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

I've started seven businesses that have gone 0 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 pry money and business Expert that's helped thousands of people start scale and grow their own multi-million pounds 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 that 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 for example waiting lists 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 Cyber truck 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've 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 if someone's out there and they've got £100 or £1,000 worth of disposable income what should I be about to making myself financially free the truth is that there's incredible wealth to be created 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 five 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 dire 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 nine months on a surprise for all of you that have subscribed to the show and I'm very excited to deliver that for you the Productions 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 [Music] episode Daniel if someone has just clicked on this podcast can you tell me the reason why they should stay around and listen and 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 then I 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 two

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 backgr 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 we went from Z to a

million in the first year and then 10 million in year three I've started uh seven businesses since that have gone Z 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 their 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 positions 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 a half 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 crisises 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 the 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 CU 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 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 sofar 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 I get that 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 a 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 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 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 Supply 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 a 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 because 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 three 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 Paris and also just a landing page of a waiting list so you're not even saying that this thing's are 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

Cyber truck I think he launched a waiting list for a flamethrower 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 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 speced out the product I also went to Angel Investors

and said do you guys want to co-invest in this one we raised £300,000 on the seis um scheme uh at A3 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 cliche 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 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 winds 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 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 an example of what the opposite of that definition looks like the opposite is I heard about some guy who pumped a cryptocoin 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 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 two years why are they destined to fail because they can't attract a team 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 and 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 in rolling 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 corporate job or the 9 to5 that how how does one prepare mentally like what's the

mindset of someone that goes 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 an 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 uh 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 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 uh 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 had 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 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 if you're doing it tough is that you're essentially regularly putting yourself into these uh situations where your IQ is right down um 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 um you know like 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 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 just have a talk with them and and see what they need and I'll help them with whatever they need 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're trying to figure out how they would do like a Star Wars style Top Gun movie and someone said have we actually called the and us whether we can

use their planes and their boats and everyone's like no 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 what 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 was when I was 16

17 in six form saw Carly Stoke sat in front of me who was a girl in my school I think she was head girl but she was picking the vending machines we were going to get in the school and in my brain I thought um we have 2,000 paying customers here surely there's a vending machine company that would love to put 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 keystage 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 had been looking to give back to the school example uh B comes in that one yeah did you feel what it felt like to be a Visionary where it's like anything is possible like why are we not just of course we've got 2,000 CL like like 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 you know and then you've had moments where it's like oh you know we can bend the world yeah we 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 is 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 the moon next week you thought 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 pitching essentially pitching is in Rolling 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 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 different ly what you know what might 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 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 space ships to Mars yeah he's like 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 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 where when they do show up they show up with low confidence they put in a bad performance it goes bad less likely show I would actually call that

autop pilot mode which is I've never done this before so I won't do it next time um reptile mode is is very destructive you're act you're actively breaking your world 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 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 we were 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 pictures on the den um lot of 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 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 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 that the emotion so Clarity Authority problem solution the why opportunity next steps and the essence and it spells out 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 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 lot of pictures 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 this is 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 ask asking your life would change 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 broken that's when I was shoplifting those Chicago Town pizzas to feed myself and I need I start I was starting this business called wallpark and I needed camera equipment I sent 20 emails to camera company 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 7 hours Samsung had sent £10,000 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 worth of camera equipment for free within 72 hours you just asked and 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 a nightclub party that I I saw these 15-year-olds um sitting in the street I just turned 18 and I was um loving going to nightclubs and I saw these 15y 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 some should put on an under 18's 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 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 it we'll send through a proposal and anyway we ran we ran a series of nightclub at that thing and we it was the first time I'd ever made 10 grand in a night because we had a th people pay 10 bucks ahead 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 inboxes 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 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 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 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 book 28 one:1 me meetings for the following 2 weeks and everyone who I had a one toone meeting 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 cign 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 keing and then we did like three or four events in a row in London we did4 million pound 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 you're free to join or not uh totally fine uh it's 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 is 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 it reminded me of an example from a company that uh 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 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 for Q 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 not a tiny shift 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 glastenbury 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 said but there's only 4,000 tickets so then they say we're going to make the tickets available at 500 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 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 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 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 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 the psychological bias because you've had to fight for something what you what you're describing is Harvard yeah it's Harvard University it's 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 um let's say let's say I was going to launch a gym in wesworth I might say we're going to do weight loss wesworth 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 weight 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 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 ones worth exactly and sometimes you get very surprised you you find out that Oh I thought that 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 now I've 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 scorecard or an online assessment great way to think of them is

a Readiness assessment so Readiness assessment like are you ready to launch a podcast answer 10 questions to find out 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 it doesn't matter you know if you say oh I you 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 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 SP 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 Chilean ice cream example what should they have done join the waiting list we're launching Chile and bzel ice cream if you'd like to try it and taste it join the waiting list people don't know what they want

though because in the ice cream example it's a taste thing right so it sounds good but in reality it could be re like so I mean this is a crazy idea it's a terrible idea that we're but but anyway let's let's go with it um so you you create a waiting list where we're doing really wild flavored ice creams and it's crazy flavors like chili and Basel ice cream and 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 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 octop octopus ice cream are you looking forward to you know which one 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 assess 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 and 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 well you want to do cold Outreach cold Outreach I don't know how long we're going to talk about ice creams 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 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 does it they deserve the money 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 thinking about it like this podcast there's lots of there's like three million podcasts a lot of podcast 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 other thing that early stage businesses need to do you got to stop calling yourself an entrepreneur and start calling yourself a sales person you're 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 you are the chief salesperson if you can't sell it

nobody's going to sell it I've the heard of a lot of these topics is this idea of failure because you're talking about experimentation we're talking about ask 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's 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 because they were sick of arguing about what the best feature was in the boardroom I look at Thomas Watson back in 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 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 woooo 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 you're bringing something into existence it's just like being a parent you know when when you see the child P 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 expressed your life you're enjo 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 it's like look there's mud and there's this and there 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 they're 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 align 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 the these people they build reputation their names come up in conversation they have more fun they build reputation all that sort 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 get something magically doesn't happen um your involvement in 40 different country uh companies people would ask the question but how

are you involved in 40 different companies and the thing 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 IRL 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 experiment 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 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 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 these 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 because 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 these ideas but I've been they can feel their soul has been drained

to some degree got a mortgage change 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 when I was 21 I was going out to pubs drinking with friends all the time we're getting drunk and that was the normal night and there was this one night where these people turned up who did laop 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 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 2hour 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 D they start cracking the jokes oh Dan's a ballet dance and now Lads and what they're doing there is it's somewhat linked to this phrase misery loves company they don't want you to leave no one wants you to change you're Dan Priestly we know you as this do not change your identity if you

try to change your identity we will mock you we will disguised as a roast and we will try and hold you back because if you change what does that say about us what that's 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 go to school in that local Town um and everything would revolve 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 and we connect on purpose and

we connect on Origin Mission Vision and those sorts of things so what the larger shift that that's actually happening is this shift of do I want to play by the old rules of the geographical based system or do I want to play by the new rules of being in the cloud and in the cloud anything is 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 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 on one of those now in the new Empire in the clouds you can build your own Media company around you per 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 score app 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 business doesn't exist anywhere there's no actual place that you can go to visit score app 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 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 him I heard 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 on the

table taking the selfie we are amazing that doesn't cultivate 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 Steven's all about like look at Steven it's like no no no you're missing the point if 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 because 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'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 of 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 Central 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 oneperson 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 8 person section 30 person platoon so they go 2 4 830 and um I I've used that myself in my own scaleup approach where if 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 Standalone value 30 people are on it so it's 24830 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 Implement someone who's heart connector with someone who 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 implementor around I've seen amazing connectors who don't have anyone balancing them out so they 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'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 en 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 dire of a CEO in the last 3 to six 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 or1 worth of disposable income every month or if I have a, or 0,000 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 uh 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 I talk about how do you formalize those things if someone's just starting out and they've got 100 a month to be to be perfectly honest trying to invest 100

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 $100 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 a 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 now it cost me £600 to open an account with that private bank but they immediately invited me to dinners and they invited me to networkingsocial

people for a dinner party uh we're going to have had 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 right and so he said great that'll be exciting so he basically said you can you can host this party on on my 100 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 will say oh but you know someone with 100 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 your energy so making investments into relationships is a really powerful thing for $100 a month personally what

would I do with $100 a month take people out to dinner that would be my number one investment i' I'd probably be taking people out to dinner why the investment into the relationship so I would be inviting the most interesting people I could possibly invite uh if I had the ability for $100 a month I guess that's one dinner so I would reach out to someone interesting and say I've seen your story I've seen what you're interested can I take you out for lunch can I take you out for dinner it's my shout I'd love

to get to know you a little bit better obviously don't do that with someone who's famous you get a hundred of those a day I get plenty of those a day reach out to someone who's not famous but who's accomplished who's successful who's who's a mentores type person not necessarily a superstar but someone who's a few ahead take those people out to lunch take them out to dinner would you say in that message that you know you talk about calls I talk about emails what what would someone have to say to you considering where you

are in your life now with all the inquiries you get for you to actually go for a coffee with them um so bear in mind everyone's going to email you and say this yeah well it happened today actually someone said um Daniel I noticed in the background of one of your photos that you have an amazing Fender Strater I teach people how to play guitar um I would love the opportunity to do a guitar lesson with you and help you to shred on that guitar and it was really nice he had watched my podcasts in

the past he had noticed the guitar he reached out with something that was valuable for me and he said I'd love to have a chat with you and teach you how to play some guitar and I obviously I'll have a chat with him while we do that but that was a really it was it was a very sense uh it was very it felt like a a good connection I also had a look at his um profile and he looked like a really lovely person you know who's who's getting on with doing stuff there's a

bit of With Or Without You energy as well in terms of you know I can see this person's up to stuff so I look at that and I go he did some research on you mhm he offered you value in an area where you were potentially seeking or looking for the value yep oh that's definitely true if you've seen me play guitar but that's that's like the corol component and I I feel the same way that I I I try and figure out why sometimes I reply to these cold Outreach messages but 99.9% of the

time I don't and it tends to be the case that the person will say they'll show that they've done some kind of research on me which is good for your ego like everyone has an ego you want to feel like someone actually cares and then they'll offer me something in return for by way do you know I did this to you I don't know even know if you remember you and I were both speakers at a conference right and we were in the elevator and i' prepared for you a really nice leather um briefcase and

it had your I created the happy sexy millionaire thing and we we gave all the speakers one of those you weren't that special we had we had something for all 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 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 LA 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 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 was there something scannable in there yeah we'

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 past of the team and they're like yeah yeah fair enough put that on the pile of cool things um so the point is is I'm saying that to say these things 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 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 wither without you energy which is when when my team do this we pick 30 or 40 people who'd make a 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 there you go it comes around again it always comes around again 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 have tens of thousands to invest or whatever but I'm curious about your personal investment thesis with a with a 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 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 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 pessimist 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 think 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 in 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 Chilean 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 chile and basil ice cream

what what is the journey that anrea 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 youel Val ated 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 quizzes discussion groups all of those are great audience Builders y 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 Clos deals to actually get sales across the line and to do that predictably and reliably so for sales we established 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 lead the leader of the company who's going to embody the brand and you got to build a team of eight people around them um a general manager Marketing in 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 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 digitization of the value so you're getting ready to scale which means for example moving physical relationships to

a CRM some kind of data 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 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 8 to 10 people is raise revenue per person so let's say you got 10 people with 100,000 per person so you 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 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 exible have you got to make a decision earli that was a mouthful it's so true it's so it's so funny 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 or ready or able to adjust to the environment you have at 30 40 50 60 100t and it's and part of the re 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 multidisiplinary individuals that can kind of wear a few hats but not do anything exceptionally well Swiss Army knives they can do 25 things badly yeah exactly and then when you get to like 50 60 70 people it's really Specialists Specialists bread knife bread knife 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 have I've had to wrestle that 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 2 to 20 million jump so at the moment the person who's leading Dent Global is Glenn Carlson Glenn 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 2 to 20 million jump so there's the Z to there's the 0 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 because I've known Glenn 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 2 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 0 to2 million phas 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 don't mean to share this without asking him but I'm sure

like he's in control of the edit so he can take it out if he doesn't like it 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 Jack's run this podcast from zero so zero subscribers to where it is now 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 5 million subscribers he's getting someone else to redesign a set so that the lighting is amazing it takes a certain kind of person to put winning over ego I love that yeah you know what I mean and and I I think about there's so many You Know Jack probably didn't know the profoundness of that moment to me but someone who is applauded from every oh you've built the best you know whatever

for him to go 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 overing is not underlings that a great company is great because you bring in overing not underlings uh so an underling is someone who's not as good as you are and an overing is someone who's way better than you are so it's that confidence to bring in the overing um all of my businesses have been great because overing run them uh

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 uh 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 Steven 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 2 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 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 7s the business had a high Watermark 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 unsalable 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 um and what they're willing to do is to do a vendor sale exit Cody Sanchez who had she talks about this I've done deals like this um and actually Jeremy with the 100 foot yacht that's how 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 Watermark so there are so many people who what 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 laundry mat yeah well here's a real life example a real life example from a friend of mine uh is called

kit King and basically he uh 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 uh 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-engage the team the team were totally un I think there's about a dozen people and they'd not had a team meeting in ages they' not they was no vision for the business they' not gone and spoken to customers in in forever and then he comes in goes and talks to customers starts hosting some online events starts um sending out messages starts digitizing builds a bit of the brand and that business has I think grown like 500% in like 2 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 is 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 uh can I pay you the 1.2 million over 6 years 7 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 uh be the security for that loan so if we screw grew 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 um 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 s years and if we don't then you 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 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 get involved in that right so that that's a huge opportunity mive the Arbitrage and 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 that get the URL I said that first trademark yeah could you guys grab the URL wait a second I'll get so the boring B business uh 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 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 he's very profitable he's now set up martial arts schools in Kenya Nepal all of these different areas that are um struggling areas now have a martial arts academy he set up his own charity and he's basically doing martial arts uh schools for kids who have never had any 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 and 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 uh 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

um 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 World 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 as you'd said gone for Bill's business and presented a young fresh dig

to social First Vision um 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 was already doing 2 million that's high water mark was 4 million and it's hared over the last six s 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 Harper Collins 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 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 MH

you know and those are two different things but they're imperative what I've come to learn over the last 5 years is the people in my life that are the best wealth creators have those two skills they understand how to structure a deal and they understand how to sell the deal yes yeah sales is sales that demand creation the the doing the deal and structuring uh phenomenal skills um and everything that you want is on the other side of a structure that exists so with scor app uh 20 22 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 parau who's the head of AI for war 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 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 two weeks so from two weeks we went from no AI uh integration to having Professor Andy poto who's a PhD of AI who's got 25 year background of AI as our adviser because we set up an Advisory Board um so I just knew

what structure to structure it is MH you know so how do I say can you help me I need to figure this out yeah you no but how do you someone that's you at the very start of their Journey they don't understand all these they don't have structures I mean it's hard because in theory you you know you go talk to a CFO and you basically talk to an experience CFO who's done a lot of m&a and you just say oh actually do you know it's even wild today you don't even need a CFO you

go on chat DV 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 chat

gbt will do a good job of that or a good starting point draft the heads of terms you can ask chaty PT today yeah dra draft the heads of terms for that deal review the draft of heads of terms to see if there's any emissions or mistakes would you have ch now that you've seen that would you do anything differently yeah I would change this send the email draft an email to the finance director of this company proposing that we acquire the business with no money down right 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 a 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 hid an iceberg 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 means Sam Alman um from chat GPT you said earlier business is a team sport now he has a WhatsApp group Sam mman the founder of chat GPT and in that WhatsApp group he's got a bet with some friends that they'll be the first ever one person billion doll 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 chat P2 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 yes it probably will happen it like assuming out 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 beat 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 context and create a context together then the content can happen using ai ai without that context it doesn't know what to do so it doesn't have any purpose right now yeah 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 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 it as it stands right now humans are great at context and AI is 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 is 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 Tik Tok

huh uh how about we get you to spend 16 hours on Tik Tok 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 consumer you'll listen to more stuff watch more stuff do more like spend more money because AI is good at that or if you use it to build stuff and make stuff and produce stuff you will be doing super human levels of creativity 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 Zoey Hu whoop until and many many more and today I'm excited to announce that flight fund is now live on Cedar 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 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 ce10 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 to Jesus moment

and then they now espouse work life balance in hindsight after having a massive breakthrough from the massive amounts of work that they did and that is typically the pathway towards the work life balance Guru so 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 it's app 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 onto YouTube and that people can watch them a year later 2 years 3 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 Uber driver I used to work in McDonald's for two days I worked in McDonald's as well

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 yeah something 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 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 yes 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 lovable 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 go energy you were describing the way you don't necessarily need the sale yeah with or without you energy that definitely happened um yeah so you know when I became an entrepreneur and I was speaking in front of big audiences and wrote bestselling 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 wither without you energy I had wither without you energy and we recognized each other as um great 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 the incredible books um that are real Smash Hits and 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 Bas 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 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 there is a huge compliment coming from you thank you oh no 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

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Commerce platforms if you guys haven't tried Shopify and your 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 Bartlet and you can get started for [Music] $1 [Music] oh