The Secret To Starting A Million-Dollar Business Without A Product | Daniel Priestley on Power Play

can you really teach just anyone to start a business scale it up to a million dollar Venture it's never been easier to do that well for Stardust there's not really such thing as a good idea so Microsoft literally had the idea for 8 years and everyone thinks Apple invented the tablet PC and the iPad is Apple you know default and they're like follow your passion passion as we currently know it in the modern world is a bit misleading so you might do it for less money than what the market value is all entrepreneurs desperately want

their product to be loved one way to make your product loved is to sell it too cheap what we discovered is that we we going to underprice this by about 40 or 50% we often think oh we have to put out so much Capital when Richard Branson launched virgin blue in Australia uh he didn't have an airline he put up Billboards and said we're going to be launching virgin blue you can get a cheap ticket for an airline that didn't exist and this is not something that cheap entrepreneurs do when they got no money this

is something the best entrepreneurs in the world do what is it that makes someone a key person of influence but we're talking about something very different from influencer it's important to know that you don't have to be naturally gifted in this space he stumbles his words that is not what I thought he's painfully impacted by public speaking we often get stuck in our comfort zone staying in your comfort zone is actually very dangerous a lot of people are worried about losing their jobs to AI there are plenty of people who are about to get massive

ly disrupted because they just don't want to get out of their comfort zone and they don't even know that they're standing in the middle of a four-lane highway with oncoming traffic it's constantly changing how are we able to tap into that the the key elements there's five of them welcome to power play with me Sally Musa where we talk to those who are shaping culture ideas and industries today's guest is a award-winning entrepreneur the author of six bestselling business books and the founder of multiple seven and eight figure Ventures and he believes that he can

teach anyone to do the same Daniel Priestley thanks for having me on the show so good to have you yeah it's wonderful um you know in in recent years we've seen entrepreneurship become this really cool thing where I I think social media has had a lot to do with it where entrepreneurship is is the big buzzword start a business let's go do it but you know can you really teach just anyone to start a business scale it up to a million dollar Venture yes it's more than just culture at the moment that as to why

it's popular so over the last 25 years we've seen the erosion of jobs and there's been a 75% reduction in the value of just normal jobs around the economy adjusted for inflation um it used to be that a footsie 100 company or an S&P 500 company needed eight people to make a million dollars worth of Revenue and today that numberers two adjusted for inflation so six out of the eight people who used to have a job they're not there anymore they don't have to be there in order to get the same Revenue numbers so what

do all those people do they start looking at creating their own jobs they start looking at well okay I'm going to take things into my own hands and I'm going to take my own skills uh to Market it's never been easier to do that so if we had been talking about my grandfather who had an entrepreneurial idea that's going to be very very difficult my grandfather was an electrical engineer um he he ran a factory with 140 people uh he would have needed to raise serious Capital he would have needed to hire a ton of

people he would have had to have amazing contacts and connections just to have a local geography business just to be able to serve his local geography forget about a global business or anything like that um if you go forward to today I regularly work with people who have less than 10 employees in their company or 10 people on their team um if they're YouTubers they have 50 to 100 million views a month um they're making millions and millions of dollars uh as YouTubers and they're under 25 uh I regular uh regularly talk to people who

have launched a fashion brand on Instagram they reach out to famous celebrities they do Partnerships they they get it all pinned down with a PDF document and docy sign right and and they've got themselves you know a global partnership brand uh I see uh software entrepreneurs where they spend $2 $300,000 creating a software product and then they sign up thousands of customers all over the world so the tools the technology all of this is available what's missing is the understanding as to how the entrepreneurial Journey unfolds because it unfolds in very predictable steps but no

one teaches those steps School definitely doesn't teach the steps the school schooling system doesn't do that so yes the time is right yes you can do it but there are some things that you have to learn so I've heard you talk about building a Global business that is quote full of fun Freedom flexibility passion and purpose it sounds too good to be true it's quite a mouthful too you know like so how what do you mean let's let's go through that sure well if you take some of the companies that I own um one of

the businesses that I started in the pandemic is called score app it's a technology business it's AI enabled SAS product uh it's a piece of software that helps companies to run surveys and collect leads and collect data about their employees and their customers and get people to do all those things we use a lot of AI we've got 23 people on the team we don't have any offices everyone works remote everyone sets their own time everyone sets their own hours we don't have set holiday times you can schedule holidays as long as it works um

so lots of Freedom we get together every 90 days and we put everyone in the in the room together we have a lot of fun um and hugely flexible uh it's held together with passion and purpose for that project we have customers in 150 countries we won scale up of the year uh we have uh coming up on 6,000 uh customers um you know our revenues are growing 5% month- on-month compounding so that is an example of fund Freedom flexibility no offices we've never had offices and you know that's made possible by the times that

we're in Fair enough but for somebody who's sitting at home watching this and going well I have a business idea or I want to start a business I don't know where to start you've taken us to the picture of success you know coming from the very beginning from the very Basics where does somebody start before you're a number one before you're a Founder um I think the best thing you could possibly do is be a direct report to an entrepreneur so especially if you've had a corporate background you don't nine times out of 10 I

would never say go start a business from corporate because the culture shock will be too great you're going to be assembling your desk from Ikea and thinking like what have I what on Earth have I got myself into where do I even start because if you're in a corporate with hundreds of employees working around you and a big brand and a IT department and all of those sorts of things it's going to be such a shock to go out on your own however if you're a direct report to an entrepreneur that is um that is

going to give you the uh training that you need or the experience that you need in order to um get used to the idea of Entrepreneurship so a direct report to an entrepreneur let's say you join a company that has 20 people or 10 people your every week you're talking to the entrepreneurs you're you're you're hearing about how the company Works you're figuring out how we make sales together all of that sort of stuff so Step One is do an apprenticeship do 6 months 12 months uh working for someone who's inspired that kind of happened

to you at age 19 when you had your first Mentor take us through that was that your first experience of Entrepreneurship and was that the time when you were like I want to do this this is exactly what I want to do yeah it was an amazing experience I went to University and I started running the nightclub parties for the University students and the the you know I was working with the local nightclub and I was having an enormously fun time doing these dance parties and um and I was making a lot of money like

we would have a thousand people uh in a night I would take the door the door was $10 per person so we'd have $10,000 of cash so my experience was this uh this incredible experience I'm doing a course on business none of my lecturers have actually had any businesses they've all worked in corporate uh and all I wanted to do was be an entrepreneur so I drop out with the stated goal of going and working for an entrepreneur so you actually studied business and you were like this is this doesn't work I went well my

lecturer started asking me what it feels like to run the nightclub parties and I was also selling flowers door too so I'd do this thing where I'd like buy 400 roses and have them wrapped up and we'd go round in little tuxedo and like sell them door too and all this silly stuff to make money right because I was a broke uni student so I'd come up with these money-making ideas and my lecturers absolutely loved hearing about how I was doing these things and they're asking me all these questions I'm thinking haven't you started a

business and none of them had so I dropped out to go and work for an entrepreneur who who the family knew and it didn't work out I did 3 months with him and I found it impossible to to his business wasn't going to get off the ground and then I was really upset like I've dropped out of University I've tried this thing it hasn't worked and then I get this phone call um where my my dad says actually I I know this guy who starting a business he's 37 years old it's his second or third

business um and he's going to be starting something new and he's agreed that he'll have a half hour meeting with you to see if you want to join the team um I end up driving up to NSA in Australia which is a beautiful place and then this massive house huge door on the waterfront and I I just looked at this house and I thought I have to work for this guy if he lives here he opens the door he's got three kids running around he's got this beautiful home lovely wife and he invites me into

his office we talk for three hours we just click and he invites me to join the company he's got no bank account no name for the company no plan he's just like yeah we're right at the beginning so we're sitting down at the kitchen table and we're planning out like what are we going to call the company what are we you were there from like literally from zero from yeah pre-revenue pre- bank account basically incredible so uh we get off to a massively fast start we do millions in the first year we do in year

two we do I think six million we get to 60 employees we go from Nua to Melbourne inner city officers and because I was John's Shadow uh I just basically learned absolutely everything I'm in all the meetings I'm in the hiring meetings I'm uh you know I'm driving him to the airport and picking him up I'm going out to different places where we're doing a launch event uh so I'm just learning all this stuff and I was a sponge so I'm just sucking in all this information and just loving it what was it about that

that you think made that Venture so successful that you then took as a lesson for your businesses so I didn't have the words for it at the time but what we did is we went through a series of steps to validate the idea and to generate demand first then Supply which is the opposite way most people go about it um today I would call this chaos and it's caos concept audience offer sale so validating that the concept is a good concept building an audience presenting them with multiple offers to see what they like and then

figuring out how we're going to sell that um to a wider audience and and so those are the first four steps that when when I now work with our entrepreneurs and you know the ventures that we're involved in we go through that chaos method so we you know we're going through those first four F first four phases we're trying to fail fast fail cheap get get data get people's Insight get insights about our Marketplace um to lay those foundations so then how do you know that something's a good idea because lots of people you know

ideas why they doesn't right how do you know that this is going to work well for starters there's not really such thing as a good idea um it like what ends up being good is a a great team executing a you know really well so in the UK where I live uh there's a very successful business called PR and it's a sandwich business we have it here too yeah so um pret is a silly idea like it's such a silly idea you're going to walk in and there's going to be these sandwiches off to the

left and you're going to grab a sandwich and buy a sandwich like that's not a multi-million dollar idea there's nothing about that that makes it's incredibly simple but it's well executed it's super well executed um and here's another great idea an amazing idea would be an iPad uh coming up with the iPad it was actually Microsoft that did the tablet PC I think 10 years earlier than Apple launched the iPad so I think tablet PC was 2002 iPad was 2010 so it was like 8 years later so Microsoft literally had the idea for eight years

but didn't execute well on it and then Apple comes along and does it beautifully and everyone thinks Apple invented the tablet PC and the iPad is Apple you know default uh and it wasn't it wasn't that way so we don't want to get too hung up on the idea ideas often change teams that are great teams often come up with new products they often improve and iterate and all of those sorts of things so but here's what we're looking for um in the early days we're looking for something called um concept founder fit so concept

founder fit is this idea that there are certain things that you would be good at that I wouldn't be good at um based on your network your experience your background your intellectual property your stories there are certain things that you could mobilize resources for that just couldn't mobilize resources for and then and vice versa so every founder has certain uh pool of ideas that are a good fit for them it's never a good idea to copy someone else uh what someone else is doing because if you're copying someone else number one it might be great

for them but not you uh number two they might have actually done a really great job and now the Market's well served and you don't need a a second player in the market so how do you get that how do you get the concept founder fit concept founder fit okay if we want to drill into it yeah there's there's really three elements to that so there's what I would call the passion and the passion we Define that by origin Mission Vision and values so we look at your origin story your vision for the future that

excites you so the background you know tell us about some of the key moments in your life the vision what do you want to see happen in the future your mission what are you well placed to do today and your values how do you want to travel how do you want to show up so that's what we would call that uh the ingredients for passion we then want to look at the problem so uh what is a problem that a lot of people have that's costing them money or costing them emotional labor um you know

something that could be better faster cheaper with more emotional benefits but like what's the actual problem uh we look at customers and we say Okay they've got a current reality they've got a desired reality they've got obstacles that are stopping them from getting what they want are we in a position to solve that for them um so this is basically looking at the problem and then we look at the payment uh is there a market for this how big is the market the types of people that we're going to serve do they have available cash

to spend all of that sort of stuff so when we look at a good concept it's passion problem payment okay so I love the word passion because everybody uses the word passion and they're like Follow Your Passion what's your purpose and all of that and you know how do you know what your passion is and if it's even be profitable that it's it's going to lead you into a successful business well the passion as we currently know it in the modern world is a bit misleading um I'm passionate about snowboarding no one's going to pay

me to snowboard um so the the origin of the word passion is the thing you're willing to suffer for right it's a suffering it's a it's a I'm willing to suffer for this it's not I love doing it it's not like ding ding ding dopamine hits that's not the origin of the word it's like are you willing to suffer for this thing um you that that that's the uh emology so when I like to look at passion I really want to just look at it through a very cold hard lens do you have a long

history of suffering for this origin story right is there something about your background that says that you stick with this thing Beyond good judgment you are um you get turned down but you still show up you you know you take a bumpy road but you still drive the road so it's like we want to look at the origin story Vision are you excited about something that is going to be hard to achieve but if you could be part of achieving that if that could happen in the world because you were involved even if other people

got the credit I love asking that question if it happened and you got none of the credit but it happened um would you you know how would you feel about that and in many cases if I take away the credit and I take away the money and you still say you know what even if I didn't earn the money even if I didn't get the credit I still want to see that thing happen in the world that's a good clue right you're willing to suffer for the thing to happen so it's this so we we

go and ask some deep questions around that that is really powerful what you just said like about taking away because it's almost like taking out your ego from the equation but you know that's purpose but you know a a lot of people they didn't think that deep before they went and got that job or started that business or whatever they're like I want to make money so and and for some people they may have gone years into One Direction before going I really hate this I don't want to be here how do you then turn

around and find all of that we make compromises so the extremes of passion is not where the business is um the the the business is right in the middle of the problem the payment and the passion and you got to make compromises here because your ultimate passion is probably going to take you away from the money and is probably going to take you away from solving a problem for a lot of people um same thing if you get too deep into the problem that you solve but you don't create a version that sells that takes

you away from the money and also if you chase the money you're probably going to be too far away from your passion and the problem that you solve so we're actually having to triangulate and find a little bit of a compromising territory in the middle like an overlapping vend diagram and we have to find the overlap we've got to make some compromises it can't be your raw passion with no thought to the other elements and everyone tends to start in one of those circles so a lot of people do start with the money and then

they have to add the passion and they have to add more of a problem that they solve um some people start with being experts at solving a problem they need to commercialize it more effectively so uh you know you can start in any three of those circles but we need to add the other two for it to be good a really good sustainable idea how do we apply that to you and your story in terms of your origin story and how that led to your passion and purpose well I mean if you take um if

you take score app the tech tech company so I founded that in 201 20 with Steve um but Steve and I had been working for 12 years prior to that on other projects we had worked on an online personality test which was effectively a data Gathering scorecard um we worked on a Facebook viral campaign that was a data Gathering scorecard we then launched in 2015 something called the key person of influence personal brand test which was a data Gathering scorecard um so we'd worked on several of these projects and there was about a 10-year period

where we'd actually really worked on these and loved working together and we loved collecting all this data and we loved doing the segmentation and getting the insights and all of that sort of stuff and then we started in like 201617 we started ning about um the election campaigns in brexit and Trump and seeing the role of data and data analytics and we were geeking out on what was happening behind the scenes with the data analytics cambri Cambridge analytica and everything that was going on there yeah removing the political Poli element we we were like staying

agnostic from the political outcomes we were quite interested in how are they doing that and like they're doing these hyper targeted campaigns and they're like creating audiences of one and they're like hitting these tiny little audiences with this message and this audience with that message two people living next to each other could be getting very different messages so we're geeking out on that and going oh wow that's a really interesting approach someone needs to create a data analytics platform that's super like that allows businesses to do Cambridge analytica style stuff so we were kind of

saying you know provided you're not using this for hacking elections this is actually really good stuff um so you know that's that's like a multi-year leadup and then we start the company in 2020 so there's a real origin story that goes right back with the two of us and our interests and all of that sort of stuff every business that I've been involved in has has had several years of buildup before I've started it or launched it or bought the company um there's always a bit of a background and um yeah so all all of

those businesses I've felt a great sense of alignment to I've got eight companies today all of them aligned to this idea that it's an incredible time to be an entrepreneur that we're developing entrepreneurs who Stand Out scale up make a positive impact we're exploring the frontier of Entrepreneurship in the modern world yeah you know when when you talk about Um passion it's really interesting and I I don't know if this is something that you might see more in women or not but when you're doing something that you love as a job or as a business

you kind of go in your mind you kind of go you know well I just love doing it so you might do it for less money than what the market value is or you might even end up sometimes doing things for free because you think oh I could get like exposure or whatever and and I I see women you know women get asked to do things for a lot less to begin with you know and if it's their thing they'll they'll be like yeah I'll do it or whatever how do we kind of get out

of that mindset where okay we want to make this a business we want to be paid our market value is there a mindset shift that needs to happen how does that work do you know because I work with five and a half thousand entrepreneurs I actually see it in men and women who are passionate about something um but I can I can hear what you're saying about uh you know a lot of passionate women getting you know getting undersold or something along those lines one of the things is data so if you you can collect

the data as to what people are willing to pay do you know like all entrepreneurs all entrepreneurs desperately want their product to be loved and one way to make your product loved is to sell it too cheap because if you sell it too cheap then it only has to be you know better than the value that someone spent you know if you sell it for $10 and someone got $100 worth of value then they're so happy with it so it's very much the entrepreneurs like thing to tr and sell stuff too cheap because they want

it to be loved and they want it to scale and they don't have a big marketing budget so they just want to like get people talking about how much they love it but if you can collect the data so I'll give you an example one of the software companies we launched a few weeks ago is called bookm magic. it's a um it's a platform that helps people discuss what book they want to write with an AI system and then that AI system helps draw out the book and helps structure the chapters and those sorts of

things um now when we launched that we didn't do any coding of the platform we didn't launch a website I just launched a waiting list for that and I said if you're interested in having AI tools to support the writing process for writing a book um join the waiting list now when people join the waiting list we asked them five questions and a couple of those questions related to price and what we discovered is that we were going to underprice this by about 40 or 50% so we were thinking about 29 a month and actually

59 a month was a lot of people expected to pay 59 a month and we we're thinking 29 a month would be tops um so we ended up adjusting our pricing uh to meet the data so by going through that little activity of launching the waiting list and collecting the pricing data up front we didn't make the mistake of launching a product too cheap um you know so it was driven by the market as opposed to our gut instincts that is so interesting that you like i' I've heard you talk about this before you know

this whole the the waiting list idea I'd love for you to kind of dive deeper into that in terms of you know how do we test our ideas without having the risk that comes with it because you know we often think oh we have to put out so much capital and so so many resources and so much time and whatever to actually launch a business but you're saying there are much easier and and much more cost-effective ways totally resource effective ways to to do it how would you do it and this is not something that

cheap entrepreneurs do when they got no money this is something the best entrepreneurs in the world do like Elon Musk doesn't build a cyber truck Factory and then try and sell cyber trucks he says in 3 years time we're going to sell cyber trucks this is what it's going to look like join the waiting list now in Elon situation 3 years ago if you know some people will remember that uh he's you know he he signed up a million people in two weeks for a $100 deposit for a cyber Tru um now he knew that

not all of those people would go ahead but he was able to go to I think it was JP Morgan rais hundreds of millions of dollars for the factory because they had a million people on waiting list so the best entrepreneurs in the world when Richard Branson launched virgin blue in Australia uh he didn't have an airline he put up Billboards and said we're going to be launching vergin blue you can get a cheap ticket you know go to the website and get yourself a cheap ticket and basically people were buying a ticket for an

airline that didn't exist it was in in the making um so this is what top entrepreneurs do we launch things like lists and we launch pre-sales and all of those kind of things to test the market so all of the you know home runs that I've had uh have started with me having an idea and just putting up a a simple landing page that says we've got a new approach to x y and Zed we think it's going to do this this this and this we're going to be building these types of features it's for

this type of person if you're interested join the waiting list we'll give you more information when it's ready um and we don't do name and email we do name email and five or six questions to to collect the data and then um and then only if we get a great result uh do we go with that and I've also killed a bunch of ideas there's a bunch of ideas that we were going to launch and we went oh no we're not going to do that like what what what did you kind of go what did

you think was a going to be a great idea that would just fell flat um honestly I'll put them out of my mind um and and and you know conversely as well certain certain events so there was certain things like uh running Live Events again so coming out of Co um I wanted to know is it the right time to launch a live conference uh and especially do people want to travel yet and all of those sorts things and I think we launched some waiting lists like months after kind of things started getting back to

normal and the consensus was no we're really happy doing it on Zoom um we don't want to travel we don't want to do any of that so we killed off those live events that we were planning on having um you know so we by launching the LI by launching the waiting list for the live event we we knew the response was lackluster um so that would be that would be an example I also was thinking about doing a retreat in Portugal and it's like you know we're going to do a writers Retreat um launch the

waiting list no not not hugely interested so we scaled it right back and did it for like 12 people this was a few years ago so um yeah th those sorts of things but also even when we know we're going to do something we've launched the waiting list anyway so we knew we were going to add AI into score app and um and plug in all these AI tools and we had those tools in development we know we're definitely going to launch these but rather than saying da da here they are they're ready we said

we're going to be launching AI tools with score if you want to be one of the first to try those tools join the waiting list and you can be part of the beta group now we run a whole campaign around this and we' got like thousands of people to say we want to be the first to use these AI tools and had we just kind of launched it nothing really to talk about they're available check it out but there's no kind of like spark around it um but by launching the waiting list first getting thousands

of people on the waiting list and then launching those tools making people feel special because they're in that first group we got such a galvanized group of clients who just like oh wow I was I was one of the first to to play with those those AI tools yeah there there's something really special about being part of the First Community to be able to to be part of that and you know set the Benchmark for where you guys are going to go forward but something that kind of goes hand in hand I guess with that

is this whole idea that we hear so much about but I want your take on it is personal branding and for you you know you wrote a book more than 10 years ago now it came out in 2010 2010 key person of influence KP yeah you know what is it that makes someone a key person of influence because obviously if you are that person you would be able to then you know Galvanize that Community to you know take your you're a business forward so so take us through what that means it was a pretty cool

pretty radical idea at the time the term influencer wasn't even well known at the time but we're talking about something very different from influencer um so an influencer has a large social media following often based around them themselves as the center of the spotlight that they're shining the light on themselves and saying look how gorgeous and amazing I am and look my wonderful omelet that I had this morning and look at my gym routine and all those kind of things a key person of influence is more of a business leader who leads from the front

who puts their personal brand on things um and at the time this was a lesser known phenomenon when I wrote the book in 20091 is when I wrote the book uh so we had Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs was like the first really big Tech CEO to just be on a stage talking to us taking us on a journey telling us what's going on with this company making us feel like we've got some sort of a relationship with apple because of Steve um so so he led the way with that Richard Branson was super pioneering

with this you know Virgin uh would launch a new thing and Branson would put his face on it his stamp on it you know a lot of younger listeners to this probably will never remember a time when you just would never know who the CEO of a company was like they were hidden well and truly in a you know behind layers and layers and layers of people and Brands to avoid them ever having to set foot in front of the spotlight but but what we see now is like Elon Musk and we you know we

see uh Ryan Reynolds you know using his brand to build multi-billion dollar businesses um you know Jessica Alba and and these great examples of people who are you know leading from the front with their business ventures so this idea of a key person of influence is someone who is deliberately treating their business brand their personal their personal brand within a business context as an asset a key asset of the business they they see that the company has a business brand they see their business as a product or service brand and then there's their key person

of influence brand which is like taking it to Market giving it a voice being on a stage being on a platform you know discussing what they're up to it it's so interesting you know that you say that because um these days everybody has to be in front of a camera talking you know about what they're doing and uh so you're absolutely right now that I think about it you know Steve Jobs was really one of the first uh to to really get in front of an audience and really talk about what they were working on

kind of uh bring people on board to his ideas and and the everybody that you've mentioned are great communicators Steve Jobs was known for that he you know with the think different campaign that he came up with you know so Richard Branson so is that a central focus of a key person of influence what does that look like what are the elements so there are some key elements it's important to know that you don't have to be naturally gifted in this space cuz Branson's actually not naturally gifted I've met Branson a couple of times he

stumbles his words he's an introvert he's not an extrovert um that is not what I thought he's painfully uh impacted by public speaking he he gets in he gets so nervous in front of a live audience there's all of those sorts of things that that Branson's very public about Tim Cook is a deep introvert but he had to St set foot into Steve jobs' shoes and he had to become that person who could lead Apple from the front so there are some people who would listen to this and say well that's not me well actually

it's just a learned behavior um you know sometimes a CEO isn't a numbers person but they have to learn how to be a numbers person they have to learn how to look at the company reports and absorb all of those numbers and we have to learn how to do a little bit of the lead from the front personal brand stuff as well so we have to learn these things as a leader we have to learn things that aren't necessarily our natural strengths the the key element that a key person of influence has there's five of

them um in the book so there's the ability to pitch ideas pitching is um enrolling people into new ideas it's powerfully communicating Vision um it's getting people excited about something that they hadn't thought of earlier um so it's that ability to plant the seed in someone else's mind um by pitching an idea uh great key people of influence they're always good at pitching uh the second one is publishing content so published content is anything that is placed into the public domain in either a written print audio format it's there it's in the public so um

a lot of CEOs now are writing books uh and you're actually seeing uh you know the CEO of Microsoft came came in one of the very first things he did is said I'm going to write this book called click refresh and um and I'm going to give every Microsoft employee a copy of this so that we're all aligned and it's almost like writing a book for the team to create a a central document where we're all going to get aligned around some key ideas um Branson has screw it let's do it for his employees so

there are a lot of um entrepreneurs who see the value in writing a book sometimes we want to write a book to get it into the marketplace and to win customers or win deals so a book is actually a really powerful document uh product ecosystem so key people of influence are very particular about what they represent their brand with and they pick certain themes Steven Bartlett di of a CEO he's picked a certain theme of products that he represents he's got hu which is a a sports string protein drink he's got um whoop which is

a monitoring for sport health and fitness monitoring he's got a glucose monitor uh called Zoe so he's taken Equity stakes in a certain set of products that he feels very confident that he can have a long-term growth relationship with those products and services um and then raising profile so getting a bit of social media getting on some platforms and the final one is being the one to go and do joint ventures and Partnerships uh that that are the transformational Partnerships so being on the front end of picking up the phone talking to another CEO and

saying hey we should be partnering together um or putting together a distribution agreement but actually leading those kind of out-of-the boox Partnerships that um that are transformational so those are the big five okay so let's talk about putting yourself out there because you know people often cringe at the idea of putting yourself out there especially if you're an introvert or you know just thinking how do I have to sell myself how do I how do I do this how do I put myself out there especially with social media this is just it's essential that that

everybody has that social media presence and you know you're saying that that we need to be publishing as well it's a lot it you know it's a lot to to think about if it's something that you haven't done before or are not very good at doing so you know where would you start with all of that I've worked with some senior senior Executives Foy 100 um big for accounting uh and they've all worried about this stuff the key um the key Insight that I share is that an influencer says look at me key person of

influence says look at that right so rather than chasing the spotlight we want to become the spotlight so we're not saying you know we're not running around saying check me out I'm amazing we're saying check these ideas out these ideas are amazing check out what the team is doing check out what these uh check out the transformation that we did with these customers and how happy they are so you're becoming the Storyteller the narrator not the star of the show and that's probably a really key Insight we don't know much about Tim Cook's private life

we don't know whether you know he's got a partner we don't know whether uh he you know where he lives or what kind of you know lifestyle he lives he doesn't share that information publicly but he but we still feel that we know him and we know him in his context as a leader uh so he's and he's never saying check me out I'm Tim Cook I'm the CEO of Apple how cool is that he's saying look at what we think uh you know look look at the key ideas that we're focused on at the

moment yeah pitching so important it's so funny because you know I've heard you say and I've thought about this as well that NBAs teach you everything except how to sell and you know we always talk about you know entrepreneurs Founders they have to know how to pitch it's your you know sales pitch it's like the most important thing yeah and so where do you start with that what makes for a great pitch and what makes for a terrible pitch too yeah so a great pitch is well rehearsed and it follows some bases and you know

the there's there's a few pitching scenarios and you want to prepare for each pitching scenario there's one pitching scenario called uh a social pitch so that's you're going to be in a social setting and you don't know who you're meeting but someone's going to say oh who are you tell me who you are um introduce yourself type thing or you might be going going around a boardroom table and everyone takes a moment to introduce thems you want to introduce yourself powerfully and memorably um so that's a mini little social pitch it's a 30-second building block

pitch but often those can lead to huge opportunities and then there's what I would call a scheduled pitch you know that you're going to be in a particular situation you can you can do some research you know you can kind of pitch to an audience and you know who they are so the way that we structure this when we work with Executives and entrepreneurs uh for a social pitch we do name same uh claim to fame aim in a game right so name same Fame aim in a game it's a rhyme so it's easy to

remember um so what is your name and your company name what are you the same as that everyone understands what makes you famous or different what's your aim in the short term what's your big game uh in the long term so we get that information into 30 seconds and it's a great little 30 second Pitch for a scheduled pitch we do something called Capstone Clarity right so people understand what we're talking about Authority why should you listen to us problem solution uh then we have a t which can either be the why we shoehorn that

in there the why or traction so it can either be the why we're doing this or the traction that we've just had um opportunity next steps and the essence or the emotional uh ending that we want to leave people feeling so we always we use that little acronym to kind of SK uh to to map out the pitch and prepare the pitch uh so that everyone you know can go into that really you know putting their best foot forward you know what but um I'm just thinking about how we often get stuck in our comfort

zone where we don't have to do stuff like that and then we do have to do stuff like that so how I mean have you had moments like that where you have had that like impostor syndrome feeling where you're like how am I going to do this what like you know breaking out of that because we all need to grow and sometimes we think we're at in a good place until something happens that makes us realize we should be so much you know better or higher or growing so much more we have so much more

potential so you know how do you get over that how do you get through that so imposter syndrome is a very specific thing which is that you've been elevated into a new role it's a senior senior role and you don't feel you were the best candidate or you don't feel you're the capable yet and yet you have to perform in the role without being capable as an entrepreneur you don't normally have that situation because you genuinely are starting at the bottom and you are it's more just being out of your comfort zone to a degree

there's an impostor syndrome because none of it exists you're pitching it into existence provided you're not pretending that exists that something exists that doesn't which would actually not be imposter syndrome it just be being an impostor yeah um so you have to you have to walk a fine line when you're pitching as an entrepreneur between we're building something and we're taking this into existence and we're taking it from our vision into reality and it's a fine line between this is ready to go and we're you know we've got this thing ready to roll out which

it's not so a lot of entrepreneurs can get themselves in a little bit of a tangle because they you know they don't walk that line well and it's it's difficult as an entrepreneur because you're always two or three steps ahead you're at the front you're at the front of your ship and there's this saying of like you're building the airplane as you're jump you jump out of plane and assemble your parachute on the way down type thing so there's there's that as an entrepreneur but the the key idea is that humans are built to feel

confident about the things that we're familiar with so that's what we feel confident about so the first time you hop onto a motorcycle you definitely don't feel confident and that is healthy biology it's the healthy nervous system that says hold up you've never done this before right you should be careful yeah right it's unfamiliar um and then if you ride a motorcycle for a year at the end of a year you just jump on and you know you don't even think twice about it you're just in autopilot mode and kind of like cruising around and

it's not even not even a thing so our brain gathers data and we say how many times I how many times have I done this and how did it work out and if those two things are low right I don't have a lot of data on this didn't work it either didn't work out or I haven't tried it before your brain's just going to send you the nervous system signal which is this is unfamiliar so as as entrepreneurs or as Leaders when we're outside of our comfort zone we just have to say thank you for

being a healthy functioning nervous system I appreciate the the warning I appreciate I got the memo uh but but this is what I need to do as a as a leader this is what I need to do to get this thing done how about we collect some data and then we'll regroup and discuss it right this is a conversation I have inside by the way this how about we collect the DAT how about we gather gather the evidence because what's interesting is oftentimes we could be in a situation where we have been just told we're

not good enough to do this thing you know the the sometimes you are can be surrounded I I had this very interesting conversation with Swiss beats the incredible Mega producer music producer who decided later in life he was doing some Mega business deals decided later in life that he wanted to go back to business school he went to Harvard and he was talking about how that was a transformational experience for him because people were talking to him like in in terms of music and not in terms of you know he was doing merges and Acquisitions

and it was like that they're like they were afraid of offending him and was like well I need to learn the language so I'm in it from the get-go and he was saying that there were people who got angry at him for going back they're like why do you need to do that you're a hot shot you you've got you know everything you've got the Grammys you got this and whatever why are you doing that so people can look at you and just go oh you're not good enough or you shouldn't do this or you

know stay in your lane or whatever it is and that can kind of really just hold us back so the power of Storytelling and really kind of reframing who we think we are I think is a big one right well if we want to make progress we're going to have to come up against our Edge aren't we you know so he obviously was more committed to making progress than staying in his comfort zone yeah his way of building that bridge was go back to Harvard and do an MBA Fab fabulous get the train get the

language you know obviously there was something that triggered that feeling out of my depth didn't understand what was being discussed in the room you know what it's a shortcoming I'm going to address it that's that's absolutely great there's multiple ways you could address that you could actually bring an NBA onto the team um you know so you could you could address that in in several different ways but addressing it if we don't address it we stay in our comfort zone in a fast moving world that we're in staying in your comfort zone is actually very

dangerous um there are plenty of people who are about to get massively disrupted because they just don't want to get out of their comfort zone and learn a bit about AI or they don't want to learn a bit about the way the world's changing or they don't want to be on social media or any of those sorts of things and they don't even know that they're standing in the middle of a four-lane highway with oncoming traffic um you know they're just saying I'd rather turn my back to it you're investing heavily in AI you know

this is this is critical to everything a lot of people are worried about losing their jobs to AI so how should people be framing at what should we be learning about AI what are the trends moving forward that we really need to be aware of and some people are saying well it's going to make us less creative as well so well the first thing is you should be afraid of AI uh that's that's a good starting point um it's a general purpose technology that actually in many ways uh does a lot of the heavy lifting

of white collor jobs um so all the jobs that we grew up thinking are very valuable lawyer accountant auditor um you know all of those kind of jobs the AI does an enormous amount of heavy lifting so at one point you know we might have needed a million uh accountants but you might only need 100,000 accountants that are working in in hand in glove with AI um something like 8% of workers in the US and the UK work in call centers or some form of a call center you only need to see some of the

AI demos that are live to realize that that is like almost like done um especially anything inbound where a customer's calling into a call center and when I talk about like how good it is the AI demo has keyboard tapping in the background it deliberately puts keyboard tapping in because it sounds like you're talking to someone in a call center um and it has ums and r in it so you you call in and say um you know I'm thinking of buying this particular product but I want to know you know are there any allergens

in that product because I get allergic to this sort of thing oh okay let me just check for you um um keyboard tapping um it looks like uh good news it looks like there are no allergens in that um is there anything else I can help you with um yeah I I want to know can I order that direct uh yeah absolutely do you want me to take your details now for sure right you don't even know you're talking to an AI um so these things are phenomenally powerful they're very fast learning they're general purpose

Technologies so general purpose technology is things like Wi-Fi internet um smartphones PC electricity steam engines tractors you know all throughout history GPS all of these Technologies are the technologies that fundamentally change things and there's small ones like GPS and big ones like smartphones or electricity um and then AI is obviously a big one this is a really big one um it's constantly changing how are we able to tap into that though and really harness the power of it for us so you almost need to see it like um it's an assistant you you've just got

a free assistant at the moment one of the first ways to look at AI is that I have a free assistant it's job is to make me better so if you had a free assistant wandering around with you uh you know let's say you had a a 23 year old graduate who came out of a pretty reasonable you know University and their their job is to just follow you around and anything you want to ask them you know to research or to get an opinion on you know they're there for you 24 hours a day

7 days a week you just have to text them in the I'll text straight back so what would you use the assistant for so you might say oh I'm doing an interview today list out 10 questions that I might um ask this type of guest or give me a bit of research on this person or um you know and and suddenly you get like a good gist and it might not be perfect um but it might be directionally correct where you go okay that kind of saves me 45 minutes I still have to do the

last 15 minutes I love to use the analogy of a bakery that has a machine that bakes all the sponge cake and all you have to do is ice the cake make sure that it's beautifully iced and it's like that's ai ai is doing all the sponge cake you're doing the icing on the cake do we do we lose out though on the the process of learning and creativity then or the schooling system up until now has almost turned humans into um large language models so if you think about how the schooling system operates with

children they say I'm going to give you a prompt um which is uh donu versus Stevens what year was that as a you know piece of you know law uh and you go oh it was 1932 the snail in the ale blah blah blah blah blah right so you they prompt you and you prompt and sometimes students hallucinate the answer right they come up with something that's a little bit off like AI does so the schooling system was designed around we prompt you you give us the the large language model answer and that's tick you

you get to graduate if you're quite well uh on on base the the future of learning is the opposite which is we need to teach humans how to prompt Ai and then take that there's some big shifts that are happening so uh let me let me talk about three big shifts um Vitality versus functionality so functionality is the ability to perform tasks Vitality is the ability to bring something to life so the word Vitality means Irreplaceable life force and functionality means reliable Tas orientated humans have to become less reliable task orientated people and more Irreplaceable

life force people who bring things to life so the type of person who organizes the party that's a very human thing to do to bring people together but the actual sending out the invites and uh coordinating the data the the the diary links and all that sort of stuff that we can Outsource that that's just the functional part of of doing the party so there's functionality versus vitality and the move for humans is towards Vitality away from functionality uh create versus consume this is a big distinction we all need to be warned immediately that AI

is extremely good at distracting you so one of its jobs is to get you to spend more to listen to more Spotify songs to to to browse more stuff on Amazon uh to watch another Show on Netflix uh to to scroll through those short little videos on on Tik Tok or on on YouTube so AI is really it's got a job to figure out what you want to see next and just Ram it into your Consciousness and it's going to get better and better and better at that and it's going to be like a chess

grandmas up against a amateur chess player as far as your ability to stop that your ability to to stop consuming um so AI superpower is getting you to consume we have to switch that and say ai's job is to make me create my job with my my relationship with AI is that it's meant to make me Hyper creative not hyper consumptive so that's a big um a big shift and then the third shift is called content versus context so content is the ability to fill in all the paperwork context is to know why you're filling

in the paperwork so if we were to talk about mergers and Acquisitions the context is we're putting together a group of companies that solves this problem in the world and we're looking for these type of innovative companies that go really well together and the cultures can merge and all of that's going to work that's the context the content is the legal agreements um it's you know reaching out to the CFO and say can I get this document and can we set up a data room and all of that's the content AI is very very good

at putting together all of that content related stuff but it doesn't do that unless it has a good clear context so humans have to switch from being uh focused on the creation of content towards the creation of context there is so much to dive into that but I'm going to kind of you know leave that point I know we're going to come back to it in another interview you've written a book how to raise entrepreneurial kids what do you teach your kids they're still pretty young do you like show them anything and teach them anything

yeah we like on cold Winters days we create a big hot chocolate thermos of hot chocolate we go out the front we set up a little shop people who walk past we sell them a hot chocolate we have like our little cups that we buy and um you know and and I actually look secretly they'll just discover this later I I secretly put the money to buy the hot chocolate on a tray out of their Vision when people walk past I give the the pound and then it comes through so you know I'm doing a

little bit of the heavy lifting here but um but it's teaching them a good valuable lesson we we don't just simply do money for chores we do money for creativity we do money for reading and understanding certain documents and summarizing it um I I involve uh the kids in understanding what businesses are out there I'll give you a very important example when you and I were growing up we had a very clear understanding that there was this thing called Cash and when we pay for uh a coffee at the coffee shop you hand the person

the cash and there's this kind of like fundamental building block of like oh yeah this cash thing is the value our children see us scan our face on the phone and go dip and then we walk off and nothing much happens and it's it's such it's an abstraction of an abstraction so cash is an abstraction of value and uh tapping your phone on to a reader is an abstraction of that abstraction so it's extremely confusing for kids now if we don't teach kids deliberately talk them through this is a business they sell things to make

money I've got a bank they've got a bank my phone sends a message to their Bank saying here's the money sends a message to my bank to send the money to their bank so I have to draw that out and I've got a nine-year-old and until I drew that out he had no idea what this whole scanning your face thing and tapping a thing no idea what that was about cuz it didn't make any sense so we forget that kids don't understand what's going on around them and we've got to explain this stuff we've got

to really give them a clue them in and you'd be surprised a lot of teenagers have no idea the difference between credit and debit cards um you know they have no idea about compounding interest or compounding debt uh and what can happen to you they just get thrown these Financial products and expected to like swim in the deep end of all these different you know Financial products that that are available that we never had to learn about until much later so these are some of the things one of the other things I love to do

is just talk my kids through what businesses are doing so you know when we go to the park I explain that that ice cream truck is a business and that their job is to sell ice creams and drinks um and that they buy those ice creams for 50 cents and they sell them for a dollar and that they make the difference and that's why they're doing it and I asked the kids the question why do you think there are a lot of people queued up for an ice cream today but they weren't the other day

oh the other day was cold and today's hot okay interesting so this is you know this is Market forces there's something going on here um we walk past a shop what how do you think what do you think happens in that shop oh they seem to be cutting hair how does that shop make money do you think oh well they must pay to have the haircut yeah that's right you're right congr that's it what do you think that shop is oh I think it's clothing shop why do you think people go into that shop oh

cuz they see the these dummies in the in the front they want to buy the same clothing so we just talk through some of the stuff that for you and I it's obvious but for them you know it's just still learning so those are some of the basics that we you know at a young age there is just there's so much that I would still love to talk to you about Daniel so much that it's it's eye openening in so many different ways and and I love how you that example about your kids and it

just really shows how the world has changed so much and it's just continuing to change and what is business going to be looking like what does value look like how do we bring value to the world how do we consume it's just this is an ongoing conversation I have no doubt Janny priny thank you so much thank you for having me [Music]