so I've been an entrepreneur for over 20 years I've done seven startups that went Z to a million in their first 12 months I've done three startups that have been worth more than 10 million in my 35 years in business I built 19 companies invested in 79 startups and I've made more money than I'll ever need I know how to make money but in my opinion no one puts it quite as practically as Daniel Daniel Priestley has grown seven startups from zero to multi-million dollar Revenue three of them have gone to 10 plus million and
it's about to teach you exactly how to do the the same for free if I were to charge you for the following it would be worth $25,000 but I'm going to give it all to you for free so if you can't sit down get a notepad out and listen I'm sorry but you're probably not going to make it so what are we going to learn today well we're going to go through five uh five stages um starting with doing an entrepreneur apprenticeship running your first uh side hustle or campaign then a little uh startup business
with 1 to three people building up to 3 to six people building up to 6 to 12 people and we're going to talk about what do we do along the way for each now when we get to about 6 to 12 people we should be a seven figure business with six figure profit and then from there if we want we can build it bigger and whatnot but we're kind of going to go through those first few stages a lot of people wanted you and me to argue in their debate and we might have some of
that today I reckon we're going to agree on more things than we disagree on I don't agree let's go let's start off with apprenticeships then shall we so yeah so apprenticeship this is where you and I might disagree cuz you run around tell and everyone go start a business straight away um and I have a different view on this I think you should do an entrepreneur apprenticeship so in the UK we have something like 6 million businesses already set up um these are small businesses um there's a tiny percentage of them that are large corporates
that have 250 or more people uh more than half of them have one person a small number of businesses few hundred, have got like sort of 10 or more The Sweet Spot for doing an apprenticeship is where you join a team that is somewhere between three and 12 people and that you have direct access to the founder what you want is to be a direct report to an entrepreneur so you're a number two or a number three to an entrepreneur and you're in contact with an entrepreneur almost every day uh while you're working for the
entrepreneur so you don't think just go start your business you you're saying go work for someone first to learn from them right absolutely so there's three things that you want right so when you're doing an entrepreneur apprenticeship you're looking to get three things which is number one self awareness uh understanding your own strengths and weaknesses understanding what you're good at what you're not so good at um who you need on your team to compliment you you're learning about yourself uh number two you want something called commercial awareness and Commercial awareness is basically your understanding business
you understand how businesses work you're starting to figure out how we do demand and Supply so how do we Supply something how do we demand generate demand for something um and all of that fits under this commercial awareness it's a little bit of an understanding of maybe a little bit bit of accounting maybe a bit of marketing bit of sales but you're actually learning how businesses work in general before we go any further let me tell you how I protect my business and myself online using incognit the sponsor that helps make this video possible today
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incog will automatically take care of it to keep your data safe click the link in the bio and use the code Simon squib to get 60% off an annual plan incog is available risk-free for 30 days this means you can try it out and get a full refund if you aren't happy with the service so what's stopping you go protect your data I want to thank incog for helping us fund people's dreams let's get back to this video and then the final thing is you're learning how to get resources like how do we actually get
uh money how do we get um access to advertising how do we get access to suppliers uh maybe how do we get team members to join so these are the resources so if you have a great entrepreneur apprenticeship you will walk out of there with better self-awareness commercial awareness and access to resources so my my my fear of this cuz actually in my new book watch a dream I say this is what people should do as well but with one caveat yeah don't get trapped there because once you start having a salary and people telling
you what to do like I I noticed kids that are gone to University uh then they get told by their teacher what to do all the time and then they can't think for themselves anymore so it's making sure that if you are the founder you've got no one in a way to turn to right where you a lot will be solved if you stick with a 3 to 12 person company because and how long should people be there for until you've got self- awareness commercial awareness and uh access to Resource and when do you know
you've got those things so well self-awareness is you're going to know your strengths your weaknesses what is a opportunity for you and what is a threat for you right so you're going to start having a good answer to these you're going to know your origin story your mission and your vision so those are the key things that you'll get with your um self-awareness so once we're talking to um a mentor and they say tell me what would be a good opportunity for you and you've got a good answer to that you've got a bit of
self you need to make sure you have a Founder that asks you that isn't just using you it may not be that the founder and it's okay for the founder to use you that's fine make someone else everyone I know has made someone else Rich first um I made I made my old boss Millions I made other people millions and then I made myself mils so I don't mind because while they're using you you're learning and that's not well as long as that's clear with each other as long because sometimes I do think people don't
make it clear I I I believe that anyone that starts anywhere especially a small company could ask for Equity could why not if you have equity in the business you're working if you spend two years there that's why wouldn't you get rich at the same time as the found it well because you're not probably not going to get rich in their business and a lot of Founders if you're an early stage Apprentice they're not going to see the value in having you as an equity partner and that's just going to rule you out if you
went to an if you came to me as an let's say you you you turn up and you're 19 years old and you go I want equity in this business if I'm going to work in this business I go piss off right it's not happening um I guess it depends on on your value to the you would then miss out on the opportunity to work for me and learn from me um you have a little bit of respect for someone that said no i' say that is totally naive I'd say that that shows me how
little you know about business I always like it makes me smart every timeone cheeky would make me smart and one thing I do like about it is it shows that they're ambitious and I have said in 12 months time you'll have Equity I got kicked out of my first business by my mentor for asking for Equity really yeah wow sometimes we have survival bias by the way which is why good for us to debate this I have exactly the opposite experience it's like I started a business from scratch straight away without really working for other
people that got me all of this quite quickly because I had no choice to learn it very quickly and equally at the same time I've always asked for equity in any businesses that I've worked I'll tell you why another reason you don't want to ask for Equity because it ties you in if you're going to be an equity holder and they're going to take you serious they're going to say well if you are are going to be a partner in this business you got to commit long term and you can't just walk away and if
you know there's clawbacks and all this sort of stuff the truth is the first business you go and work for you may not want to be there for more than 2 years you don't want to be tied in as a shareholder um I think that's key you just said though first ever business though cuz that's slightly different sometimes I think some of my audience to be working for someone else for a few years they're not getting any of this from that job they're working a call center for nothing wrong with the call center no but
they're not getting this experience they're just if you're do sales sales is a great place to get self- awareness commercial awareness and access to resources that's not a bad place I got my first job was my first proper job was McDonald and I loved working at McDonald's I learned how to run a multi-million dollar restaurant at 15 by working at McDonald's and I could not believe my luck but you knew you weren't going to work McDonald's forever right you went in there with the right mindset learning experience believe it or not I actually thought at
the time I was going to buy a franchise I I ordered the franchise kit I wrote a letter to the CEO of McDonald's Australia did he did and he sent me the franchise kit and um so I did think I was going to own a McDonald's I got I own a McDonald's but some people go into jobs thinking I'm just going to do this job and this is what I do to make money everything I've ever done I've done it full in full on when I was a Pizza Hut delivery driver I used to put
on the big jacket you didn't have to wear it but I knew that I looked more like a pizza delivery driver with the jacket I put the pizza delivery hat on right and I and I discovered one line that doubled my tips which is I ran three red lights to get this to you so it's nice and hot and they would always give me twice as many tips and um so I learned my I learned my craft I learned how to show up to someone's door with a big smile on my face you're highlighting something
really important which is be all in whatever you all in so so just because I am scared some people go all in and they get stuck in this this idea wellity will get them stuck well Equity also doesn't necessar mean you stuck I mean PL plenty of people I work with have equity and left and annoys it annoys people if you go to a founder and say I'm going to be amazing and I'm going to be your best person ever and give me a little bit of equity and then you leave I had that someone
joined me I gave them equity and they left I just brought the equity back off them cuz they had made the company more valuable in that time it's not there's no right wrong that's why we debate this but when I'm talking about this I'm talking about your first experience here of working for someone who's got 3 to 12 people you might be working in a landscape gardening business you might be in a pest control business you might be in a call center you might be in A Little Agency digital agency marketing agency you might be
working for an author and helping them to coordinate they're speaking to us you're doing something at a small scale and the reason 3 to 12 direct access to the founder and I want visibility into the demand and Supply so when you're in a big corporate let's say you go work for KPMG or something you have absolutely no idea how that business works the partner's doing something over here that's invisible to you someone else is doing something over here they're invisible totally true so you get shoved in a corner and they say your job is to
cut and paste this into this spreadsheet and do this and then come up with these slide decks and you don't even know why you're doing it when you're in a 3 to 12 person organization you can see oh that's how they run ads that's how they make sales that's how the money gets made that's how we deliver it that's how we make customers happy that's how we go above and beyond to make sure that every runs so you can see the whole production yeah I love this by the way I again like the the general
headline is go work for someone else and get experience I don't agree with that go work in a company where you know you're going to get experience that I really like but how do we make sure people know when to leave because this is a definite track they're going to get a salary drug yeah they might get stuck so how do you know these other two things here how do you know when you're kind of okay I have it now I need to leave so you start to feel like you're filling these buckets so commercial
awareness is I understand sales and marketing I understand operations I understand a little bit about Finance right so we're starting to tick the boxes and say I I understand how to make a customer I know how to deliver I know how the finance works I understand where we're getting our suppliers from right so we understand all this and you say yeah I'm starting to understand how this business Works self-awareness I understand what I'm good at my strengths I understand what I'm not so good at my weaknesses I'm starting to understand what an opportunity looks like
for me which is linked to origin mission and vision and I understand what could be a threat for me all right so this is the self-awareness and um resources is you say I if I needed to I could raise 20,000 I could people would be able to give me 20 grand I can get a little bit of credit I could get a credit card uh I could if I needed one yeah right no I'm not no I know I mean many people have started business on credit cards including me for that matter I don't like
them me as well right I started on a credit card um resources are I know how to get suppliers uh resources are I know how to get a mentor um outside of this um so this is where you start ticking off all okay all these resources that I need I could get a little bit of cash I could get a little bit of this I know how to set up a company I know how to do a setup right I know how to get bank accounts right so now you're actually saying okay I can put
in place all the things that I would need for a business I've got self-awareness about a good opportunity I've got commercial awareness about how business works so tick tick tick so now we can move on to our next uh phase so side hustle is essentially an open and shut campaign what we're trying to do is we're trying to run a campaign uh and the key here is that it start right it it has a start point and a finish point and ideally what we want is about 90 days that that these things don't take up
more than 90 days and they complete they're done so for me when I was uh a teenager I sold Rose's door to door and the start point was I had to find a wholesaler uh for roses and I spent $40 buying uh 100 roses and then I wrapped them in cellophane and uh ribbon and then I went door too and I sold them for $400 uh and I made $360 profit um and that was you me each like okay now I see what you mean now that makes more sense yeah so so in and this
this whole campaign probably took 10 days um in terms of having the idea to uh having a completion it was done um so I had the idea uh I knew that it was Valentine's Day I probably had the idea on the 1st of February and the 14th of February was coming up I thought oh Valentine's Day I'll just walk around door to door and I'll sell roses so in that situation I had an open and shut within 2 weeks and I could see I could test myself can I can I spend $40 on roses can
I walk around sell them all and make 400 bucks so buy for 40 sell for $4 each and if you haven't got the $40 to buy the Roses maybe you can do a deal with the person owns the Roses to share some of the what are you talking about some people don't have that money that's why you go get a job that's why you go work for a small business right those three circles I'm bit joking resources right this is what I'm talking about that last slide was commercial awareness self and resources if you're sitting
there going I don't have $40 that resources piece is missing you need to go get a job but my hack would be to say to the Roses supplier I'll share some of the profit with you if you give me the roses for free but I hear you I think today's about your knowledge not mine the other thing I've actually by the way I've just done this myself I literally just bought 200 hoodies yeah and I'm sold them and now I'm going to make another 200 hoodies there you go and and you know exactly therefore what
your costs are what your margins are and appetite for the product so these are open and shut campaigns let me give can I grab the the Eraser let me give you another one that I did so when I was 18 years old I did a nightclub party and what I did is I contacted the nightclub and I said hey we want to do an under 18's nightclub on school holidays and we're going to you're normally closed on a Tuesday night I said we're going to we want to open up on a Tuesday night uh we'll
pay the additional cost of security and bar staff you keep the soft drink sales we will keep the door and we'll pay all the additional costs um and they said fine let's do it so I met with the general manager we agreed a deal um all cash after the event um so uh the good news was I didn't need any cash up front I did need some money to print flies and I went and stood out the front of schools and I handed out flyers I went to where kids work and I handed out fers
I went to the shopping center and I handed out fers uh and basically uh the whole thing was probably 2 months right so it was a 2mon cycle I did my deal making here where I put my deals together I did my promotion where I handed out flyers and then I delivered the the evening right so this was the the party um I got prizes uh I did a deal with the radio station as well this is still very current today by the way people could do this today yeah exactly um now we ended up
with 1,000 people showing up times by $10 which this was 20 this was 25 years ago so prob I don't know how many how much the numbers would be now but couple of million pounds per ticket probably ,000 tickets time $10 so I did 10,000 in cash um on the night out of that came about 2,000 for the additional costs of opening so I I made 8K uh and it was all it was all pretty good right so but it was open and shut so 2 months open and shut uh that now that's obviously a
bit of risk because I had to get a th000 people at 10 bucks ahead to all show up at the same time in the same place or else I was in trouble because I owed the nightclub and they own bouncers um I to the other that's great about this is you don't have to own the infrastructure so a lot of people think I'd have to open up a nightclub they have a dream of opening up an nightclub they have to go and open anything up you just work with someone who needs you to do this
because their marketing is Never Enough exactly so these are all just like super little startup campaigns and basically for each one of these campaigns that I've done and I've done lots of little startup campaigns it's open and shut the key here is that you don't get yourself long-term committed if it doesn't work you just shut it down um so you're trying to make these which by the way again opposite to me I always tell people build a brand not a business eventually I think eventually but these are just test campaigns well personal brand is a
part of this process anyway because if you're doing that campaign a nightclub owner likes you you know your personal brand there's lot of things you can do I end up doing six parties so we did um we we ended up with two nightclubs and we did three at one and three at the other um and we made 10 grand pretty much much every time we did it U got better and better at doing it and for for a period of time from 19 to 20 I was doing nightclub parties and walking away with 10 grand
worth of cash or 8 Grand worth of cash after so if you're if you're 20 today you haven't got a lot of money social media all the rest of it what would you do um so let's come up with a an open and shut case I would walk around a wealthy neighborhood and say you've probably got loads of clutter around your house and there's stuff that you wish you could sell but you haven't got the time you haven't got the time to photog stuff in my house like that yeah say what we do is we're
going to keep a list of all the stuff that uh that we um that you want to give me and I'm going to list it I'm going to sell it and we'll give you 40% and we take 60% for selling it um but we just get that clutter out of your house and uh you just come out that idea right now yeah I love it that's a really good idea take it go for it like someone's going to say oh well okay here I have my bike you know I'm not using my bike anymore uh
someone's going to say oh I've got a baby car seat someone's going to say I've got a you know Nintendo 64 thing someone's going to say I've got these leather jackets that I don't wear anymore right so there's going to be stuff in wealthy neighborhood well I even I tried to sell stuff on eBay and then I had such a nightmare with a person trying to buy the bloody chair I just canceled it you know so you can take that away from me take 60% of the profit I don't mind the the wealthy neighborhoods they
don't really care about the money no I want the stuff out my house they want the Clutter gone I don't want to throw away the stuff and waste it they don't want to waste it and they also really don't want strangers coming to their house so if you can take it away and sell it somewhere else yeah well if you can become a trusted brand I don't mind you coming to my house yeah there you go yeah so so there you go that's that's an open and shut right so you go knocking on a bunch
of neighborhood doors just do a whole video now on ideas for people this alone could be brilliant so that that would be a simple one um yeah there's that's awesome okay so so the hustle stage short term come up with something that can make you money don't get locked into to it and learn how to build build revenue and build and open and shut right little 90-day tests now the beauty is you could still be doing this while working at this other job so you could still be working in a job were you doing another
job when you did the nightclub thing yeah yeah I did I had a night club oh well I had so many jobs I was I was on the weekends I was a door- too appointment setter for a roof insallation company I was doing a little bit here and there with a pest control company I was a McDonald's person I was a Pizza Hut delivery driver worked worked in a um weddings venue bar on Fridays and Saturday nights till 3:00 in the morning what drove you this is a lot of ambition what what I mean people
listening might be I can't be bothered with that you know what what what would you think was driving you um probably I I was an embarrassed Teen um and I had low selfworth and felt that um I needed to prove myself and I just needed to do stuff that would I I went to a very sporty school and I wasn't great at sport and I felt like I needed to find my thing um I also I wanted to do stuff with my life and I knew that the default was I'd do nothing so I was
going to miss at everything if I I didn't do stuff I'd be missing out but it resonates with something I've written about my book which is um you need to have pain to actually go out there and make things happen you don't just want it you you needed it you couldn't you wanted to prove that you were good enough yeah okay so we we've got the whole get a job uh but only if it's going to teach you and then we've got the side hustle uh which hopefully will teach you not to get the job
anymore now what okay so in the military they have something called a scout team and a scout team is two people who go off and Scout an opportunity in entrepreneurship we call this co-founders and co-founders are essentially two people and typically we have someone who is what we call the commercial co-founder or the sales and marketing co-founder and we have the technical co-founder or you might call them the Ops co-founder so uh one person says can we sell it one person says can we build it um so what we're looking for at this stage is
potentially to find ourself a co-founder and we want to say all right the two of us and and the data suggests that co-founders outperform uh solo Founders so this is where you get together I'm a big fan of working with someone I mean I interviewed Nick Jenkins from moon pig who said I don't want to have anybody else in know as a co-founder I like to be a soul founder I personally all the business I've had that as successful it's because I had someone El they keep me going they motivate me it's more fun it's
more fun and yeah more fun yeah you have less Equity I think the businesses are bigger because of everything yeah I I think you end up I mean Equity as a percentage is a bit of a red herring because I'd rather 1% of Facebook than um than 100% of a tiny little agency totally you're stealing my lines that's one of my lines I totally agree so a sales and marketing front end person which I you know Steve Jobs type person and Ops wnc guy in the back who's making the product that's making the all these
work right y so um so I've got score app score app is now um on the fast growth list so we're on the fast growth index one of the 200 fastest growing companies in the UK we're about to do a big partnership with you guys too people can buy the book using score very very good so um so we've got score score is Dan and Steve so the two co-founders I'm the guy who gets out there and sells the score app um stuff I don't know how it's built Steve is the CTO technical guy who
knows how to build score even now you don't really know how it's built I I the same with help Bank by the way I have an engineer team Yi is the head of it is my Ops uh partner I have no idea how I built it he tells me sometimes magenta or something like that and I'm like okay good Ruby on Rails as long as it works it does what we promise yeah we're not overselling for a long time I don't even have a log right I definitely don't have a log for anything technical right
so I'm not allowed to get in and break anything but it actually works well for me because I often ask Steve for things that I don't know if it's hard to build or not and that naivity stops me uh that naivity allows me to ask for what I want and not know whether it's well that's again Steve Jobs said make a phone with one button I think people want that yeah and the engineers were like one go no you know that's a nightmare exactly often the engineers will keep over engineering whereas in many cases I've
said to Steve and the dev team don't build those features you'll confuse people yes that's true right so keep those up your sleeve but don't build them because we're moving too fast so sales and Ops good chemistry that's that's one of the things that we want to do now what we want to do is conduct fast and cheap experiments um so the fastest and cheap experiments to launch a business is a waiting list uh so a waiting list is where you say we're going to launch a piece of technology and it's going to it's going
to be a hoverboard that walks your dog for you around the neighborhood it's like a skateboard but it floats in the air um and we're going to build this and I want that by the way yeah wouldn't it be good I I did this method for help Bank we had 10,000 people sign up in three days and we also knew people needed a product then exactly so then you what you do is you say here's a picture of it uh here's what it's going to do here's how it's going to work if we get enough
people who engage with this then we'll build it and you just get them to sign up on the weight list nearly nothing as well you get a weight list page done really cheap it doesn't cost anything you do it on score app for free so that's one of um so a weit list is really really good as a very very minimum 30 people on a weit list is the absolute minimum that tells you anything about whether the idea is good better than that would be 150 um and better than that would be 1,000 plus so
if you can't get 30 to join the weit list you're not going anywhere this is do not pass go do not collect $200 you are not going anywhere if you if you cannot get 30 people on a waiting list forget the idea um 100 or resell the idea in a way that makes sense because it might be you're selling it wrong if you haven't got 30 it could also be the idea might be good you just haven't sold it right so yeah so go go back to the drawing board and see what we can what
we can do again um it's actually not a bad idea to test 5 to 10 ideas so rather than saying I'm committed to this particular idea you say actually you know what let's come up with to 10 ideas we'll launch a few waiting lists and see which one performs best when someone joins a waiting list you always ask them about five questions how much you willing to spend what problem you're trying to solve what outcome you're trying to get you want to get these kind of things on the waiting list and then so you've got
the data so that's a good one um another one is called an intro event uh so an intro event is you say we're going to be launching a new credit card um and it's going to be a special credit card for medical clinics uh people who work in the medic industry and it's going to have special benefits for those who do and you say uh we're going to do an introduction event on Zoom it's a 30 minute introduction if you're interested in learning more about what we're doing register for the intro event so an intro
event is absolutely awesome a discussion group um uh so a special interest Discussion Group you be say I'm going to be launching a weight loss business uh helping people to lose weight uh if you're interested in weight loss we're going to be running a WhatsApp group uh for 400 people join the WhatsApp group uh and we're going to have daily topics and daily motivation and all of that sort of stuff so we're going to put together a discussion group um so that's always a really good one so these are all fast cheap experiments and what
we're trying to do is see can we get 30 150,000 people to join uh a waiting list a discussion group or an intro event um in order to test the idea love it it's so simple low cost and it will allow you to validate your idea and once you've got this I don't know 30 email addresses it's also a chance when the product's ready to start getting Revenue because you can instantly contact those people you're not relying on social media posts which don't necessarily Reach people or all the people that might want your product you
can directly email them I think collecting email addresses is so underrated in today's business World somehow social media is taken over is the cool thing butle and if you can even also phone numbers the ability to call people you know can we actually have a conversation because a lot of the times people will say oh look I didn't buy because you didn't have it in purple oh why was that important to you yeah the data feedback where you can actually have a conversation with someone is is a fascinating thing and you go well of course
we can do it in purple I did an intro event but a version of this which is basically I I do a zoom with all the people that were interested in the product and have a round table discussion with everyone that pre-signed so these all feed each other of course exct but intro events doesn't have cost money it can be online I did a zoom and I asked people why did you sign up what is it you want out of this product what would you like features wise in this product and literally they helped us
build the product before we'd even built the product I've got a friend who's a billionaire and he um he sold his company for 900 million and then restarted a new business that's now worth over 2 and a half billion uh when he was launching that business he sat down with 150 people and asked them questions about what would you like uh he's a billionaire he already had 900 million in the bank and he did one to one little sales meetings yeah it's so underrated that data collection everyone's trying to do everything at scal so at
dat data collection this one's a big one and this is called an assessment an assessment is probably one of the greatest sales tools and greatest underused sales tools so for example if I was going to do a weight loss business I would do a weight loss assessment that people can take and that's where we start the business we start with the assessment if I was going to do a uh image Consulting business we start with an image Consulting assessment and we sell the assessment and see if we can get people to take the assessment um
it's funny this this is clearly because I'm I'm about to use um I'm about to use score app right as to for people to join the waiting list to buy my book this clearly this assessment's in there so people do do you have a dream do you want to make it happen so let's assess where you are in that journey and so this whole method you're talking about we're about to launch for the books so assessment piece number one is do you have a dream yeah right and number two is do you have what it
takes right right what tools do you have presently what don't you have what do you think you're missing what do you need those sorts of things yeah so you might have a 9 out of 10 for dream and a 1 out of 10 for having what it takes so it's like great keep your dream but learn to do what it or you might have out of 10 for the dream but you might have ofs out of 10 you got all these but you don't have a dream to focus on so now we know what to
do with you so the assessment super super powerful if you can get people to answer questions you learn about them you figure out what's going on with them it's funny my street content is basically an assessment of people it is so I what's your dream it's amazing what people reply you can see this levels of people out in their lives what people's ambition is what lately has been a like an idea that someone's wanted to start well someone today we just helped them uh they want to teach people to grow food in their home so
that they understand one how to grow food two become more self-sufficient and three enjoy the flavor of what a carrot really tastes like when it's not gone for a supermarket love it so what most people in that situation will do as a mistake is they will create a curriculum of learning they'll film a bunch of videos that people can watch they'll create a recipe book that people can follow they'll go out and like you know buy all this equipment all this sort of stuff and what I would say is just simply launch a waiting list
totally are you interested in learning how to build a garden right are you uh because they can do it today and it cost no money it cost all of this and that is the conversation having them but they're making all that you have no idea if it's going to work right so if you did an intro event on Zoom how to start a garden in your in your back Garden um how to grow a carrot would be a fun introduction of it maybe a 20-minute um Workshop to join how to grow a carrot in your
garden I also think a taste test like what a carrot tastes like from a supermarket versus you've actually so you could go into a public area and you could do an assessment can you tell the difference between homegrown and supermarket and then people taste it and then if they could taste the difference say would you would you be willing to join the waiting list for our training program that we're going to be launching you know what I love about this is most people's excuse for not starting a business is they don't have money so the
interesting thing is if you follow this process and you have all this interest resources to your point earlier will easily come to you if like when I got 10,000 people signed up to help back that was my validation for a few people that came board and helped us you know like wow people need it right okay there's help it's funny because even if people on the surface thought your idea was stupid which they did once they've got 10,000 names they're like okay we'll back it totally we thought this was crazy but we'll we'll do it
so um olden days we used to call this clipboard um and clipboard was walking down the street and asking stopping people with a cpb right we don't have to do do it all online sa us although clipboard itself is still kind of an interesting to go Street go the streets and ask so um I've got a question for you in a minute but I want to make sure before I I have my question this is basically what the scout team are doing the two of you are working together now you can do this as one
person um if you're the salesperson especially um but it's kind of fun to do it with a friend so your scout team you've got yourself you got a co-founder you got you basically launching a waiting list right and at this stage you're not necessarily setting up a company or a bank account or all this sort of stuff you're exploring you're seeing if you can get a uh a little launch Campaign together see if you can get validation so my question then is um if this if this is the whole part of this section is a
lot of people will be thinking how do I find a co-founder so let's say they are an O person they're looking for a salesperson the salesperson they're an OP person they didn't go to Eaton so they don't have some fancy connection network how would they go about getting a co-founder a lot of the time we bump into co-founders when we have a job um so we bump into people who also have jobs and things like that um a lot of the time we can go networking for co-founders we can also go on to online like
social networking for entrepreneurs there are groups on Facebook there are groups on Instagram there are accounts to follow you literally go onto some of the busy accounts people could go onto your Instagram account and say I'm looking for a co-founder uh I'm working on a business that starts up this they could even go in the comments of my post that's what I mean yeah exactly yeah um so we live in the you know for me when I was starting out you could really only get a co-founder by people you went to school with people you
worked alongside um you could go to physical networking but now there's this whole dimension of like finding an online co-founder as as well M um one thing you might do is say let's not agree whether we're 5050 or 7030 let's not agree any of that yet let's just kind of see whether let's explore we'll we'll sit down I want to talk about percentages a bit later actually because percentage stuff comes up a lot people don't know whether to do it 50/50 I mean I did it 5050 with my last very successful company and it worked
for me but I know other people done 50-50 then have a deadlock and there's problems so we can talk about that later um just on this though so co-founder wise I think if you agree with me is write down your skills and what you love to do and then write down what you're missing because it's like the red car strategy you know that way you know if I talk about red cars right now suddenly everyone's going to see red cars everywhere otherwise you won't spot them if you don't write down exactly what you want you
probably won't spot them because they might not even be your typical social network right let's move on to the next stage then so what is the next stage called so we've gone from scout team to fire team fire team now is it yeah oh that sounds cool um actually and let me bring up my other whiteboard I'll show you where we are in the I got very good at wiping boards down I've discovered this could be a part-time job for me side hustle yeah you can always fall back on that lach a waiting list wait
so this take okay so so we did an apprenticeship y we did a side hustle campaign on our own put that together okay so now we've got a scout team we've got an offer that we're presenting to the marketplace I didn't mention this laps leads appointments presentations and sales that's one of the things that you're trying to get done you're trying to uh generate leads book appointments present to people and make sales and one of the perfect things that you're really trying to do is get into a bit of a lapse Rhythm so you might
say every single week we identify 30 leads we book six appointments we present to five cuz one doesn't show up and we make one sale and we go yep we're going to do that my first business we actually had actual shoe boxes where the leads went into one shoe box called the leads box and then we' called them in book appointments and they went went into the appointments box and then we present to them and they went in the presentation box and then we make sales and we put the sales form in the final box
we moved people through the um through the that was my first CRM system the software products that are really good at this but this is really important cuz you also know the numbers game then cuz people think I want to say oh I spoke to three people and they all said no we didn't speak to enough people you know like magic number is always 30 I use 30 all the time so 30 in science they call that statistical significance that they in science they train scientists not to judge unless they have enough samples so they
say well just because you met one person who uh didn't have a cough doesn't mean that more you know there's not a virus out there right so they say you got to test 30 samples to then extrapolate and for bigger populations you need 150 samples well I think also if you can verify those 30 people so you know if if you're selling female products and 30 men like you got to validate your all I'm saying don't judge don't judge until you've hit 30 yeah so here's the funny thing of your supposed demographic yeah what you
yeah you got to obviously not be total numb but some some people are I mean literally they don't they don't validate because you know it's to sell me the pen thing right people Mis understand that completely on they think sell me a pen is like do you want to buy this pen they don't understand you got to verify do you need a pen yeah yeah you don't need a pen I'm going to waste my time selling to you an expensive pen you don't want um so yeah you got to try and have a hypothesis right
so um we have a hypothesis and a null hypothesis if you're a scientist and then and then you based on your hypothesis you go do 30 samples and you see what happened right what what happened and then you go back and you say okay do I want to change my hypothesis or keep it um so we're just doing a scientific experiment laps laps laps but keep focusing on this leads appointments presentation sales leads appointments presentation so if you're doing a gardening business leads is we knock on this many doors we knock on 30 doors six
people say that they'll have us do an assessment five people show up one person says yeah you can do my gardening for the next 3 months right so it's leads appointments it's always just weekly laps and every week you need to say what is my laps Target on a Monday and on Friday what did we actually do what was our laps actual so now we're starting to get a real business we've done some validation we're getting laps leads I feel like I'm actually doing this with you I feel like we're building a business's wild right
so now we want what we call a four-person fire team um so did you come up with these names from military use the military ter so the military is scout team fire team section platoon right okay so I do scout team fire team section platoon it's not tradar no it's Royal Marines love it fire team let's go so fire team so here's what we need we need four people who are working together now and what we need is we need a person who is a key person of influence we need sales we need Ops or
customer fillment and we need someone called a Swiss army knife right Swiss army knife is a bit of everything right so they help out wherever we need to help out this key person of influence can be an associate like an advisor or um noninvolved person they just got the ability to bring bring you traffic for example they might open doors for you um they could be a chairman a director they could be an investor um they could be your angel investor um they could also be just someone on a day rate so for example you
could do a deal with someone who's a really well respected person in the industry and say can we book you for a day a month uh and we'll pay whatever your day rate is right and they say oh my day rate is 2 Grand 2 Grand a day and you go okay we'll sign a deal for 10 days over the year um but you want you need a key person of influence involved these people are worth their waiting gold because they open doors they give credibility well in they can do sales in theory at very
low cost as well so yeah acquisition they steer you in the right direction right so this is someone who's more experienced right so you need a key person of influence well you're the key person of influence with score rap yeah I was off Equity the other day to be a key person influence in a business I wouldn't take a fee but yeah I think I think it's actually really really interesting and a lot of people think they again this is kind of go back to what you were saying earlier about getting a job sometimes I
think you can have a a mentor or someone a key person influence join your business and as long as you've got the drive and ambition and you're willing to learn you can just start if you have this sort of person on board totally and that's how that's actually how big businesses work if you go to the biggest businesses that are on the public listed markets they have a chairperson who is the key person they CEO who who's brought in because everything works when those people well Steve Job again did this didn't he got Larry Ellison
and all these people in as key person of influence and they got him the contracts for you know selling Apple at scale yeah uh a great story is Nike so um it was a young guy early 20s just out of Stanford his name was Phil Knight and his lecturer um was called Bill Balman and Bill Balman wrote a book called jogging that sold a million copies and introduced people to the concept of going for a run um so Bill Balman became the non-executive director of Nike uh Phil Knight did all the work but Bill Balman
opened up all the doors got got him in with all the associations and started the ball rolling uh Phil Knight worked 60 70 80 hours a week Bill Balman probably Worked six or seven hours a month but they were Partners in that business um so it can work very well a lot of people when they get older and they're successful they're lazy they don't want to work as hard anymore exactly some people like this they want have portfolio of 10 companies I think people be shocked how many people are willing to do this as well
like a lot of people think oh I won't be able to get that very successful person on board if your Visions are aligned to their dreams like that guy wanted to help people run more so you know Phil KN say I'm going to help people run more well we're aign so why wouldn't he exactly at this level it's about vision and Mission right do we have a shared vision and Mission do we have shared values vision mission and values right and if we can get those guys into alignment now we're now we're going by the
way on rever first someone last week very interestingly they sent me a message and they said Gary ve is helping me with something I think you could help too so Gary ve wasn't even involved in the whole conversation you know he just leveraged Gary Vee's name so even so Gary ve said sure I'll help and then Gary ve had to do nothing after that cuz then that guy I also did this um when I had fluid when I first started my agency business um we was I was trying to find clients I'd ring up say
hi I'm fluid would you like us to help you with your marketing and people were like who are you never heard of it and then we maned to get a a small contract with Fortune Magazine so after that i' bring up say hi I'm Simon we work for Fortune Magazine I wonder if I could come and help you with your marketing as well so kpi leverage doesn't actually have just have to be a personand recogition exactly um it really helps I think you probably could have built faster if you had have like had the chairperson
from Fortune Magazine actually join your board or become an adviser you would have taken a load of money on exit though I might have taken 5% which actually you're right it might have been it took me 15 years to build that company so if I had him on board from the beginning could years well might and it could have been or it could have been the same amount of time but double the size that's why I'm making these videos I want people to know this knowledge and not wait 20 years to make the mistakes so
thank you for sharing it yeah my first company I did a deal for my key person of influence associate and it was 5% of Revenue oh okay not even Equity I offered well I offered equity and he said your Equity is not going to be worth anything but I just want the revenue right right so he he said 5% of Revenue we ended up doing in our first year we did 1.3 million right um with four of us we did 400,000 of profit so but he had Revenue not profit he had 65,000 of that 1.3
million wow so he got 65 Grand to just be the key person of influence which probably is quite cheap right when I think I don't know he didn't spend he didn't spend much time he was in uh on top of that his deal was 5% plus 1,500 every time he did a speaking engagement which was about twice a month so he got three grand a month for speaking and he got 5% of all revenue that we made uh so we had 65,000 plus 30,000 so about 100 Grand actually but I made 400,000 in my first
year I was 22 23 years old um but I would never have been able to do it without him without the key person of influence name I'd love to interview him I bet he did it because he believes in your vision and just wanted to help you as well I mean a lot of people a lot of people don't know because if he if he if he believed in my vision he would have taken Equity uh he well taking Equity early on in a company is actually risk yeah for some people look I'm just interested
I don't want to guys I don't want to muddy the waters you have the equity I just want how long did this last uh 2 years did you did a 2ear deal Reven we evolved the company past we moved the company into one day you didn't need that kpi anymore so yeah yeah so this is where you have an associate kpi you work your tails off here um and you know basically okay so what are we trying to do here we're trying to do a few things we're trying to do two campaigns for the year
so campaign number one is called laps and Laps is every week so it's a i i call this a perfect repeatable week or a weekly lapse campaign and what we're doing is every single week we're doing leads appointments presentation sales leads appointments presentation sales and we just sell sell sell sell sell make happy clients make happy clients make happy clients we just work like it's mostly laps and what's called experience score so laps is leads appointments presentation sales and experience score is where the customer happy on a scale of 1 to 10 how happy are
you right provided they're above an eight we're happy and we're making money and then the second campaign is what we call spotlights Spotlight campaigns is once a quarter we're going to get all the leads that we didn't sell to and we're going to give them something exciting to do up here and we're going to do some other special thing three or four times a year so that these leads that we didn't sell to get re-engaged in a spotlight camp campign and that's what our team of four are going to do so we're going to sell
sell sell every week and then every quarter we do something special brilliant yeah I mean one of the things I did was a client that I sold to that was happy I made them my advertising campaign there you go so I spotlighted the client Spotlight the client yeah and then the client would be very happy and then other people would be like I want friend I was spotlighted exactly and share it with their Network so yeah fantastic love so so like take an agency every single week we're saying we minimum we have to identify 30
opportunities we have to sit six appointments deliver five present uh five presentations uh and we have to make one cell and you say that's our that's our monthly or our weekly right that's what we could do over and over and over again but as you can see here 29 people didn't buy they go up to the spotlight and out comes one more sale so now we get two out of 30 so people listening to this might be thinking cuz we're now talking about this this part of the equation the sales part of the equation well
they might not be good at sales or they might think how do I find a salesperson I have a theory that anyone can sell like my best salesperson in my last company was my accountant and actually ironically all I did was I taught them how the business works I showed them the results we had for clients and they were CFO they would sit with other CFOs very proudly talking about how we fixed this company and we turned it around and we helped them not go bankrupt and then those CFOs would go back to the office
and tell their bosses and that's how we got the business I love it so I agree anyone can sell um but we've got to treat sales like a profession ideally we well typically if you're going to do that you can have opening what's called opening and closing or pointment setting and appointment closing so key people of influence are great at opening but they don't typically close or you can put people in front of the key person of influence who are highly qualified and they can close but they won't do the opening so you can do
a bit of that um the the key here is that you must treat it like a profession you got to get into a rhythm with it you can't around the truth is that entrepreneurship is mostly selling right if I unfortunately if we go back in time into the Industrial Age business was setting up the supply of something right so we had to be Hy Ford was setting up the supply of cars and there demand have to worry about didn't have to worry about uh demand everyone wanted a car every plus PR you were one of
the first that just sells itself because everyone hears about it yeah everyone had a horse and a car was going to be a lot better and cheaper so that now think about if we were in the Industrial Age if I was going to set up factory making scissors the truth is I could sell the scissors as fast as I can make them but that's not true today today it's all about Demand right demand and Supply so entrepreneurs who are successful today are the ones who know how to drive up demand and Supply isn't that which
is why um attention isn't down the new gold right I mean the new oil I think they I hate o a new gold I think it's kind of like there's definitely something really powerful in having the ability to sell and interestingly people might here again hear this think well I I don't know how to sell you might know how to make a video that can sell influence like for example I'll give you an example cuz I can see cynical right there's a friend of mine what he does he wears white gloves and he unpacks old
video games on a video gets millions of views in the video so the video makes money and then people like I want to buy that how can I buy it and they buy they sell it in the comments a good ex a good exception to the rule almost always people who do good videos that sell can sell one to one they can sell face to face sales is just is something you have to learn and shying away from it by making videos with white gloves on is for most people going to be a waste of
time right yes there's an example of someone who's doing it but I would much rather I'm thinking of the introverts who think they can't sell and I'm trying to give them a tool to sell int introvert only means this an introvert just simply means that you are energized by time alone and then you go out into the world extrovert means that you're energized with time with people and you go out into the world so being an introvert or an I've met some billionaires they can all sell but they're introverts almost all billionaires are introverts so
just to be clear I I am saying anyone can sell and you are also saying anyone can sell I think there are different ways to sell U but I really believe all my heart you're right that sales is now the key to a successful business my fear is when people hear that they'll think they can't sell and I'm just shown by the white gloves idea that there are many different ways to sell right and and maybe the white glov one's not the best example but like plent of people are selling gardening equipment by just videoing
themselves doing gardening I I I just want to push back though there's nothing nothing beats getting face to face with a customer it depends on what you're selling and I know that it feels well I know you might end up doing videos and videos are a great way to scale but the best people on videos they can sell one to one right so I just but can anybody sell one to one I I think that's I think anyone can sell but I can S one to one some people don't want to be comfortable with that
long term and I'm not saying do it long term I'm saying here's the here's the truth the truth is that if you Outsource sales let's say you bring in a great sales person they'll take your business if you can't sell they will take own Equity like I have someone doing sales for me they own Equity they won't go Steve Steve who's my CTO my co-founder he doesn't have to worry about me running off because we're Equity holders that's true right and I'm going to make sales and he's going to build the product but the truth
is that if someone in nine times out of 10 if you hire a white night salesperson who gallops in on their Noble Steed and makes a ton of sales they know they've got you over a barrel by the way we haven't covered these other two me and you love sales better help people the other army knife is going to be a bit of bookkeeping and it's going to be a bit of like organizing stuff and it's going to be a bit of like going and getting boxes from the printer and does this sound like an
intern right yeah it could be an intern yeah it could be an assistant could be an executive assistant an admin an intern Swiss army knife is think about an actual Swiss army knife 25 things bad right this person can do 25 things but not anything in particular they're they're the company generalist um when it comes to knives you've got a bread knife that does one thing really well it cuts bread but it's not very good at anything else and you have Swiss army knife that does 25 things badly it's not very good at cutting bread
but you can if you need to they just fill the gaps they fill the gaps they keep they keep the sales people selling cuz you might say Swiss army knife make sure that you run some Facebook ads to get these guys some more leads or SSS armi knife download all of that data we collected put it onto an Excel spreadsheet and give it to the sales guys to make sure that they have my wife worked in film and she was a suici knife at the beginning for MTV they just make it go get tea they
make file stings yeah so this is very very important uh it's overlooked actually because people see this as an insignificant role but actually without it you have a lot of gaps I have almost always hired an executive assistant as like one of my first hires I've had some phenomenal executive assistance and they absolutely maximize everyone's time because there's just so many things that need doing and you need to be able to have an idea and get someone onto it so this is the person who's on the ideas getting things done um the idea turns into
action because that this person exists now the operation they have to live and die by experience score so experience score is is the customer happy so they have to do whatever needs to be done to make sure that the customer got what they want they need to talk to the sales people what was this customer promised now in an agency it could be the design it could be if you're it's a social media marketing company it's actually doing the social media marketing uh if you're a uh veter Clinic it's actually a vet looking after the
cat uh so it's it's whatever the customer gets ironically though a lot of businesses survive experience score for example your experience with a bank what do you think since you think Bank experience score very low I bank with I bank with a bank that has previously had incredible I've had good experience with banks but private Banks private Banks yeah but General like experience got interested me because like I agree in a small business in the size of talking about now we're going to get on a bigger company in a minute this does really matter but
weirdly as you get bigger I think like they like Sky TV for example my experience them is so bad they they eventually get disrupted I hope Netflix comes along yeah but they've included Netflix now somehow they they're still yeah but but they're losing their margins yeah they make sales harder cuz these sales guys ring me up for sky and I'm like I don't want to work anyway this is this is for four person I but I think this this is for a smaller company very important for bigger company think about this an or this could
also by the way this could also be a gardening business this could be any number of businesses do something more exciting or it could be a tech company okay next what what's it called Next what's the uh military term next we are we we are going to be at the end of our journey for today and that is what we call a core team or a section do we want to call it a core team or a section let's call it a section section stay with the uh military so section okay so here's what our
team looks like so we've got a key person of influence we've got a general manager we've got marketing we've got sales we've got an admin and we've got maybe an executive assistant or a bookkeeper or financial controller um and we've got uh Ops and either Media or it right something like that so now we've got our eight person team now this can actually go up to 12 people you can have two sales people right or you could have well I've got this exact set up right now by the way and it's 15 people 15 people
this exact set up so you might you might have content and ads right so in marketing you might have head of content head of advertising you might have appointment setting appointment closing um so you might have Ops and you might have events uh you might have media and it right so 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 right so you can definitely go up to got a staircase manager that's probably 15's a little tricky at once we once we go past 12 I will say this once you go past 12
it's typically starting to be too big to be small and too small to be big and the team starts to kind of divide into two teams and there's a little bit of like friction and all that sort of stuff you're a little bit too big to be a small business and too small to be a big business so you're going through this kind of transition phase and this is why I want to stop at around 12 but a section typically we're looking at 8 to 12 actually I'll say I'll actually say 6 to 12 right
because that could be one person technically and that could be one well in my in my case because it's interesting to use a real life example I've got four people they this acts like a little team y four people acts like a little team four people acts like a little team and then in management so so so actually therefore these these guys all work as individual units they of course share data and information because what happens to the product the marketing team needs to know so the sales team can sell it in right exct yep
so um this is all about winning business and here's what we're going to do here we're going to do our laps we're going to do our Spotlight campaigns and now we're going to build a brand right so we're going to do finally brand got in there I love building a brand I think it's so undervalued this well this is now now that we're here we've got enough Stories We we've got self-awareness about the company we understand what kind of brand we want to build we understand the customer that we're selling to so now we're building
a brand so leads appointments presentations sales that's happening every week um Spotlight campaigns are happening quarterly and we're building a brand using social media and we're we're building a brand with all sorts of like um uh touch points and all of that sort of stuff we're really building out the brand so those are the three things that we're doing here um and then over this side we're building a product equal uh a product ecosystem uh and this is I'm going to call this an ATM and an ATM sending transaction model spits out cash and we're
going to have a gift product we're going to have a product for prospects we're going to have a core offering and we're going to have a subscription product for clients so we're going to have four products boom boom boom boom boom things that you can get for free things you can get cheaply the main thing that you do and the on going journey of what you do so four products and this team here is building out gift product for prospects core offering product for clients so we're selling it we're building it and this ke this
team is data right so they're keeping track of finances and they're keeping track of uh dashboards and all of that sort of stuff so they're making sure that there's plenty of data going here general manager is running the business right and the key person of influence this is probably the most important role they are this person is now internal and they are the face of the business so this is where you have a spokesperson and their job is to do the five PS so the five PS we've got pitching publishing products profile and partnership and
basically what they're doing is they are being the big the big name who pictures the business to the public publishes stuff uh about the business like um videos and articles and books and all that sort of stuff they help make the product decisions they raise their profile because personal Brands get cut through better than Company brands and they go and do the big big fish joint ventures and Partnerships right so that's their job they don't run the business the GM runs the business um and now they've got you've got an eight person team and this
is absolutely this the framework to build a business and this is the framework I'm building a billion dollar company right now myself this is the framework I'm using for it there you go and one thing on here that isn't on here it's probably in your mind but I want to add it is is community and interestingly I have a community manager who works with the Ops Team and the marketing team they work together because my community sells what we do community kind of ticks two boxes so Community ends up being in the marketing and it's
also a great gift yep so people can join a community for free or product for prospects right so it's they also get value from being part of it so yeah so it's early stage value and it's kind of cool because it's a gift or a product for prospects and it actually turns into sales but Community works if you've also got a core product and a product for clients so once you've got a way of monetizing a lot of times people say oh we've got a community but we haven't monetized well you've got this but you
haven't got a core product for clients um and some people say oh I've got a really amazing product but we're not getting enough people you need a gift or a product for prospects so I kind of say community is one of those tick box ticks all tick aot talked about enough and people don't know it and it's a big power up uh yeah perfect okay let's go on help bank and answer some questions and go have some chicken you hungry I'm ready for some chicken all right let's do it
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