked last week and and I didn't die last week, well then I might as well do the same week again. Um and then there's visionary mode, which is what could I do differently? What, you know, what might What What would be a creative way to solve this problem? So, I feel that a lot of people think they're missing something and actually it's all built in. And if you can get yourself into that visionary mode, often it's the people you hang out with, um it's the books that you read, the podcasts that you listen to. If you can get into that mode, then a lot more becomes possible. You get more IQ points, you get more EQ points. Um and you see the world in a in a very different way. The key question there is like, how do you get into that mode? I have a very one-dimensional biased um journey. So, I'm not sure if my journey is the the best one to take um notes from. But from what I've seen personally, people are either in some kind of upward spiral towards being more visionary because it's compounding in their favor. They're they're they're sending the email and then it's working, which means they have the evidence to send more They're more likely to send emails with more conviction and more frequency because it worked last time. And then more work, they get more responses. So, they send more emails. It's this upward wonderful reinforcing spiral upwards and they become more and more visionary. Like Elon Musk is at the very top now. He's like, "Spaceships to Mars." Yeah. He's like, "Neuro chips in your brain that monkeys can control computers with." That's someone at the very top of that visionary cycle. And at the the bottom of the reptile cycle is someone who, you know, at work the CEO says, "Does anyone want to stand up and share their ideas?" And they just slouch back in the chair. Mhm. Because they've had their confidence um negatively reinforced. Maybe last time they tried, it didn't go bad. Maybe their father or their mother gave them bad feedback one day and they're in this downward spiral. Well, when they do show up, they show up with low confidence. They put in a bad performance. It goes bad. Less likely to show up call that autopilot mode, which is I've never done this before, so I won't do it next time. Mhm. Um reptile mode is is very destructive. You're You're actively breaking your world. All right. So, it's it's where you do the worst possible thing. Okay. Um so, you are throwing tantrums and you're lashing out against the people who you should You're actually lashing out against the people who are trying to help you, probably. Um so, that's that's where you're really at the bottom of reptile mode, very destructive. Autopilot, in your situation where you said about the person who, you know, is given an opportunity to speak and they say, "Oh, well, you know, it's not what I do." is the autopilot response. Mhm. The visionary is like, "Oh, this is a chance to mobilize resources. Um I've got an opportunity here to expand my sphere of influence and become a key person of influence in this room." You know, so the visionary is like, "Oh, great. This is This is a good opportunity. I can do more with this." If the pitch is the keys to everything you want to be, because if if we're saying that it's really conversations that stand in the way of where you want to go, and it's the pitch that is essentially the key to wherever you want to go, what are the attributes of a perfect pitch? What are the fundamentals of being an exceptional salesperson pitcher? Well, you've seen some great pitchers on the Den. Um and a bad ones, too. Yeah. So, here's what I look for. Clarity is the base level. You just don't want to confuse people. Um authority is the ability to communicate that you are worth listening to, that there's something about your background or what you've done or the data that you're possessing or the mentor that you've got that gives you some sort of authority to be talking about this. So, clarity and authority. Uh defining some sort of a problem that the customer has or some sort of problem that exists in the world that needs solving and that you've identified an insight or a solution for that problem. Then the why, which I would say is about communicating why you care enough about this that people would buy into you as the person to drive this forward. You then want to define the opportunity. What is the bigger opportunity for anyone who gets involved? The next steps. What should someone do next? And then the emotion or the essence that you want to leave people with so that they remember you based on that essence or that emotion that you made them feel. So, that's the great arc of a of a of an inspiring pitch. What was the last one there? Was it the emotion? So, clarity, authority, problem solution, the why, opportunity, next steps, and the essence. And it spells out capstone. Capstone. So, that's how I remember a great pitch. I've I had to come up with a way of remembering this because I was pitching so often. I had to be able to come back to, okay, how do I pitch this? So, the essence, that's the one I I wanted to some more definition People remember you based on how you made them feel. So, you want to think, how do I want to leave people feeling? What's the emotion that I want people to remember? When I'm pitching? Yeah. So, you want to finish the pitch on an emotion. You want to finish the pitch by expressing um what it is that you uh essentially what is the emotion or the feeling that you want um you want this business to be about. And what's the opposite of that then? The emotional piece. So, what's a pitch that is lacking Uh well, a lot of pitches finish on next steps and it's very logistical. Um so, I've seen a lot of pitches that are going great and then they go, and then here's what we need to do next, blah blah blah, and then it becomes a little to-do list and everyone goes, oh, that kind of landed flat. And if you finish on the essence, then you actually just bring people back to, this is what it's really about. So, that we even though we've talked about opportunities and next steps and the finances and all that sort of stuff. You want to finish on, this is what we're really about. What we're up to in the world. I've been thinking a lot about, you know, some adjacent subjects to what we're talking about here, but this idea that if you just asked five times more than you're currently asking, your life would change. Mhm. Um the secondary example I was going to give after my coffee um machine example from when I was 16 was when I was 18 and I was completely broke and that's when I was shoplifting those Chicago Town pizzas to feed myself. And I need I start I was starting this business called Wall Park and I needed camera equipment. I sent 20 emails to camera companies saying, hey, I've got um this website I'm going to launch, we're going to record videos on campus, I need some cameras. If you lend us the cameras, we'll put your logo on all the videos we make on campus. Within 72 hours, Samsung had sent 10,000 pounds worth of camera equipment to my front door in my side. I got an email the day after the cameras arrived and it said, these are um returns. Send them back when you don't need them anymore. And I'd solved someone's problem for him because he had returned cameras in a warehouse that he didn't know what to do with. He sent me 10,000 pounds worth of camera equipment for free within 72 hours. You just asked. And I I go, oh my god, like, when you're at the bottom and you have nothing to lose and you have an internet connection and a Gmail account, why aren't you sending out 20, 30, 50 emails a day Yeah. asking? You think in emails, I think in calls um cuz when I was 18, you pick up the phone and make a call. Um I always had this rule called make three calls. And I remember nightclub party that I I saw these 15-year-olds um sitting in the street. I'd just turned 18 and I was um loving going to nightclubs. And I saw these 15-year-olds and they're skateboarding and they're hanging out in this little area and um they were asking me what it's like to go to a nightclub and I said, oh, someone should put on an under-18s nightclub party so that you can experience it and see what it's like. They're like, oh, that would be amazing and and I thought, oh, I'm going to do it. So, I called the nightclub I'd been going to and said, oh, I have a promotions company and we run nightclub parties for under-18s during the school holidays. We've selected your venue to be one of our venues um for the next uh holidays. Would you be interested in discussing that? He said like, yeah, send through a proposal. And then I'm like, oh, okay, yeah, we'll send a we'll send through a proposal. And anyway, we ran we ran a series of nightclubs at that thing and we uh it was the first time I'd ever made 10 grand in a night because we had a thousand people pay 10 bucks a head. And that was a lot of money and it was all cash and uh it was it was wild and it was just literally just asking. I have to say, a lot of people send me messages. I get um many thousands of messages a week across my inbox, LinkedIn, Instagram, the podcast, etc. And because I'm exposed to so many thousands of messages as I'm sure you are, you get to see the variance in a good ask versus a bad ask. Yeah. Now, I want to drill down on that. What are the core components of a great ask? The best ask has with or without you energy. With or without you energy is the energy that you have when this is going to happen with or without you. So, essentially, when you say, we're going to be doing this filming and do you want to send some cameras and we'll put your logo at the bottom, it's happening with or without you. You can be the company that gets the logo or not. Um but it is happening with or without you. Um the worst asks are I desperately need this to happen and if you don't say yes, no one will ever say yes and and therefore, I'll give up. So, if I think about the best asks that come through, something is going to happen and it's going to happen whether I'm involved or not and I get to choose whether I want to jump onto that or not. Um and those are the most compelling and most exciting uh opportunities that that get pitched. So, I'll give you I'll give you an example. When I first arrived in the UK, I had a suitcase and a credit card and I'd never been above the equator. I arrive in London and I'm going to launch a business in London. And within the first two weeks, I message all the people who are influential in in my industry and I basically say, I'm I'm hosting a dinner party. There's going to be about 30 amazing people there who are the who's who of the industry. Um I've just arrived from Australia. If you'd like to come along to the dinner party, let me know and I'll um allocate a spot to you. And within two weeks, I'd filled 30 spots at my at my dinner party. And they were all people who had massive databases. The biggest database was like 600,000 people. So, I've got this dinner party and I stand up and I say, I'm Daniel Priestley and I've just arrived from Australia and I'm going to be launching a business here. I thought I'd put together a dinner party just to kind of get to know everyone. I've got my diary with me. I'd love to make a time uh in the next couple of weeks to sit down and have a chat with you about how we could do a commercial partnership or a joint venture um as part of our launch. I'll just come around and I'll make a time and um and and and then other than that, enjoy the evening. So, I walk around and I booked 28 one-to-one meetings for the following two weeks. And everyone who I had a one-to-one meetings with knew that I had 28 other one-to-one meetings and they could see that I'd hosted this party. Mind you, the party this dinner party cost like 1,500 quid. It wasn't it wasn't nothing, but it wasn't a lot. So, I then end up having these uh meetings and everyone starts agreeing to support my launch. So, I'm pitching into existence that we're launching this thing uh and then the biggest database with 600,000 people, they say, yeah, we'll support your launch. So, when we did the launch email campaign to everyone's database, we booked hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people. We did two nights in Manchester, two nights in um Birmingham, Milton Keynes and then we did like three or four events in a row in London. We did 4 million pounds worth of sales off the back of it in the first few months. It was interesting that whole experience of just putting together a dinner party and getting everyone involved, but it had with or without you energy. What what's the sort of psychology underpinning that? Is it like scarcity? What is it that's causing with or without you energy to make people choose to buy from you or go with you? I think people like to get involved in something that they feel is happening um and it also demonstrates that you're a key person of influence, that you're actually an influential person in your industry, that you have the confidence to say, I'm I'm putting this on and it's going to happen. We're going to make the movie. We're going to launch the business. We're going to do the thing. We're going to raise the fund. You're you're free to join or not. Uh totally fine. Uh it's the there's no neediness and humans respond to the idea that they don't want to miss out on something that's going to happen. Um very rarely exciting things happen, right? Most of the time for most people, everything's humdrum and then occasionally something exciting's happening and you don't want to miss out on something that's happening. So, you know, I don't like no one likes neediness. People like things that are happening and people like to flock around key people of influence. So, by demonstrating that you're a key person of influence who's putting something together, people just naturally gravitate around that. It's interesting cuz it reminded me of an example from a company that I I invested in five or six years ago. And in one of my first meetings with them, I looked at their website and they had this button on there that said um become a member now. And I said, we should try changing that to join the waiting list. And when I had my first board meeting with this company, they said, Stephen, of all the things you've done for us, the most valuable thing you did was getting us to change that button from become member now to join the waiting list. And I said, why? They said, two things happened. The first is, the amount of inquiries we got the amount of people clicking that number rose by 500%. The second thing is, conversion went up by about 300% because previously, just by changing a couple of words on that um button, people would click the button, they would then get scheduled an appointment to have a tour of this um facility. They would then not even show up for their tour. They would because they didn't value it. The minute we changed it to join the waiting list and then they got an email saying, hey, you've been selected to for a queue jump or whatever. They would never ever miss the tour. And if they were late for the their scheduled tour by 1 hour, they would profusely text and apologize and try and reschedule. Tiny shift. Tiny shift in just a couple of words. Because if you look at how human psychology works, in order for someone to want to buy something, they have to be about 100% certain. In order to join a waiting list, you only have to be 5 10% certain that you want to do something. And people like to warm up to things a little bit slowly. So, join the waiting list means that, hey, you only have to be slightly sure that you want to do this. Then, the uncertainty of do I get through or not? I've joined the waiting list. I've made a micro commitment. Now, it's there's a an uncertainty gap and it's like, oh, I need the certainty. I need to know whether I'm off the waiting list or I'm through to the next phase. So, now we enter a different like, oh, will I will I or won't I get through? But it also gives the business a great opportunity to warm people up. So, you talked about doing a tour of the club. Let me give you some other examples. Um Glastonbury Music Festival, they tell people that they can't book a ticket, they can only register for a ticket um that they're interested in a ticket. So, a registration of interest, but not a ticket sale. So, what they do is they get 700,000 people to register interest, and then they tell you slowly who are some of the bands, and they warm you up to will you get it or not, and they tell you 500,000 people are now registered, 600,000 are registered, 700,000 are registered, and they say, "But there's only 140,000 tickets." But then they say, "We're going to make the tickets available at 5:00 a.m." So, only the true believers are going to be there, only the true music fans who are willing to get up early. And then there's this whole like suspense and excitement of like will I get a ticket or not. People set their alarm in the morning. They know that 700,000 have registered, 140,000 will get through, so they just fight for those tickets. Rolex had a massive uh breakthrough in the way that they uh in becoming a a big brand when they stopped selling Rolexes and they started selling the waiting list. So, you can't buy a Rolex. The way it works with a Rolex is you go into a Rolex retail store, and the only thing they will sell you is getting onto the waiting list. So, they won't actually sell you a watch. So, first you will have to get on the waiting list and register, and then about 6 months later they'll say, "Good news. Uh we have the watch that you want available, but it's only available for 3 days. Right, other than that, we can hold it for you for 3 days, but after that we'll have to sell it to somebody else." And essentially everyone goes rushes down and gets the Rolex. So, that cycle of join the waiting list and then make the sale is brilliant. And this translates perfectly for people at the early stage of the entrepreneurial journey, because it doesn't matter whether you want to do a rocket to Mars, or whether you want to launch a cupcake business, or you want to do a fashion brand, or you want to do uh a service of bookkeeping and accounting. All of those you can launch a waiting list with minimal cost. Um you set it up very simply and basically. Um you use a template. Boom, you you've got a waiting list. And you can also collect the data. So, you you can't just join the waiting list. Name, email, answer five questions to get on the waiting list. How much are you willing to pay? What are you trying to achieve? What's your biggest fear of that could go wrong? What would you try if this didn't exist? So, you ask a few of these questions, and then people get on the waiting list, you've got all that data. When people hear that, they'll think that putting someone through a set of sort of rigorous questions to give them access to the product on the other side would would deter most people. But it reminds me of a psychology study that I read about then wrote about in my last book, where they got two groups of people. Um and it they had a boring community forum online as the sort of the product. They let one group of people straight into the boring community forum, and then they asked them how much they appreciated and found value in the boring community forum. That group of people said it was boring. Right? Then they had this other group of people in this study, and they didn't let them into the boring community forum, they made them go through a rigorous selection process. And the people that got into the boring the same boring community forum, when asked in surveys after, "How much do you value the boring community forum?" they said it's great. Yeah. And it's this psychological bias, because you've had to fight for something. What you describe is Harvard. Yeah. It's Harvard University. Exactly that. It's the same university subjects that everyone teaches, but it's hard to get in. Yeah. Um I use one of the other strategies for building a business is waiting list, but also discussion groups. So, one of the things we do when we launch a business is we don't launch the product or service, we launch the discussion group. So, the first thing is uh let's say let's say I was going to launch a gym in Wandsworth, I might say we're going to do weight loss Wandsworth, an online discussion group on WhatsApp. And we just promote the hell out of that group, and if we had 4,000 people in that group, we could then launch a gym pretty easily off the back of the discussion group. So, I'm a big believer like in wait list, discussion groups, anything like that that is super fast, low risk, low cost. These are the best ways to start businesses that that you you know, and you're collecting data, you're getting people to answer questions to get in. And you're learning about what the product market fit probably is going to be the right product for those people in Wandsworth. Exactly. And sometimes you get very surprised. You you find out that, "Oh, I thought this was going to be for men who want to build big muscles, but it's actually for women who are excited about CrossFit." It's like, "Oh, okay, didn't didn't know that." Like I now have asked the questions, I'm finding out that it's slightly different to what I thought. I thought everyone would love red, but everyone loves blue. Uh okay, we we can we can do that. So, in those early stages of of business, you want to when I said uh before about conducting fast cheap experiments, waiting lists, discussion groups, online assessments are amazing. So, an online score card or an online assessment, great way to think of them is a readiness assessment. So, a readiness assessment like are you ready to launch a podcast? Answer 10 questions to find out. Uh are you ready to build your brand? Answer 10 questions to find out. Are you ready to be an investor in this type of investment? Answer 10 questions to find out. So, it's an online assessment where you answer a series of questions to get a readiness score, and then based on the readiness score, uh you people will then find out if they're 30% ready, 40% ready. And people love these readiness scores. This is one of the fastest ways to test an idea and getting signals of interest. Everything is downstream from lead generation in business, so you essentially have to uh you have to generate leads, and then you figure out if you've got a business or not. So, the fastest you can get into the lead generation, the better. One of the worst things that people do when they're starting a business is that they think that having a business is about the supply side of what they're doing. Supply side means your ability to look after a customer and keep a customer happy. But actually a business has to start with the demand side. It's you've got to test the demand side before you test the supply side. If you can't manufacture demand, there's no point manufacturing supply. Doesn't matter. You know, if you say, "Oh, I've you know, I've come up with this chili and basil flavored ice cream." Great, you can make that, but does anyone want that? Right? You got to check out whether you have the ability to to get that um product into a market. So, what I see so many people they take a qualifications, they get certifications, they might raise money, they might set up a venue, they might book an office, they might buy laptop computers, all of this stuff. And they might spend 3 to 6 months doing that. And then finally, after all of that, they then experience, "Oh, no one's interested in this. Now what do I do with all that stuff?" So, in the chili and ice cream example, what should they have done? Join the waiting list. We're launching chili and basil ice cream. If you'd like to try and taste it, join the waiting list. People don't know what they want though. Because in in the ice cream example, it's a taste thing, right? So, it sounds good, but in reality it could be like So, I mean this is a crazy idea. It's a terrible idea that we're But anyway, let's let's go with it. Um so, you you create a waiting list. We're we're doing really wild flavored ice creams, and it's crazy flavors like chili and basil ice cream and uh salt and pepper ice cream and blah blah blah. If you're interested in really different exciting new flavors of ice cream, join the waiting list, and we will invite you to a taste tester um when it's ready. You'll get to come to an exclusive event where you get to try and test our latest recipes in the mid in central London. So, now you promote the waiting list, and you see can I get lots of people? And some of the questions might be which flavor are you most looking forward to? Are you looking forward to octopus octopus ice cream? Are you looking forward to, you know, which one? Uh Right? So, you go through and you they answer all the questions, and then they join the waiting list. Then you say, join the ice cream discovery discussion group. Right? So, now they're in there talking about their favorite ice creams and what crazy flavors they like, and you can actually have a daily poll, and you're doing that all in WhatsApp. And then you say, "Now come to the the event that we've got, the taste testing event." You could launch the ice cream assessment. All right, what kind of what which type are you? Are you the savory ice cream person or the sweet ice cream? Are you the, you know, So, you could have four ice cream personalities. They take the test and find out which ice cream personality they have. So, you can do all of this stuff for free or almost for free without making a scoop of ice cream. Right? None of this stuff involves actually any commercial kitchens, none of it involves packaging or branding, or any of the expensive stuff. You're just doing the things that's testing whether people are actually interested in this. And if it's crickets, if you put a lot of effort into trying to get people interested in this, and you've got 12 people in your little group, and they're all, you know, sadly looking at each other going, "Where's the basil ice cream?" You know this is never going to fly. If it, you know, I was thinking there, some people might come to the discussion group, you know, your friends, whatever, your mom comes down. She goes, "Yeah, your ice cream's great, Daniel." Mhm. Well, you want to do cold outreach. Cold outreach I I don't know how long we're going to talk about ice cream, but cold outreach is is where you essentially make um a list of all the communities and groups that exist online, all the all the accounts that already have followers, and you just cold outreach a thousand people, and and get them involved. But Daniel, what if someone steals my idea? Well, my my experience tells me until you've got a Ferrari, no one steals your idea. Yeah. People steal ideas from people who have Ferraris. Right? So, it's that bias towards if you've been successful in the past, then your ideas are worth stealing. The beauty of having nothing is no one's going to steal your ideas ever. They're going to look at your account on Instagram and go, "Oh, you've got no followers, and you know, you haven't got a Ferrari, so I'm not going to steal your idea." So, you've got this great advantage when you're starting from zero that no one no one will steal the idea. And here's the other thing. Ideas aren't worth anything. Uh here's a great idea. Let's rip down all the old buildings in London and build brand new buildings. What's that idea worth? Trillions. Well, it would be worth trillions if we did that. Well, actually no, the value is for the person who does it. So, if someone else steals your idea, but does it, they deserve the money. All right, let them have it. They're better at executing. Get on with the next idea and be better at executing next time. So, if someone's able to execute better and faster than you, they deserve that money. That's fine, let them have it. Get on to the next idea. Mhm. Thinking about it like this podcast, there's lots of pod- there's like 3 million podcasts. A lot of podcasts. The idea itself to start a podcast isn't where the value is derived from. No, so much of it is pitching and um and also the commercials behind the scenes, you know, creating the right offers, making sales. So, this is the other thing that early stage businesses need to do. You got to stop calling yourself an entrepreneur and start calling yourself a salesperson. Are you going to get out there and make sales in the early days? So, a lot of people are really uncomfortable with the idea of making sales, but that's what an entrepreneur does. An entrepreneur is a salesperson, especially in those first couple of years. You are you are the chief salesperson. If you can't sell it, nobody's going to sell it. At the heart of a lot of these topics is this idea of failure. Because you're talking about experimentation, we're talking about asking, with all these things. And people's relationship with failure seems to correlate to their eventual success. Over the last couple of years in particular, especially from doing this podcast and a lot of other more recent businesses that I run, I've realized that that experimental mindset, the type of person that quickly runs the test versus sits and procrastinates for years, is really the winner in most pursuits. And then I studied Amazon and Jeff Bezos' shareholder letter says, "This has to be the best place in the world to fail." I looked at booking.com and they have that moment where they launched their experimentation platform cuz they were sick of arguing about what the best feature was in the boardroom. I look at Thomas Watson back, you know, I think 1950 or '60 where he says, um one of his employees had just made a huge mistake which cost the company $600,000 and he's asked in an interview, "Are you going to fire them?" And he goes, "Fire them? I just spent $600,000 training them." These people seem to have a different attitude towards the value of failure. Yeah, this goes back to the school system. The school system is designed for component labor and you don't want components to fail. Um what we're doing now is different. So, we're especially now we're entering the entering the age of AI. So, in in a post-AI world, most of the things that we think of as valuable that the school system could possibly teach us are not going to be very valuable very long. So, functionality versus vitality. When something is functional, it performs a task reliably. When something is vital, it's irreplaceable life force energy. So, what we have to do is recognize that the value has swung from something that is reliably able to perform a task to something that breathes life force energy into into a project. So, I know this is kind of woo-woo, but essentially this is the difference. When you are breathing life force energy into something, you're okay with failure. We're we're just conducting experiments. We're finding the way that works. And we just found 900 ways that don't work and now we're going to find the next one. And you're you're bringing something into existence. It's just like being a parent. You know, when when you see the child fall down, you you get the child back up and you get them on to the next thing. And when we learn riding a bike, we have to go through falling off the bike. So, there's all of these experiences that you know what it's like to bring life force energy to something. And that involves a process of failure. Um and then functionality, if we're really um putting our value around the idea that something has to be functional or that I have to be functional, that my value is in my functionality, then failure is such a bad thing. So, this is a big difference in how the pendulum is now swinging. We have to remove the idea that you are valuable because you're reliably functional. We have to swing it back to this idea that you're valuable because you breathe life force energy into something. For someone that doesn't know the definition of life force energy, how would you define that? So, this word vitality has two definitions, irreplaceable and life force. So, if something is vital, it's irreplaceable and it's life force. So, you need to find something that you are the irreplaceable life force. You pitch it into existence. You create it. You innovate it. Um you take ownership of it. You enroll others into it. Um That's the alignment kind of thing you're talking about. You're aligned to that thing. Yeah, you fully express your life. You're enjoy- you're enjoying this because it's your life journey. Um and uh you know, we're so tuned out from from the idea of this that that essentially we have to relearn what the hell does this even mean, this definition. Life force energy is what kids do, right? Think about, you know, everyone's talking and everyone's serious and then a 5-year-old bounces into the room. Look what I found, right? And then it's like, "Look, there's mud and there's this and there's you know, it's like, whoa." And suddenly everyone's disrupted and they bring energy into the house. They bring energy into a room. So, they just know what it's like to fully express themselves and breathe life force energy into something. Let me give you another example. There are magicians and they have these like fake thumbs and these things. Those fake thumbs are functional things, right? There's a functional thing called a fake thumb and that's how you do the magic trick. But it doesn't mean that everyone who has that fake thumb can do the magic trick. In fact, some people do the magic trick and people go, "You're just wearing a fake thumb." Right? Then there are magicians who completely make you believe in the magic. And they're using just the fake thumb as well. They're just doing the same functional thing as the other magician, but they're so good at doing it. They're so good at enrolling you in it. They're so good at getting you your attention and your engagement and your beliefs aligned to what they want you to believe that suddenly bringing that magic trick to life is what the magician is doing. When you study magicians, you realize that it's not about the gadgets. It's not about the functionality. It's about the way they do the trick. It's the way they breathe the life force into the trick. So, the the life force is the magic. It's the way you it's the way you bring it to life. So, the idea that I noticed years ago when I wrote the book Key Person of Influence was that there are these people who make stuff happen around them. Um and these these people they build reputation. Their names come up conversation. They have more fun. They build reputation. All that sort of stuff happens. And when they're involved in something, it all comes to life. And when they're not involved in it, it almost dissipates. It gets something magically doesn't happen. Um your involvement in 40 different compa- companies, people would ask the question, "But how are you involved in 40 different companies?" And the thing is is that you're not functionally involved in 40 different companies, but you're breathing a life force energy into 40 different companies. There's something that your your energy brings that stuff happens with you involved that wouldn't happen if you weren't involved. You're the irreplaceable life force. And if that irreplaceable life force comes gets gets removed, the result won't be the same. If you're involved, the result will be different. And that's what people want from you and it's not functionality. No one's saying, "Can you come and work in the office?" It's very very interesting, very very true. And I the two sub-questions that spiraled off that were how does one know and does one need to know what their vitality, their life force energy is? Do we need to know? And is there a way for us to find out what it is? We need to get into environments where it becomes normal to explore this stuff. And we need to be around people who are full of life. So, when you are around vital people, you discover things about your own vitality. You've had this experience of launching a podcast that gives you access to the world's most interesting people and me. Um and you've got this uh I bet from every single person you've raised your energy. You've raised your vitality. Something inside you was awoken in each and every interaction that lifted your vibration up. When you're in a low vibration environment where everyone's functional, everyone is suppressing their life force in order to be functional, you essentially just resonate with that and you suppress your life force in order to be functional. So, we need to get into environments where vitality is the norm, uh where we raise our energy, where we feel good about thinking about vision, mission, and values and we feel good about exploring origin and what what value that might add to the world. Um it feels normal to be conducting experiments. It feels normal to be making sales. Um it feels normal to want to be a key person of influence in your industry. Um it feels normal to have a conversation about what resources already exist on the planet and how they could be used differently. So, all of those things happen inside the right environment. So, I have a saying that environment dictates performance. I went in into a number of prisons with a charity called Key for Life. And what we discovered is that a lot of these young men are entrepreneurs, but in their environment, the product that you would sell is an illegal product. But they're the in that environment, the only successful entrepreneurs they come across and the only successful entrepreneurs they meet are selling drugs. So, they go, "Oh, that is my pathway. That's what I do. That's my mentoring. That's the environment." If you were to take this same entrepreneurial spirit that these young men have and showed them, "Oh, here's an IT services company." They'd go start an IT services company. Or here's a book publishing business. "Oh, okay. Now I'm going to be a book publisher." So, these their entrepreneurial spirit, the only place they saw in the environment of someone who's on the rise was this drug dealer friend, so they got involved in it. So, environment dictates performance. What we need to do is we need to find environments that lift us up. What if we're not in an environment that lifts us up? Cuz there's going to be a couple of million people right now that are that when you've described the definition of life force energy and you've also used the word stagnation as almost the antithesis of that, they're thinking, "Oh my god. I would love some life force energy. I'm in a corporate job in the city. I've been doing it for 10 years. I'm I'm institutionalized in this place because I've been here so long that I don't even know what the outside world would look like. And I've got all these ideas, but I've been they can feel their soul has been drained to some degree." Check your mortgage. Change it. Well, change environments for at least an hour or two a week. And what I mean by that is I'll give you an example. Uh when I was 21, I was going out to pubs drinking with friends all the time. We were getting drunk and that was the normal night. And there was this one night where these people turned up who did le bob uh Latin jive dancing. And I looked across the room and I saw them jive dancing and I went, "Oh, that's incredible." And I get talking to the the guy and I say, "How did you How do you do this?" And there's like six beautiful girls and this one or two guys who they're all waiting for a spin. And I'm like, "How do you How are you doing this?" He goes, "Come to dance classes." So, I'm like, "Go to dance classes? That's I would never go to dance classes." I rock up at dance class. And then when I was there, I was in this environment where it was completely normal to dance. That was just the normal thing. In that environment, you grab a partner and you the music comes on and they show you the moves and you do the moves. When they demoed the moves, and I can vividly remember this from 20 years ago, when they demoed the moves, I thought to myself, there is no way I'll learn that in 3 months. And then by the end of that first 2-hour session, I'm doing the whole routine and I'm comfortable with it. I'm like, "Wow, I can do this." So, being in the You can't do it outside of the environment. You can only do it in the environment. So, entrepreneurship is an environment thing. You You do it inside an environment and you It's very hard to do that outside of the environment. So, you basically have to find entrepreneur meetups, entrepreneur groups. Um you you find a mentor. Uh you You know, in every city around the world right now, there are entrepreneur meetups every night of the week. Uh online, there are entrepreneurial events every day of the week. So, you just get in You just get in the environment. There's this thing called social shedding, which I've never actually shared with anybody before, but it's this idea that when you take that first step into dance class and you get to see behind the curtain of another world, you slowly no longer resonate with your other friendship group. And what And there's often a friction there where they say, "Oh, Dan, you Dan's done They start cracking the jokes. Oh, Dan's a a ballet dancer now, lads." And what they're doing there is is somewhat linked to this phrase, "Misery loves company." They don't want you to leave. No one wants you to change. You're Dan Priestley. We know you as this. Do not change your identity. If you try to change your identity, we will mock you. We will disguise as a friendly roast and we will try and hold you back because if you change, what does that say about us? Well, that's If that's holding a mirror up to me, it means that I'm less than you in some way. And I hear this from entrepreneurs or startup entrepreneurs that when they that decision to start building a personal brand or starting that cupcake business typically causes resistance from their existing social circle and then this decision whether they want to socially shed, which means letting some of those people go. If we were born at any other time in history, you would grow up in a town, get a job in that local town, and go to school in that local town. Um and everything would have revolved around just the local issues of of that particular place. You probably would know a thousand people for your entire lifetime and you'd have this very tight circle. There's something in our evolution about being part of these little local communities. And for the first time in history, you can choose to be tapped into a global community, anyone in the world who who shares values or you want to share their values. It's now freely available to to us. There's something that feels very foreign about that because it's never happened for the last 5,000 years. And then there's something very exciting about this where you go, "Actually, I'm living in a different time now. This is an incredible moment." I think that what's happening is that we're going through an empire shift. And the current empire shift is this empire shift away from geography to digital, which means that we connect on values. We connect on purpose. We connect on origin, mission, and vision and those sorts of things. So, what the larger shift that's actually happening is this shift of do I want to play by the old rules of the geographical base system or do I want to play by the new rules of being in the cloud? And in the cloud, anything's possible because I can go anywhere. I can do anything. I can access any information. I can connect with any person on the planet. And as soon as you make this shift into the new empire, that's where everything starts to shift. And now you So, we all have to make that shift. So, the big shift is not even just changing your friendship group. It's the courage to change empire. It's the courage to say, "Actually, you know what? The world is a very different place than what I was born into. It's now going through a big change. The faster I can actually get into this wave and surf this wave the better." That's so interesting. And one of those shifts from the old empire to the new empire is seen in building a personal brand because the old gatekeepers of media and reputation were just newspapers and the radio. And there was like, you know, 10 of those. So, you got to be lucky to get one of those. Now, in the new empire, in the clouds, you can build your own media company around you. Mission-free, you can digitize your value. Um you can connect with anyone in the world who resonates with what it is that you do. So, when we launched the most recent business, um ScoreApp, we launched it in London, but because it was the pandemic, um we ended up with employees all over the world. And we've never had an office and we still don't have an office. And it's this incredible business. And what's happening is that we now have clients signing up every single day. Over 100 people sign up. And we have clients in 152 countries. I checked yesterday. And they resonate with a message. And there's no The The business doesn't exist anywhere. There's no actual place that you can go to visit ScoreApp. It's just a digital business. The employees are everywhere. The customers are everywhere. But what holds it together are these intangible things such as values and vision and the value that we offer and the ideas and the you know, all the stories. And all of that intangible stuff now exists in the cloud and the whole business exists in the cloud. So, it is an incredible time. Personal brand is one of these incredible things where you don't need permission. You can just go straight to the market. You've done that. Um and anyone who resonates with your story, your ideas, you know, your the things that you want to get done in the world, they can just follow along. Um I I hate the idea of personal brand being like showing up and doing dances. It's actually it's about sending out a signal of this is what I'm up to in the world. And do you want to come along for the ride? Do you want to be part of that? Like, are you up for this game that I'm playing? Do you want to Do you want to take part in what I'm interested in? So, it's it's a connection. It's It's not an image. It's not like a voice or a a message that gets repeated over and over. It's I'm up to something in the world and I would love more people to be part of that. Come with me. I think I might have Adam Grant speak in one of his books about the big misconception with personal branding is it that it's this kind of pursuit for fame, whereas great personal branding isn't self-promotion. It's idea promotion. It's this is what I believe. This is my perspective. Gather around if you think the same. Self-promotion sounds like we just won an award last night at the marketing awards and you're all in the table taking a selfie. We are amazing. That doesn't cultivate a a personal brand. Personal brand is this is my perspective on the world. Um if you've got the same perspective, which we call idea promotion, come join me. It's not look at me. It's look at this. Yes. It's not chasing the spotlight. It's becoming a spotlight and spotlighting the thing that matters most. And it's it's shining the light on something else, especially on an idea. So, we see people online who are shameless self-promoters. I went to the gym today. Look at my avocado on toast with chili flakes. And they're saying, "Look at me. Look at me. Look at me." And the people that we most want to follow are the ones who say, "Don't look at me. Look at this. This is what's going on in the world. And this is what you should You should be excited about this." Um And And that's the difference because on the surface, we might see you and say, "Oh, you know, Stephen's all about like look at Stephen." It's like, "No, no, no, you're missing the point. If you think it's about that, you've missed the point." He's shining a light on something that's going on in the world and he's bringing stuff into the spotlight. He's not trying to say, "Check me out." He's saying, "Check this out." It's interesting that the podcast was the most accelerating thing for my personal brand and it's really bringing people here and then do my very best to listen as much as I can. Which is interesting, right? Cuz we've kind of cultivated It's almost like the campfire. We've cultivated more people sat around the campfire listening to conversations like this. It is incredible that these times that we're in, these are the conversations that would have been behind closed doors 20 years ago. And you would have been incredibly privileged to be able to sit and listen in on those chats. And now they're they've been democratized. These type of high-level conversation, the types of conversations you have that you share with the world. Uh you've democratized something that was once a very elite activity and you've made it freely available. People. I've I've come to learn especially over the last couple years about the importance of people. You talked about people at the very beginning of this conversation. Hiring people, finding the right people to join you in your mission. How essential to being successful in both business but just more broadly in life is assembling the right group of people? So, business is a team sport. There's no There's no getting around it. I don't believe in solopreneurship. I don't believe that you can be a one-person entrepreneur. I think entrepreneurs are team players and that they assemble teams. Um they put together teams of amazing people. Sometimes they put together teams of ordinary people at the beginning and then they become amazing people. So, I'm a believer that two-person co-founders or a founder plus an assistant is a great place to start. Four-person campaign teams. Eight-person core teams. 30-person performance teams. So, I love the British military's approach to team building. Uh so, in the British military, they have two-person scout team, four-person fire team, eight-person section, 30-person platoon. So, they go 2 4 8 30. And um I I've used that myself in my own scale-up approach where if there's a new idea, we put two people on it. Once it's proven, four people are on it. Once it's up and running, eight people are on it. Once it becomes a business that has its own stand-alone value, 30 people are on it. So, it's 2 4 8 30. Um and that's been um that's been a British military learning uh that that I that I kind of went, "Well, if they've done 400 years of HR experiments, why wouldn't I just learn from how they organize their teams?" Is there anything you've found that is consistent across all of the best people you've hired, worked with, co-founded a company with, partnered with? Is there any consistent thing? I'm I'm always looking for complimentary energies. So, here's what I'm looking for. Uh in the deck of cards, there's four suits. So, you got clouds, so head in the clouds, spades, doing the work, hearts, connecting with people, diamonds, money, finance, data. So, I always look for a balanced team of someone who's visionary with someone who's a spades person doing the work, implementer, someone who's hearts connector with someone who's money or or data. So, I'm looking to try and perfectly balance my team with the four suits. And I've seen visionary people who get nothing done because they don't have an implementer around. I've seen amazing connectors who don't have anyone balancing them out, so they know never retain any of the money that's flowing around them because they're an amazing networker, people are doing deals around them, but they they're not involved in any of it. So, for me, it's the it's the connection between those four energies. And when you get all four energies firing, um and in one team, then you get the value creation and retention. Let's talk about money. Let's talk about it. We're in a cost of living crisis in the UK and many countries around the world are either in or on the brink of recession. So, one of the most popular questions we've had at The Diary of a CEO in the last 3 to 6 months is about money, people's concern about their own money, spending, finance, and saving. If I'm someone out there now that has, I don't know, $100 or £100 worth of disposable income every month, or if I have a thousand or ten thousand pounds, what should I be thinking about as it relates to creating more money and making myself financially free? The first thing is you just want to earn more. Um people massively settle for how much they could earn. Um so, the first place to I think to invest is in yourself. But, here's the first principle. The first principle is income follows assets. Income follows assets means that the more assets you have, the more income you'll earn. If I own If I want rental income, first I need a house. If I want dividend income, I need shares. Um if I want to be paid as a brand ambassador, first I need a brand. So, essentially, the more we can accumulate assets, the more easy and effortless the money flows. So, um we have to figure out, well, what assets could you accumulate? And what assets could you formalize and own? I wrote a book called 24 Assets, and I listed out all the different digital assets that are new economy assets that people could have, things like brand and positioning, things like databases, things like company culture is an asset now. So, uh I talk about, how do you formalize those things? If someone's just starting out and they've got a hundred um a month, to be to be perfectly honest, trying to invest a hundred a month or any of that, it's not going to do anything. It's not going to change your life. But, if you put that into your own skills and your own development, um let's say you don't have negotiation skills. Well, there are courses that you can take for a hundred dollars that give you negotiation skills. Let's say you don't know how to close sales. You can take a a course on how to make sales. Let's say you don't feel confident public speaking, you could do public speaking course. Um so, there are things that allow you to gain your skills. The other thing, too, is money is relationships. So, if you don't have a lot of money, you typically don't have a lot of relationships. Um you might have a limited number of relationships or a limited number of relationships with people who have a flow of money. When you have a high degree of relationships with people who've got money flowing, it's very effortless for that to flow to and from you as well. So, you might have to invest in relationships. Um when I arrived in the UK, I knew that uh one of the places that I would meet interesting people would be private banks. So, I didn't qualify for private bank, but I went into a private bank, and I said, I'm going to be launching a business, and of course it's going to be great and successful. I want to bank with a private bank. Um can I Do you have an entrepreneurs program? Oh, yeah, we did. And they start selling me joining the entrepreneurs program. And it cost me £600 to open an account with that private bank, but they immediately invited me to dinners, and they invited me to networkings and all these sorts of things in the private bank. One of the things that I've recommended a lot of people do is host dining dinner parties and reach out to people who you don't know. Uh Here's a Here's a silly story. I was just in Dubai, and I know someone who has a hundred-foot yacht. So, I said, Jeremy, can I borrow your yacht for the evening? Um I'm going to be putting 15 really influential people for a dinner party. Uh we're going to have burgers on the boat. And he And he said, oh, great, can I come? And I said, of course you can come, it's your boat. So, he said, great, that'll be exciting. So, he basically said, you can you can host this party on on my hundred-foot boat. So, I reached out to all the people who I didn't know, and I said, hey, we're putting together burgers on the boat, would you like to come along and have some burgers with interesting people? And then they came along, and I made the investment into relationship. Um now, the funny thing is, a lot of people say, oh, but you know someone with a hundred-foot yacht. Funny thing is, I I think plenty of people who have a boat, especially in Dubai, it sits empty most of the time. You could reach out to 30 people and say, we're going to do it on someone's boat, would you like it to be your boat, with or without you energy? So, making investments into relationships is a really powerful thing. For a hundred dollars a month, personally, what would I do with a hundred dollars a month? Take people out to dinner. That would be my number one investment. I'd I'd probably be taking people out to dinner. Why? Uh the investment into the relationship. So, I would be inviting the But, anyway, it was interesting cuz I actually have done that with you, and we never ended up following up with you, and you never followed up with us. But, Here's the Here's the thing. I want to share that No, I want to share that because sometimes it doesn't work. Right? Sometimes you have to send out like When I sent out 3,000 cold DMs to launch a business, I didn't expect 3,000 people to respond. I expected 30 or 40 people to come back to me. When I gave gave that to you, do you remember it? I remember getting a briefcase, and I'm I'm trying to I do I do quite a lot of public speaking these days, so Um we only had like a five like a two-minute interaction, and I said, hey, this is a little gift for you. Inside, we've created something for you, have a look. Um Was it something I had to scan? Probably. Was there something scannable in there? Yeah, we'd built we'd built you a little landing page campaign. Yes, I remember. Yeah. I remember getting in the car and saying to my team, oh, this is cool. Yeah. And then, of course, it gets passed to the team, and they're like, yeah, yeah, fair enough. Yeah. Put that on the pile of cool things. Um So, the point is is I'm saying that to say these thing You don't want to get hung up on the idea that one person's like in that same event, we gave that same thing to another really well-known person, and they've gone with it, and they're like um you know, millions of followers, and they're one of our clients now. So, we have with or without you energy, which is when when my team do this, we pick 30 or 40 people who'd make amazing connections and contacts in our VIP outreach team, and then we reach out to them, and we expect maybe two or three of them to get back to us. So, it's that idea of you know, don't Like, if someone messages you and you don't message back, it's not the end of the world. There are other people you can message, and there's a And look what happens. And there you go. It comes around again. It always comes around If it's If it's meant to happen, it'll happen. So, what about people You know, so many members of my team speak to me and ask me about investing. They might have tens of thousands to invest or whatever, but I'm curious about your personal investment thesis. With the with the capital that you have spare, what do you do with it to create more money? So What does your portfolio look like? It's extremely boring. I just stick any available capital into S&P 500. What's the S&P 500 for anyone that doesn't Yeah, the top 500 stocks in the US. So essentially any government that inflates its currency anywhere in the world, that money will hit the economy and it will eventually make its way back to the top 500 companies in the US through spending or that capital will end up being put into the S&P 500 which inflates it. So one way or another it's going back to the top 500 companies in the US. So it's almost impossible to beat the S&P 500. I hate investing. It's not my thing. I like expansive business creation. I'm an optimist. Uh great investors are often pessimists. They're very good at thinking what could go wrong and they analyzing risk. I hate that [ __ ] So for me personally I want to as much as possible expand the portfolio of businesses that I think should exist in the world. And I've always made my money by just saying I romantically like the idea of this business existing and I'm going to pour my energy into it and it's going to become worth millions. Rather than thinking about where I want to invest money, I want to create something that's investable for other people to put money into because that's how you really make money. So the exciting thing is not placing my own chips. The exciting thing is creating something where others want to place chips into that. So let's talk about that journey then. Yep. That journey from got an idea, want to start that ice cream business, that chili and basil ice cream business, whatever. Except for tens of millions. Except for tens of millions. It I I get off the ground. People love my chili and basil ice cream. What what is the journey that an entrepreneur goes on from zero up until they exit? So there's there's a key stages. The first four stages where everyone gets caught is called chaos, concept, audience, offer, sales. So you have to develop your concept so it's a good concept. You've validated it. You've conducted some experiments. You're aligned to it. Other people are excited about it. Audience is that you engage an audience. Waiting lists, dinner parties, uh scorecards, uh quizzes, discussion groups, all of those are great audience builders. Yeah. Um offer is that you construct a packaged up offering so that people can buy something and that they that audience can now act on something and buy. And then sales which is the ability to talk and discuss with your interested parties to close deals, to actually get sales across the line, and to do that predictably and reliably. So for sales we establish something called a rhythm of laps, leads, appointments, presentations, and sales and we measure our pipeline every week. How many leads, how many appointments, how many presentations, how many sales. So those are the first four things, concept, audience, offer, sales. And that should get you into the six figures of revenue just by doing that. The next thing is about team building. You've got to establish a key person of influence who's got a personal brand, who's leading leader of the company, who's going to embody the brand, and you've got to build a team of eight people around them. Um a general manager, marketing and sales, finance admin, um uh IT, media, and operations, those kind of roles. And essentially you now build this core team of eight and um the key person of influence job is to engage bigger and bigger audiences. And so they they get out there and tell the story of the business. They get on stages. They pitch. Um they publish content. They raise their profile. They do joint ventures and partnerships. So they're leading from the front while the general manager or ops director is making sure things don't fall apart behind. Once you hit about eight people, you now have to digitize absolutely everything of value in that business. So now you go through the whole process of digitalization of the value. So you're getting ready to scale. Which means for example moving physical relationships to a CRM, some kind of data the database or Building a CRM, uh formalizing your intellectual property, um building a brand, a company brand, um formalizing your organizational culture, uh getting into um uh really good investor relationship and and documentation governance. So all of these are developing systems, developing assets of the business. Um having online marketing and sales systems, having an online way of generating a lot of leads reliably, having an online way of making customers mostly happy most of the time. So you're basically trying to build as many assets as possible. What you're trying to do at about eight to 10 people is raise revenue per person. So let's say you've got 10 people with 100,000 per person. So you've got a million of revenue. 10 people times 100,000 million of revenue. If you can add assets and get it to go to 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 million. Now you've got 130,000 per person. So what you're trying to do is add as many digital assets as possible to get the revenue per employee or the revenue per person up. Once you see that the revenue per person is going up, now you can add people because the more digital assets there are times by the number of people, now you're going to be successful. Now the really hard jump is from 12 to 30. From 12 people to 30 you're too big to be small, too small to be big. Very difficult time in any business's life. Um and what you have to do is go through a transformation of a small team of rebels and misfits to a professional team that's that's manufacturing value. A lot of people have to go. Unfortunately some of the earlier people who were there because they could breathe and had a pulse and all of that sort of stuff. They uh unfortunately have to go find a new startup and you now have to go and bring on team members who come through recruiters with a proper process and who they go through an an entire process of how they join the team. They're on boarded correctly and now you transform into a more valuable professional organization. Once you hit 30, you've got a five person executive team plus a non-executive director and an advisor and then you've got some teams of teams and now you're doing 10 million of revenue, 3 million of profit and now you're exitable. How do you got to make a decision early? That was a mouthful, sorry. so true. It's so it's so funny that Did you agree with that? All of it. I agreed with all of it. The interesting thing as well is the part you said about of the first 10 people you hire, very few of them are equipped already or able to adjust to the environment you have at 30, 40, 50, 60, 100. Totally. And it's And part of the what I've noticed is that when there's 10 people, you're requiring a different set of skills and you're you're thinking more about multi multi-disciplinary individuals that can kind of wear a few hats but not do anything exceptionally well. Swiss army knives. Yeah. do 25 things badly. Yeah, exactly. And then when you get to like 50, 60, 70 people, it's really Specialists. Specialists, yeah. Bread knife. Bread knife, yeah. Just cuts bread really well. Just that. So on this then, when we're thinking about our own careers, we've got to ask ourselves that question which is are we a specialist that should be going into a company where there's 50, 60, 70 people or are we that kind of Swiss army knife that should be playing in startups and then going from zero to one versus like one to two? Yeah. I I have I've had to wrestle with with that myself. I personally absolutely adore the first 2 million of revenue. That's That is where my fun That for me is fun. It's where I find it exciting. I become almost pathologically distracted once we hit 2 million of revenue and I have to remind myself, oh wait a second, we've got a fast growth business here. Stop thinking about other things. I really enjoy getting businesses past that first couple hundred thousand a month and then for whatever reason I'm like dreaming of a blank page. I just want some like what if we did this? What if we did that? But here's the cool thing. There are so many amazing people who are phenomenal at the two to 20 million jump. So at the moment the person who's leading Dent Global is Glen Carlson. Glen is I've known him since I was 14 years old and actually what he's phenomenal at at the moment we've discovered is that he's really really good at driving that next jump, the two to 20 million jump. So there's the zero There's the zero to 200 grand like testing. There's the 200 grand to 2 million which is like, yeah okay, this thing's got some legs. There's the 2 million to 20 million jump which is we're professionalizing, we're become a proper business. Um we're becoming valuable. We're getting all the right people. What's shocked me cuz I've known Glen for so many years is that we've just recently discovered that that's what he's suited to. He's really good at the two to 20 million jump. He's so good at recruiting talented people. He's so good at pushing them through a process that weeds out like 15 amazing people down to two amazing people down to one. How would you make the case to someone that's just heard what you've said about your companies and that you like that zero to two million phase? What case would you make to me to admit what I'm not good at for the sake of my business because everyone can relate. Like I I don't mean to share this without asking him, but I'm sure he like he's in control of the edit so he can take it out if he doesn't like it. But But did you think I was going to do it? Jack turned around to our team the other day and it was I've actually spoken to so many people about this moment since he said it. Jack said, you know what? Um if Jack's run this podcast from zero, so zero subscribers to where it is now, it's 5 million subscribers. Jack turned around at 5 million subscribers and was like, I'm not the best in the world at doing lighting. So what I've done is I've gone out and I found someone who's the best at lighting and they're going to teach me. They're going to redesign my set. At 5 million subscribers, he's getting someone else to redesign his set so that the lighting is amazing. It takes a certain kind of person to put winning over ego. that. You know what I mean? And I I think about this so many Yeah. I Jack probably didn't know the profoundness of that moment to me, but someone who is applauded from everyone I you've built the best you know, whatever. For him to go, do you know what? There's so much I don't know. He He role modeled humility and he role modeled um the idea of winning is better than uh being right. Right. Yeah. Um and overlings not underlings. That a great company is great because you bring in overlings not underlings. So an underling is someone who's not as good as you are and an overling is someone who's way better than you are. So it's that confidence to bring in the overlings. All of my businesses have been great because overlings run them. Every everyone who is in my organization is way better than me at the thing they're doing and I feel like like the conductor in the orchestra can't play all the instruments and probably maybe is okay at one instrument but actually their ability to bring in the best in the world at that instrument is what is what makes them a great conductor. The ability to enroll people. So the first thing I'd say is that there's value to be made at every level. If you're watching this and you're you know you're not a founder and you're sitting there going all the people who make the money are the people who start from scratch and get something off the ground and look at Daniel and look at Stephen. Those guys are the zero to one guys. Wouldn't it be great if I was one of those but I'm not. Well actually that's not true. The truth is that there's there's incredible wealth to be created if you can take something from two to 20 million. There's amazing wealth if you can take something from 20 to 200 million. Do you know this is worth mentioning one of the biggest opportunities in the world right now. Biggest There's there's two major opportunities in the world but one of the biggest opportunities in the world at the moment is baby boomers who want to retire and a typical scenario is you get someone who's late 60s early 70s. The business had a high water mark of a couple of million and now it's dropped down to maybe a million or six high six figures because the person's semi-retiring and because the business has been on decline it's almost unsaleable. The person wants to retire and they just want to hand over the keys and they just want that business to go to someone who's fresh. And what they're willing to do is to do a vendor sale exit. Cody Sanchez who you had she talks about this. I've done deals like this. And actually Jeremy with the 100 foot yacht that's how he that's how he does it. So you essentially you buy a business that the person wants to retire and you take over that business with fresh energy and you bring it back to its high water mark. So there are so many people who what they would be suited for is not starting with a blank sheet of paper like me but they would actually go and find you know Bill and Sarah who want to retire and they want to do a deal where they get paid out over five years to hand over the keys to the business. Let's zoom in on this because a lot of people don't understand the concept of like a management buyout. So I see Bill and Sarah they're running a laundromat. Yeah. Well here's a real life example. A real life example from a friend of mine is called Kit King and basically he approached someone who had that business. They built it up to I think a few million and then he the guy was ready to retire. When when he walked in the orders would get printed out and put onto a spike and spike number one was like this is an order and then when it was fulfilled it goes onto the fulfilled spike piece of paper and then you know he this young guy comes in and he digitizes the business and he gets all the automated order thing flowing. Cost about 25 grand to get in a specialist who could do all of that and then he basically re-engaged the team. The team were totally unengaged. I think there's about a dozen people and they'd not had a team meeting in ages. They'd not There was no vision for the business. They'd not gone and spoken to customers in a in forever. And then he comes in goes and talks to customers, starts hosting some online events, starts sending out messages, starts digitizing, builds a bit of the brand and that business has I think I'm like 500% in like two years. It's massively successful but he started with something that had been going for 30 years. In that example you don't necessarily need any money. No no no this was no money down. So you can create a multi-million pound business theoretically starting with zero money Remember that remember that money's just a database. So it's a database of the value. So what you do is like if I want to buy a house I go to the bank and they lend me the money to buy the house. If I want to buy a business the person who already owns the business is probably the most likely person to see the value in funding the business. A bank probably won't but the person who is selling it. Let's say I let's say I go to Bill and Sarah. I say look there's no question your business is worth 1.2 million. I don't have 1.2 million. I have a little bit of money that I'm going to invest into the business to grow it. Can I pay you the 1.2 million over six years seven years? And what we will do is this is my business plan. You will be the board members, chairperson of the board and the business will be the security for that loan. So if we screw up and we can't make our payments you take the whole business back with everything that we've thrown at it everything that we've done at it. You'll be able to take it back and sell it to somebody else if we skip our payments. So you're securing the purchase of the business with the business itself. You're doing a business plan where it makes sense that the business could make the payments. Now think about it from Bill and Sarah's point of view. They've got this thing that's driving them crazy. They want to retire. They want They want to go south of France. They want to go spend time with the grandkids. And now someone's coming along and saying yeah we're going to pay you 120 grand a year for the next seven years. And if we don't then you get your business back. And if we don't you get the business back. And if they believe you which is the key part if they believe in your ability to execute because And if there's and if there's no one else offering anything else they believe you and there's no other options it's a great deal. Now there are here's here's a crazy thing. 65% of the value of all business equity in the economy is owned by baby boomers right now. So if you were to take if you were to throw a dart board at all the valuation of every company in the UK or the USA there's a 65% chance that you hit a baby boomer. Right? So it's it's it's incredible. Now all of those businesses have to be passed on somewhere. Now all of these young people they all want to have the latest psychedelic startup or they you know something like that and they're like oh I don't want the elevator repair business that does 8 million a year. You know it's like go get in get involved in that right? So that's a huge opportunity. The arbitrage in the opportunity here is boring businesses. Boring businesses that you can you can bring something to it. You can digitize it. You can make it interesting. You can create a culture that's exciting. The thing about a boring business boring boomer business boring boomer business right? I said that first I said that first trademark So the boring boomer business the BBBs. What you know a business can be exciting. It can do a boring thing but still be an exciting business. You the way you run the team and the culture the the money that it spits out can be exciting. You can use that business to sponsor a charity. You know I've got a a friend and a client called Sebastian Bates. He's got an amazing martial arts school that's in the UK and Dubai called Warrior Academy and he's used all of his his very profitable. He's now set up martial arts schools in Kenya, Nepal. All of these different areas that are struggling areas now have a martial arts academy. He's set up his own charity and he's basically doing martial arts schools for kids who have never had anyone look out for them. They're often street kids and homeless kids. They come into martial arts and they get taught life skills and martial arts and confidence character. But the point is is you can take a boring business and the way that you run it you can do you can launch a charity associated with it. You could hire young people who are coming out of prison and give them a second chance to get started and that could be part of the excitement of the business. There are so many ways to make a boring business an exciting business. Most of the times Bill and Sarah have given up on that. They're just you know they've been doing it for 20 30 years. They're not fresh. And the business has been in decline. Anyway that's a huge opportunity. Massive. Way bigger than starting something new. Like if if I was starting from scratch that's probably actually where I'd probably start. It's so funny that that never dawned on me. When I was penniless in Manchester and I was very persuasive but my strategy for wealth creation was to pitch a brand new tech company because I just seen that Social Network movie with Mark Zuckerberg. Whereas really I could have just you know as you said gone for Bill's business and presented a young fresh digital social first vision and and mitigated his risk by And even if you wanted to do social chain you could have started by buying a marketing agency that was declining already doing 2 million that's high water mark was 4 million and it's halved over the last six seven years. But it still has a core team and it's got a 20 year reputation and it has a contract with AWS and it has a contract with HarperCollins and it's like oh yeah we've got all these things in place. You buy that business that's doing 2 million as a starting point and then you say now I'm going to do social chain on top of that. So now you go from two to you know whatever but rather than starting from absolute scratch you could you could actually start with a couple of million of revenue just by just by going in and doing a deal with someone who's already got a starting point. Two key skills here. The first skill is sales. We've talked about that. You have to be persuasive and the second key skill is even understanding the structuring of that deal. Mhm. You know and those are two very different things but they're imperative. What I've come to learn over the last five years is the people in my life that are the best wealth creators have those two skills. Yeah. They understand how to structure a deal and they understand how to sell Yes. Yes. Yeah sales is sales that demand creation the the doing the deal and structuring phenomenal skills. And everything that you want is on the other side of a structure that exists. So with Score App 2022 AI comes out and I go oh my god AI changes the fundamental nature of this business. We need to be on AI. I thought the first thing I want to do is bring someone onto the team who is an AI expert. So I approach Professor Andy Pardoe who's the head of AI for Warwick University and I say we're setting up an AI advisory board. Would you like to be on our AI advisory board? Here's how much we pay per year. And would you like to join the board? And he's like, yeah, I'll I'll join the advisory board. So, he comes and joins our advisory board. He starts making some recommendations about how we adapt to the AI challenge. We didn't need anyone else. That was absolutely perfect. He brought with him a team of researchers who came in and worked on the back end of our system as well. But, what was interesting is that that happened in 2 weeks. So, from 2 weeks we went from no AI uh integration to having Professor Andy Pardoe, who's a PhD of AI, who's got 25-year background of AI as our advisor because we set up an advisory board. Um so, I just knew what structure to structure it as. Mhm. You know, so had I said, can you help me? I need to figure this out. You you wouldn't have been able to No. No. But, how do you get someone that's, you know, at the very start of their journey? They don't understand all these They don't understand structures. Yeah. I mean, it's hard because in theory, you you know, you go talk to a CFO Yeah. and you basically talk to an experienced CFO who's done a lot of M&A and you just say, oh, actually, do you know what's even wild? Today, you don't even need a CFO. You go on ChatGPT act as a CFO, explain to me what structures I would use to to do this. Um how would I structure a deal How would I structure a deal with this? Explain to me, I would like to buy a business uh an existing 20-year-old business. I would like to buy it so that um I don't have to pay anything up front and that the owners of the business finance my new ownership of the business. Act as a CFO and advise me on how to do that transaction. And uh what's amazing is ChatGPT will do a good job of that or a good starting point. Draft the heads of terms. You can ask ChatGPT to do that. Yeah. Draft Draft the heads of terms for that deal. Review the draft of heads of terms to see if there's any omissions or mistakes. Would you have changed Now that you've seen that, would you do anything differently? Yeah, I would change this. You can send the email an email to the finance director of this company proposing that we acquire the business with no money down. Asking for a meeting. Yeah, yeah. Isn't it crazy that we live in this new era where the possibilities in terms of communication, storytelling, persuasion and the cost of um a sale have completely completely changed. Dynamics have shifted. AI is changing everything. We haven't realized yet, have we? If you think about how we're behaving No, no, no. We haven't quite realized the potential of the technology we have. We are like on the movie the Titanic when they hit the iceberg and they're all just like dancing on the thing and someone says, oh, it's an unsinkable ship and the guy with a white face uh says, it's made of steel, it will go down. It'll sink. When I first saw AI do what AI does, I had that moment of like, oh, no, this changes everything. We've just hit an iceberg. The this is a fundamental general purpose technology that is going to change everything. It's going to change every industry top to bottom. Everything's going to have to reorganize itself around an AI landscape. But, we're all pretending like it doesn't exist. We're all pretending like this thing isn't doing what it's doing. Um but, yeah. There's one thing that AI disagrees with you on. When I say AI, I mean Sam Altman um from ChatGPT. You said earlier business is a team sport. Now, he has a WhatsApp group, Sam Altman, the founder of ChatGPT. And in that WhatsApp group, he's got a bet with some friends that they'll be the first ever one-person billion-dollar company soon. And they're guessing on the date of the first ever one-person billion-dollar company because with AI, the team sport becomes you and a large language model like a ChatGPT. I think that it's directionally correct what he's saying. The one-person AI business will be beaten by the 10-person AI business and that like uh yes, it probably will happen. It like let let's assume it. Of course, it will happen. There will be a person who creates something using AI and it and it'll be a standout thing. But, to replicate that again and again, having what we will see a lot of is five-person teams with a CEO, CTO, COO, CMO, CFO who work together as five people doing the work of 500 people using AI. That'll happen definitely and that'll be rep you know, that'll reproduce. But, to a degree, business is is always going to be a team sport that essentially five or six people will always be one because they're they're they're talking to each other and they're covering different angles. And whatever AI strengths AI is very good at content but not context. And having five people who share a context and create a context together, then the content can happen using AI. I AI without that context, it it doesn't know what to do. So, it doesn't have any purpose. Right now. Yeah, it to a degree it can start to it still needs a first mover on what is the context. Why are we doing this in the first place? Right now. So, well, that's the one person. Um yeah, I I agree with you that there is like we are at a time in history where we can't see around the corner. Um we don't know what society will look like. But, here's a few things I do know about. I do know that as as it as it stands right now, humans are great at context and AI's good at content. And if you can provide AI with an amazing context of to what it's meant to be doing, it will fill in all the blanks, but it needs the context first. I know that vitality versus functionality. AI's great at functionality, but it needs someone to breathe life force into it. It's the human life force that we that we breathe that we breathe into things. So, it still needs vitality even though AI does a lot of functionality. And the warning that I have for people is that AI is very good at turning you into a creator or a consumer. So, it essentially figures you out and it says, oh, TikTok, huh? Uh how about we get you to spend 16 hours on TikTok? Um and and hypnotize you into spending way longer than you thought on this thing. And the AI is really good at saying, we'll drive you down the to the edges of how much someone can consume. But, it will also drive you to the edges of how much someone can create. And one thing that is going to happen in the next few years is everyone is going to have to make a conscious decision. Do I want to be a creator or a consumer when it in relationship to AI? Because if if you allow AI to use you, it'll just turn you into a a consumer. You'll listen to more stuff, watch more stuff, do more like spend more money cuz AI is good at that. Or if you use it to build stuff and make stuff and produce stuff, you will be doing superhuman levels of creativity uh because of AI. But, it's going to divide society into consumers and creators. Okay, very important announcement. Waited a long time to tell you about this. Last year, I launched my very own private equity fund called Flight Fund with the aim of investing in great companies that are working to bring about a better future. At Flight Fund, we're committed to empowering the most innovative founders by providing not just funding, but mentorship, guidance, and a network that fuels their growth. Since launching the fund, we've invested in disruptors like SpaceX, Zoe, Huel, Whoop, Until, and many, many more. And today, I'm excited to announce that Flight Fund is now live on Seeders. Head to the link in the description below on this episode. It will say Flight Fund and you can learn more about Flight Fund and why we've partnered with Seeders. Quick one. As you might know, a company that I've invested in is now also a sponsor of this podcast and they're called Zoe. And I'm coming to you today with a warning and it's all of those diet companies' favorite month of the year. And that means that you're about to hear a lot of jargon and words across all types of media when it comes to diet culture. Please don't get caught up in the fads. When it comes to your own health, you must listen to experts. And that's exactly what Zoe has. Zoe isn't about restriction or removing foods from your diet. It's about building sustainable daily habits that will make your life better forever. They'll help you to discover how eating in the right way for your body, with what they call personalized nutrition, will have you feeling the benefits almost instantly and far into the future. If you're looking to pick up new habits this year, then use my code CEO10 to get 10% off of your Zoe kit and do it right now. Work-life balance, Daniel. Oh, work-life balance. Um Is it a thing? Is there Is it possible to be wildly successful and not work exceptionally hard? The people who talk about work-life balance as a as an important thing, they normally worked their asses off to the extent that they almost burnt themselves out. Then they had a come-to-Jesus moment. And then they now espouse work-life balance in hindsight after having a massive breakthrough from the massive amount of work that they did. And that is typically the pathway towards the work-life balance guru. So, here here's the unfortunate thing. You've got to look at what You got to look at the statistics. People who earn over 100 grand uh typically work 55 hours. But, per week. But, there's work and there's work. So, you and I work enormous amounts of hours. But, we're not digging up roads. We're not laying cables. We're not doing boring repetitive stuff. In most cases, our work is creativity. It's publishing things. It's pitching deals. It's sitting there in Dragon's Den analyzing what's going on. It's doing interviews. So, there's a new style of work. So, when people get angry about work-life balance and they say, damn it, work-life balance has to be a thing. It's normally because their association to work is that work is such a negative thing and work is something you have to do in order to make money. And when people say, oh, I do 55 hours a week and I love it, they go, well, something's deeply wrong with you. It's like You're toxic. Yeah, you're toxic. Well, actually, the Apples and oranges. Yeah, I'm enjoying I'm doing something that's deeply fulfilling and passionate and I could do it from home and I do it online and it's digital and I see my kids all the time while I'm doing it and I actually don't feel like I even work that hard. I'm just enjoying it but I am but I am doing that stuff. Keep in mind this. If you're doing a lot of hard work that doesn't develop an asset simultaneously, it's probably going to end up toxic. You may burn out. If you do a lot of hard work that simultaneously develops an asset, the asset value eventually takes over and then you're working completely by choice. So simplify that as if I was a 10-year-old. If you create podcasts and those podcasts go on to YouTube and that people can watch them a year later, two years, three years later, you've developed something that has a life of its own and it's going to continue to create value without you having to physically be there. So if your work is creating a byproduct of an asset if you own the company that you started and you own the shares in that company and that company becomes more and more successful and the equity value becomes more and more valuable, you're building your work is creating a valuable asset. Um if uh like my wife, you renovate horrible properties into amazing properties, her work creates income and an asset simultaneously. What's the opposite of that? Where you're working but you're not creating any assets. Well, an Uber driver. I used to work at McDonald's for two days. in McDonald's as well. I I loved working at McDonald's. The asset that I created was a deep uh appreciation for systems. But the the problem with being an Uber driver is that you can actually do 16-hour days. However, at the end of 16-hour days, that's it. You've earned that amount of money and you've not developed any additional asset. Uh you've just performed a role. Um so you're not building simultaneously an asset. The people who love their work and don't burn out are the people whose work creates income and asset at the same time and they're doing something that's fulfilling and passionate. And an asset could be reputation, skill, deep skills. Yes. Deep Something that has a life of its own. Something that lives beyond the the day that you created it. Daniel, thank you so much. Um we do have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you is what is the one thing you'd wish you'd known about sex and relationships in your youth that you later learned? The the a lot of the enjoyment of sex is the relationship that you're having with someone outside of that moment. Um so in my youth I saw sex as a standalone thing that was a compartmentalized thing and essentially, you know, if you can pick up and have sex, then that's a win. But you discover pretty quickly that it's actually empty and meaningless and and also awkward and really awkward the following day and all of that sort of stuff. Whereas when you find someone who you really love and you're building a life with them and you're uh sharing highs and lows with them and there's a deep connection, then it's actually something that is it's almost like an ingredient that is infused through all of that. Um so it's it's very linked to love and connection and life. Does that fit into your framework of function and Functionality and vitality, yeah. So so it's either done from a space of love and life force energy or it's done as something that's functional. Probably something that people have to go through to experientially learn. I think that um you know, that there's you know, the the other thing for for young men is that that that the the way that sex happens for a man is different to how it happens for a woman and that you you know, you may have a feeling or I had a feeling when I was uh a young young guy in my late teens, early 20s that I was unlovable and unattractive and um and that no one would want to have sex with me so I'd have to trick them into, you know, having sex through pickup lines or things like that. And actually when I built my confidence and when I built who I was as a person, then it actually became much more of a natural experience. Um and uh I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here. It's not No, it goes back to the energy you were describing. The where you don't necessarily need the sale. Yeah, with or without you energy, that definitely happened. Um yeah, so I you know, when I became an entrepreneur and I speak in front of big audiences and wrote a best-selling books and all of those sorts of things, I had much more with or without you energy and the beauty was is that when I met my wife, I was in a really great space where I you know, she was she had with or without you energy. I had with or without you energy and we recognized each other as um great a an amazing force of collaboration and partnership and we realized that one and one would be 11 in this situation and actually it was it was uh a magic moment. I knew I was going to marry her within about 12 hours. Daniel, thank you so much for your time. You have so many incredible incredible books real smash hits. So it's funny that these books are growing in popularity despite the fact that times are changing which I think speaks to how timeless they are and you create a lot of content. So I think if people want to hear more from you on an ongoing basis basis and continue with this sort of education that we've had today, then they should definitely check out your social media channels because I followed them and the way that you create content is very much like the way you speak. You're very good at taking large complex ideas, distilling them down into sort of simple, relatable, understandable concepts and delivering them to people in a way that's actionable and accessible. That's what your books do. That's what your content does and that's what you do so well. So thank you, Daniel, for being on my show. It's a huge compliment coming from you. Thank you. You're you're a master of what you do. So I appreciate you, Daniel. Thank you. Cheers. The key to growing a business is making sure that it's scalable and this comes with integrating into the right platforms early in the game to support your growth. A platform that's helped me and my team to do this is Shopify who I'm sure you know by now because they do sponsor this podcast. Shopify is a commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. We recently launched our second version of the Drive Over Fear conversation cards on Shopify which would not have been possible without Shopify. When I started podcasting an online store was the furthest thing from my mind but now thanks to how simple it is to use the platform, it's made this whole process so unbelievably easy. It's actually the internet's best converting checkout, 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. If you guys haven't tried Shopify and you're business owners, go and try it now because you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period just by heading to shopify.com/bartlett and you can get started for $1.