EP019 - The Entrepreneurial Mastermind - Daniel Priestley

This is the Whole Man Academy podcast. I am Anthony Astbury. Our guest today is the wonderful Daniel Priestley. Daniel is author, speaker, father, CEO and co founder of Dent Global. And I saw he was described as an entrepreneurial mastermind, which sounds a bit like a Bond villain to me, but I like it. Daniel, welcome to the whole Man Academy.

Welcome to my lair.

Questions we always start with is, how are you and where are you?

So I'm locked down in London in Putney and actually we're very. When we got this place we thought wouldn't it be great having this back garden? And we didn't realize just how much of a godsend it would be. The ability to. I've got three kids under six so the ability to get them outdoors and in the garden has just been worth every penny.

Priceless. Yeah, I guess that's the thing. For many people doing lockdown at least if you've got an outside space is a lot more bearable.

Honestly. I've got a very good friend of mine who lives in a flat and they've got, they've got a two and a half year old and a three month old and I mean, you know, they are locked in all the time and it's really doing their head in. It's very, very difficult situation. I really feel for someone who's, as most people whose house is not built for lockdown, you know, it's, it's pretty horrendous.

I think there's also two sides of it. I've got, I've got friends who have got kids and of course it's driving them nuts because everybody's together and no one's getting a break. And then of course you've got friends who live on their own who are saying what I would give for some kind of, you know, proper social interaction.

Yeah.

So I guess every, everybody's having their own issues now. I was listening to various parts of your content as I usually do and have been doing for five years. You'll be, you'll be pleased to hear. And one of them was about, I wonder, with you now at home, are you doing more of the cooking because you're at home or is your wife doing it? Because I know you said your wife was a good cook.

She's an amazing cook. She's, she's been doing some just awesome meals which has been, been lovely. No, unfortunately I've been, I've been riding on her coattails this whole time. We also have my mother in law with us. She's vulnerable so you know she's in that category of being potentially at risk. So we thought the safest place would be, you know, to have her close. So she's also an amazing cook as well. So between the two of them, it would be like taking sand to the beach.

Yeah, you've got it covered.

I've got it covered.

Well, I'm kind of the same. My partner is firstly a good cook and also she's a proper qualified nutritionist. So she, you know, he's got it all covered.

That's that glow you've got going on.

Yeah. Well, last night we did a whole man academy and we're trying to, you know, think of ways to, you know, obviously our live events are on hold for a while, so we said, you know, obviously, let's jump on the zoom bandwagon and try and have a tutorial every, say, Thursday night. So last night we had a guy called David Swan who's worked under Heston Blumenthal and Gordon Ramsay.

Amazing.

And he's a lovely guy. He was on our podcast early on and he did a what was supposed to be a 20 minute steak tutorial, but with all the questions it was an hour. But, you know, it's just trying to bring guys together and do something different.

The truth is, I love cooking. I actually, it's a screen free activity that I really enjoy, but I get ushered out of the kitchen as quick as possible whenever I go there.

It sounds familiar. Well, let's get into the, you know, one of the big reasons we're on here, I think the words, I can barely pronounce it and spell it, but entrepreneurial mindset. And as I say for yourself, you were described as an entrepreneurial mastermind. What does that mean to you at the moment? Because you've gone through a long journey from a young age of being an entrepreneur. So where are you with it at the moment for you?

Well, I'll give you a little bit of background. I was really lucky. When I was 19, I got recruited as employee number three for a startup and it was very fast growth startup. Over the course of two years, we went from an idea, something sitting around the kitchen table, pre revenue, up to about 6,7 million of revenue, about 50 people, 60 people in the office. And I had a really great bond with the boss, who was kind of a mentor figure to me. And he was 37 at the time, which I thought was quite old, but I was 19, he was 37. And I really committed myself to just anything at all that I could get my get, you know, get experience With I just did it. So it was. If it was literally, if it was folding envelopes and packing envelopes and putting direct mail campaign together, I did it. If it was writing ad copy, if it was making sales, booking appointments, hiring people, running ads for new employees, sitting in on every meeting that I possibly could, I really threw myself at it. And I probably averaged about 60 to 70 hours a week. Most of the time I was doing kind of 12 hour days, eight to eight, and then even weekends, you know, we'd run workshops and we'd do trainings and all that sort of stuff on the weekends. So I probably only get one weekend off per month. And I loved it. I loved every minute of it. I just, I actually was fully immersed in my work and it was one of those kind of lovely periods where I was loving what I was doing and really enjoying it. But at the two year mark, once we'd built some significant value, I went to John and I said, could I get shares in the company? You know, I was there at the beginning, can I get some shares? And I caught him at the wrong moment and he says to me, dan, if you want shares in the company, go start your own company. If you want shares in a company, go start your own. So I kind of pondered this for a while and thought maybe I should start mine. So I went and started my own company at 22 and with everything that I've learned, it was a fast growth company in itself. So we went from zero to over a million in the first year, went up to about 11 million in the next three years. So it was kind of one of these real rapid growth companies. We had a team of, I don't know, maybe 20, 25 people. And everyone was kind of under 30, definitely. So you can imagine it was work hard, play hard, everyone, everyone hooking up and going out to nightclubs together and all this kind of stuff and fast growth culture. So that was all before I was 25. I built this business. We got up to about a million a month before I exited. So it was a really amazing kind of MBA by fire. And then moved to the UK, started several other businesses. Once again, fast growth, 0 to 4 million in the first year and kind of just been very much entrepreneurial since. So today I run a business growth accelerator. We've been going for 10 years. We have 3,000 clients around the world, great companies that we've selected. We typically select about 4% of companies that we interview. So we've interviewed a lot of companies over the last 10 years. I've been given access to a lot of different business insights, working with so many companies. So that translated into the four books that I wrote on entrepreneurship. So I'm not sure what an entrepreneur mastermind necessarily means, but I guess I've been up to my elbows in entrepreneurship for the last 20 years.

Yeah, I guess you've, I can only imagine what it must have been like working, as you say, starting your own company at that young age. I know for myself and probably many of my friends, I don't think we'd even have any capability of doing that because we were too busy just, you know, going out and, or working, but going out, just kind of living week to week as opposed to being able to do all of that.

If I had have met myself, if I met myself now, if I met my 22 year old self, I'd think I was a pretty weird kid.

Yeah. What was that like then as a 22 year old? Were you, were you fully focused or were you, I say making up as you go along because you didn't have anything to, you know, no experience to fall back on?

I was, I was actually, I was copying the first two years. So the first two years working for this guy John, you know, we executed the same campaign over and over and over and over again and there was a lot of repetition. I mean success is a lot of repetition, right? So you know, Roger Federer plays a lot of tennis and actually in that particular company we ran the same campaigns, you know, up and down the country all the time. So I was actually just copying what I'd been taught and you know, I was working with a proven set of metrics and ideas around that business. I didn't start a vastly different business. I started almost exactly the same business. I went in competition really and you know, I copied the kind of copy the formula. No, it was very intense, very focused. One of the first things I did is I rented a four story townhouse. Didn't know how the hell I was going to pay for it, but somehow they made, they gave us the, the, the lease. I rented this four story townhouse and I made the top floor bedroom and then the rest of it was at the office basically. So I lived and worked in this big house and we had four people on day one who joined, who, you know, I started the company with three people working on the team straight away. And basically it was from minute one it was live and work, same one and the same and work hard, play hard, know, party, sell market, deliver all of that.

How did you, how did you kind of Keep your feet on the ground at that young age when you're obviously making some decent money and being so, you know, so busy, as you say, living the work the whole time.

Two things. So fast forward a couple of years, and number one, I didn't keep my feet on the ground. I was a bit of a jerk at times, and I made some real mistakes around, you know, thinking that I was bulletproof. And number two, I was so immersed in it that I didn't really have time to stop and compare to what else was going on in the world. So, for example, when you go through really rapid growth, you don't end up watching the news, you don't watch television, you don't watch series, you don't socialize with anyone outside of work. You know, in 2005 was the busiest year, and we did 274 promotional events with an average of 300 people. So we, you know, kind of do the maths on that. And it was four or five a week or something like that. You know, it's just all the time, just constantly packing up, setting down venues, Venues, venues, airports, hotels. But yeah, you're right. Look at 20, 24, I bought myself a BMW X5. And, you know, I bumped into my old boss who had fired me from a pub years earlier when I was 18. And I was a real jerk to him and, you know, kind of rubbed his no in the fact that he was still working in pubs and I was now driving a BMW X5.

I guess that's a good. I always think back to the guys.

He did earn that, though. He really did.

Yeah, maybe deserved it.

Scott was a proper jerk. He was a real nasty, nasty guy.

Where is he now? Do you stay in touch with him at all?

No. It was a great story, though. He fired me really unsanctimoniously. He was really nasty about it, and he. He fired me with a big smile on his face. And then years later, I pulled up in front of this club with me, my girlfriend and about three of her friends, all dressed glamorously. And we walked in and he didn't really recognize me because I've just rocked up in this BMW with these girls, and I've walked in flanked on both sides by beautiful, gorgeous friends and my girlfriend. We walk through and he's on the front door as, like, standing in for the bouncer. And he's like. He's like, hey, how you going? Not recognizing that I'm that kid that he fired really nastily. And then about three or four minutes, he connects his eyes connect with mine and he figured out who I was. That was it. That was a movie moment. It was pretty cool.

I guess we will have maybe little moments in our life like that where, you know, just a little part of you is, is allowed to be pleased that you've kind of, you know, you've, you've maybe had a little bit of one upmanship.

Yeah.

What was it like for you when you moved to the uk?

Well, I'd never been above the equator. I'd never, I'd never really traveled. That was one of the reasons I came to the uk, because I'd been so Australia focused with that, with that first business that I wanted to travel. And everyone in Australia just goes to London, bases themselves in London and then, and then travels around Europe. And rather than actually doing that, I couldn't help myself. I started another company and got off pretty quickly. So I think we did either 2 or 4 million in the first year, but it was something like that. And 2006, I arrived 2007, we must have done about 2 million, then 4 million in 2008 and then 2009 we got absolutely hammered by the global financial crisis and went from 4 million down to 400 gr. And so we got 90% drop in revenue off the back of the financial crisis. So it was kind of like a start from scratch kind of moment.

Sounds very familiar at the moment for a lot of people.

Yeah, absolutely. But it was, look, it was, it was interesting coming to London. I didn't know what to expect. I was quite surprised by the amount of chimneys. I arrived in a really hot 2006. Summer 2006, it was sweltering hot. I lived in a little flat with no air conditioning. I cannot imagine being locked down there if I had been locked down in that, if I had arrived at this particular moment.

So that, I guess bringing you up to that was 2009, is it 2010 that you co founded Dent?

Yeah, yep.

And how did that come around?

So part of my business had been hanging out with people who had written lots of books and who had built successful companies, Dragons from Dragons Den and you know, people who had built multi billion dollar businesses and we would have them as speakers at our quarterly campaigns. And I watched and saw just how much buzz they would create and how much, how effortlessly opportunities came to them. And if they wanted to fund something, they could often come up with an idea in the morning and have it funded either that afternoon or the following day. You know, I saw that sort of stuff going and I had this thought in my head that like, unless you're that kind of a person, you, you know, you really, you're really not going to, you know, the speed at which they can execute is phenomenal and the number of talented people who want to work with them was phenomenal. So I wrote a blog called why youy need to Become a Key Person of Influence in your Industry. And it got, it got like 20,000 views, it was well, well read blog. And I talked about having worked with these people, these are the things that they do differently to normal people. They're very good at pitching, they publish content, they have products and services that they sell behind the scenes. That makes the money. They have an elevated profile and they have partnerships in place. They do joint ventures and deals and they create a lot of partnerships.

Is that your five p's?

That's the five p's. And then basically a lot of people said you should write the book on that. So I did. So I wrote the book in 2009, 10, released it in 2010 and we basically made it the manual for the accelerator that I was launching. So we launched the Key Person of influence accelerator and then that has emerged into what is now dent and now we've kind of got three accelerators that we run globally. We've got offices in Sydney, in Toronto, in London, got clients in the US and Singapore, Dubai. So yeah, we've got this great, great kind of global coverage now.

What's it been like scaling that from, I guess your, you know, your conception of the idea to now getting to that. It's quite mind boggling to get to that stage where you've got, you know, obviously look at the website and you've got offices around the world and all the different whole team around you. Where do you go from that small little group of people to WhatsApp worldwide network now?

It's great, it's great to have a good culture and it's interesting because there comes a point where you can't control it. So you know, you start a business and once you hit about 50 people, you're kind of on the receiving ends of updates that are happening. So you know, you kind of discover that you've hired someone and you discover that you've won an award or you discover that you've hit a milestone, but you're discovering all these things after the fact in many cases. So you know, for us we've got a global team. Now this morning I met one of the key members of the team who had been hired to do a really important job. He's been with the company for over a month and I met him today on Zoom, you know, and that sort of stuff starts to happen, which is kind of cool. And you hear about client case studies and client stories and all of that sort of stuff, and it's like, oh, wow, that's really, really cool. I didn't know that we were. I didn't know that was going on. Right.

So I guess is that, is that part of the fun of it when you've got that big team there? You know, there's. It's not when you're a small team, it's just you and a few people doing everything. But now you're.

It takes on the life of its own. And that's. It's kind of like as a parent, when you discover that your kids can do stuff that you didn't know they could do. You know, when, when your kid comes home with something they've written and you're like, wow, you know. Yeah, it's like, who wrote that? It's like, yeah, I wrote that. It says volcano. That's quite a big word. That's, that's great.

Well, it's. I was wondering about, with, especially for guys listening who are either thinking of, especially with the check, the change in the, you know, the workplace at the moment, maybe people will be looking to start a new business or be forced into it. About bringing a team around you and I'm assuming it's more important to bring a team as opposed to waiting for the perfect team.

Yeah, well, actually, so for starters, I'd say business is a team sport. Entrepreneurship is a team sport. It's not something you can do properly on your own. You can be self employed, which is all on your own. But self employment tends to have the worst attributes of a business without the best attributes and the worst attributes of a job without the best attributes. The. The big payoff for being self employed is essentially you get to keep the money that would normally go towards an office and you also get to save a bit of time on the commute. So other than that, it's pretty much the worst of both worlds. Business entrepreneurship is very much team sport. The founder gets way too much credit and actually doesn't create as much value as they get the credit for. It's mostly it's a team that's delivering the value and creating the value together. It's the nattering between team members that creates a lot of the value and solves a lot of the problems and deals with a lot of the awareness. So I've always started businesses where day one we have a team. So pre revenue we're working together as a team. I've often thought about starting a business is a little bit like robbing a bank. I would imagine that you kind of get the team together first and you sit around having pizzas and beers, talking about what might work, what might not work. You know, what are the strengths in the team, what are the weaknesses, what do we need to achieve, how would we know that it's a good time to get started and you're nattering away for, you know, for maybe weeks and then there comes a moment where you go, actually I think we can get away with this. This would be great. So you go off and you know, one person's got their job and the other person's got their job and you go and execute your plan. And that's actually what it feels like with a good startup. A good startup is a lot of nattering, a lot of, a lot of big, you know, drawing papers and whiteboards and you know, sort of, well, how are we going to solve this problem? And you know, why hasn't anyone else been able to do this? Or can we find an example of a company that's done that? Well, print that out, put that on the whiteboard. So you kind of like solving that stuff and like, let's create a brochure and let's create a document, let's put a slide deck together and let's map this out. And then there comes a point where you go, actually we're ready. Let's, let's get out there and start, start pitching this and start, you know, start putting it in the marketplace. Yeah.

Is that, I guess I'm trying to think of with. Even with our whole man academy team, we started with just two of us but now there's kind of four, well, five. Five of us officially on the team. Yeah. And that's whether we knew it or not. You know, you've got Matt who works for the BBC and has a lot of the kind of the media contacts. I'm more of the blokey sports and a bit of an all rounder and happily talk on camera. You've got Robin who's one of our ambassadors who writes the New York Times. So he's brilliant. He's done all our rebranding for us. You've got Scott who is more of a scientist background and likes the arts. And the last one is John who is kind of into the mental health and mindfulness stuff. So I was just trying to think I was trying to think, what are we missing at the moment?

So, well, it depends. Are these all people who are creating content or.

Yes, or capable of it? I think for us all, we've all got full time jobs as well, which is the challenge.

It tends to be that, you know, the key roles that I'm looking for is I want someone in sales, someone hitting the phone, 60, 70 attempts a day, you know, basically turning every last little tiny inquiry into a sale, going through social media, finding people who have engaged and teeing up an appointment with them. So basically someone who's really focused on sales. I want someone who's focused on technical delivery, so whatever it is they're buying, someone who's responsible for making sure that it works, making sure that it lives up to expectations. I want someone who's finance, admin or manager, and then I want someone who's the flagship face of the brand, the key person of influence, the evangelist, the kind of person out front. So those are the kind of four roles that I'm always starting with. So sales management, technical delivery or client, customer success, and a key person of influence, a pitch evangelist, a CEO. However you think about that person who's out front.

That brings us nicely onto our kind of subject, of the books that you've written. And I. Please just. I've got all your books and I've got one of them here. A lot of them are on my Kindle, so I can read them wherever I am. And I remember back when I first read the Entrepreneur Revolution and it was such an eye opener because for a lot of us, you know, I worked in the city and you were an employee, you got told how much holiday you could have and, you know, you did what you were told. But even then I could see that it's not a technical term. Computers were taking over what we were doing and at some point, if you didn't have something else to fall back on, you were in a lot of trouble.

Yeah.

And that was my big realization when I read that book. And it was a bit of a game changer for me.

On that point. What's happening in the world right now is we're all on lockdown. Whenever you do anything differently for 21 days or more, you form a new habit. So the new habit is work from home. The new habit is Zoom meetings rather than physical meetings. And at the moment, everyone thinks this is so cool, right? I get to work from home, I get to do all my meetings on Zoom. This is really, really cool. The danger is that the next logical progression or the next logical step is that you could be anywhere in the world. And the next logical step is that we'll get other people who are anywhere in the world. So when you think about a lot of people who are working happily in London right now, and they're very high paid and their income is proportionate to London Lifesty, they're gonna fight. Let's say they're on 120,000 a year. There's gonna be someone who's equally as qualified, who's awesome, who's great, who can do Zoom calls, and they're gonna be on 60 grand a year and then there's gonna be someone who's got a master's degree, who's in the Philippines, and they're gonna be on 40 grand a year and they'll speak perfect English and they'll have detailed knowledge and insights and, you know, as soon as we form this new habit, everyone thinks, oh, this is great. But it's a double edged sword. There's a counter trend to this coming. And the counter trend is what happened to blue collar jobs in the 80s is going to happen to white collar jobs in the 2020s. So it's worth being that entrepreneur. You don't want to be sitting around being told what to do for very long because it's only a matter of time before the top people think, actually, we could save a lot of money just having people on Zoom calls anywhere.

Yeah, I guess that's my other worry with that also is even if you had a business, a big business, but you realize that you can run it via Zoom, so everybody can stay at home. It's about therefore, you know, you lose the energy of having the people face to face. And I met the editor of Golf Monthly, a private kind of luxury watch event, a few weeks ago, and he said they'd move their offices and from when they were originally in London. You cannot replicate having that guys all, you know, guys or girls all around in a room, in a table throwing ideas to see what sticks as opposed to being, you know, he said he found it frustrating going from kind of Zoom call to zoom call and email to email.

Yeah, a bit of the magic's lost, but you can, you can get people together. Right. If you, if you want to have that magic one day a month or two days a month, you know, then everyone can do that. You know, it is going to change. It's going to change things. There's no going back the way things were. We are, we are living in a very different world. The 80s was different to the 70s and the 90s were different to the 80s and the 2000s were different to the 2000 to the 90s. So the 2020s are going to be different. We got some big tech coming, some really big technology. 5G is not just faster Internet, it's a complete game changer. It's like a laptop compared to a typewriter. A lot of different capability that a typewriter just doesn't have. So 4G is fast Internet. 5G is a lot more than that, you know, and that's going to change the way we live and work in a big way.

How's things changed for you with Dent? I mean, along with what's happening with the virus around the world at the moment, but also with 5G, how will that impact on the actual kind of running of the business?

Well, a very basic level is that, you know, one, one component of 5G is very fast Internet, which makes capability to deliver things in a very different way. So for example, delivering something on Zoom, it opens up different ways and different methods of delivery. So one of the things we've just been pioneering is that when we're delivering workshops with our clients on Zoom, we actually have a team of experts sitting in the chat answering people's questions in real time. So people are throwing questions in and I've got my team in the background copying and pasting links. Check out this, you know, if you want to know more on that, check out this video, download this template. And like, the speed of like, collaboration, it's a different form of collaboration, but where we're pioneering different ways of doing it. We're building a platform at the moment that's tracking a lot of data with all of our clients monthly. We're building accountability systems so it badges them and bugs them. Have you done this? Have you done this? Have you done this? On track, off track, done. So we're, you know, we're just building the systems that allow us to deliver a different experience globally. Now, we're not harnessing the power of 5G yet in any meaningful way. When you, when you start thinking about 5G, for example, the difference is, is that this is carrying a computer on you at all times. 5G is living within a computer. So essentially what 5G does, I'll give you an example of capability. You'd be walking down the street in Oxford street and you just make a gesture and say, I'd like to get an Uber home. And you feel your phone or your watch vibrate. That a camera across the street, a high definition camera, noticed the gesture knew that it was you, Read your lips, has sent a fight, have sent an Uber on the way to pick you up.

For some people that's a scary thought, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's certainly a different. It's a different paradigm. It's a very different paradigm. You'll see things like walking out of a tube or walking into a tube. You won't have to check in, it'll already know who you are. So you just walk straight in. And your watch or your phone will vibrate just by walking through it. And it won't be that you cross any physical thing, it'll just be a high definition camera that picks up on everyone who's walking through and immediately cross references them and scans them in. And then on the way out you walk past just a wall of food and drinks and stuff like a Pret or a Tesco and you'll just grab a can of Coca Cola or water or sandwich and then you'll feel your watch vibrate or your phone vibrate as you walk away from it. And it'll just be that cameras have picked up, that it's you and that you've grabbed a sandwich and it was a chicken and salad sandwich and it's £3, so it's just debited from your account. So that's, that's what it's like living. That's what it's going to be like living in a 5G enabled world where you're living inside a computerized system as opposed to carrying a computer, you're in.

A computer for yourself. I mean it sounds like a sci fi movie and that's what it's becoming, I guess. But are you happy? Like just, just forgetting the business side of it. But I guess being yourself, are you happy to be technically another number that is kind of tracked with whatever you do.

So I'm a subscriber to a kind of philosophy of, you know what you know well. Stoicism. Right. So the stoic philosophy basically says that you give no thought to things that you can't control. So if you find yourself in a living inside a 5G enabled computerized world as a number, you then you just make the most of that. And the only alternative is trying to rally against the system. And I don't want to spend my time, my effort, my energy, my creativity trying to break a global multi billion dollar, trillion dollar system. That's not how I'd want to spend my time. So you've got to. So very pragmatically you just arrive. I personally just ask the question, it doesn't matter how I feel about it, it's happening. So therefore pay it zero attention, zero thought, zero energy, and figure out how to surf the wave. You know, the surfer can't choose what waves are coming at them. They can just choose whether they want to surf the wave or not or get dumped by the wave. And for me it's just a matter of this is what's coming. So how do you surf it?

You said focus on what you can control.

Focus on what I control. Give no energy to stuff that I can't control. And that, that's freeing.

Yeah, I guess. I mean, as you say, it's one of those things that maybe if people are worrying too much about it, maybe they can put their focus into something else. And we opened up one or two of the people that knew that you were going to be on the call today. I always say to people, have you got any questions? One of them was about for you. How easy has it been for you to write the books that you have? I mean, you've written. Is it four books?

Yeah, four books and co authored a couple.

And, and they're all great. I mean a, they've been bestsellers, so everybody likes them. But I've always thought that they're actually really, they're really easy to read as well as being really good, as opposed to one where sometimes you can think I've got lost in the technicalities here, but how easy has it been for you to write not just four books, but for best selling books?

I think it's been easy because of the content is very much in my wheelhouse. If you asked me to write a book on anything, I'd struggle. If it wasn't within the narrow thing that I spend a lot of time on, I'd find it very, very difficult to. I never like, for example, I don't think of myself as a writer, I don't think of myself as an author. I have written books, but I don't think in terms of, I'm an author. So because I'm up to my elbows in entrepreneurship all the time and I'm working with these thousands of clients and they're asking me questions all the time and I'm trying to find the right analogy, the right example, the right story, and I'm seeing what works and what doesn't work and I'm just kind of immersed in it, I find that I tend to end up repeating myself on key points. And when I start repeating myself on a few key points, I think, all right, well, that must be resonating. So I might write that down and I'll write a few chapters. And then I think too. I feel that one of the habits I got into which was really helpful was processing my thinking through writing. So whenever I feel a sense of confusion or lack of clarity, I'm not sure what to do about this. Then the first thing I'll do is I'll say, all right, let me write a blog about it. Let me, let me write an article about it. Let me try and explain this to a reader. And it's kind of, it's a, it's a discipline or a way of trying to process a thought and process a way of thinking. And what a lot of people do is they say, once I'm clear, once I know how this is going to play out, then I'll put pen to paper. And for me, I've kind of the helpful habit is the expectation is once I've written about it, then I'll be clear. So I'm going to write about it in order to get clear as opposed to writing about it because I'm 100% clear.

It's an interesting one. I like it because I know lots of people always think they're going to write a book, but maybe they're waiting. And waiting was, as you say, maybe if you're. It actually helps you to maybe declutter your brain if you've got all these constant ideas to get them out and get them down on paper big time.

And one thing you should always know is that the book looks pretty scrappy right up until, like you write 40,000 words, 50,000 words, and you kind of skim through it and you go, oh, you know, it's not necessarily this great piece. And actually it's the editing process that brings it together. So when you work with a third party editor, someone who's a really good editor, then they kind of, they go, look, you've kind of repeated yourself here. Let's cut that out. You know, you've kind of made this really long sentence when all you're really trying to do is say that. So let's just cut out the middle of the sentence, let's put some brackets around that, let's put in a big asterisk here, you need a story here. And then they send it back to you. And the most delightful thing, what happens when you've written a book is you write about 45, 50,000 words perhaps, and then it comes back to you and it's 33,000 words. They've cut out thousands and thousands of words. You actually, a good editor chops it right down and you go, ah, that sucks. You know all of those work. Yeah, all of that has been cut out of the book. So suddenly you kind of have this. This sucks. And then you go through and you see where they've said, can you add something here? Can you add something, something? And you start editing, you start bringing it up and it comes out at about 40,000 words. But it's when you see the edited version that you go, oh, this actually, this doesn't suck as bad as I thought. I imagine that happens with movies that you capture a lot of footage and it's kind of roughly in a sequence, but then when it's edited, that's when.

It becomes a movie you've described perfectly. We're in the middle of working one of our online courses and the first draft of it, one of our guys who showed me, you know, it's great, but there was so much to it that it gave me a migraine. And actually yesterday I saw it for the, you know, probably a couple of weeks on where it's, as you said, it's been condensed and what have you. And it was in a beautiful kind of, you know, just five points and explained. And it was like, wow, that's as you say. Yeah, it's. It's now it looks like a course as opposed to before it was. It was just a scatter. Scatter line of ideas.

Yeah. And then you get that sense of clarity and that sense of, you know, that you get that moment of yes at the end, not at the beginning.

I think it's trying to think with your books. I know you've gone. Was it obviously key personal influence over subscribed entrepreneur revolution and 24 assets. If a guy. I mean, I'm going to put this on our newsletter anyway because I'm a real one for. I suggest to people, instead of reading loads of kind of personal development books or business books, it's like pick. We would say pick one person and read all their content. Consume everything you can for them as opposed to going from person to person to person.

Yeah, I agree with that. It's kind of like doing different martial arts classes where you do a beginner class with 12 different styles and it's like you end up confused.

Yes.

Far better off to pick one lane and just go deep on it, stick with it.

So if someone was gonna. I was gonna say go deep on you, but that's gonna sound weird. But you know what? I Mean, if someone said, you know what, you've got your four books, where would you suggest someone start? Which one should they read first?

They're written in an order, which is the way that entrepreneurship unfolds. So Entrepreneur Revolution is very much about spotting an opportunity, developing the entrepreneur mindset, putting together that first few teams members, putting together those first product ideas. That's that book, Entrepreneur Revolution. And it kind of sets the scene as to why you would even want to be an entrepreneur in the first place. So that's book one, book two. Once you've got your value foundation, there's a challenge in Entrepreneur Revolution called the Chaos Challenge. And it stands for a concept, audience, offer sales. And it's like once you've proven your product and you've proven your value proposition, now you want to become seen as an influencer in that space, a key person of influence comes next. Once you're seen as a key person of influence, it's very easy to run campaigns and promotions and scale up a bit, which is over subscribed. And then once you've got yourself over subscribed and the business is churning along, you actually want to create capacity for the business to run without you. So you need to formalize your assets. So that's 24 assets. So it's basically it's a journey value proposition, becoming an influencer, getting over subscribed, formalizing the assets in the business.

I'll make sure we put that newsletter in that order. And I think it's such that the four books can be so powerful for people. And I've taken so many lessons out of each of them. One of them I remember from when I first read it was just one of the lessons about make three calls.

Yeah.

And I've actually used it sometimes when you're speaking to people and it sounds quite simple, but actually it's really powerful. And even with us with the whole man academy, sometimes you're like, let's just, you know, let's just speak to three people. And then it starts to fan out because they say, well, even if I can't help you, you should speak to this person. This person. And it's such a simple concept. Can you kind of explain it to the guys listening?

Yeah, it's trying to avoid overthinking things and just sort of getting some contact with the marketplace. So it really comes down to the story in the book is that I had this idea at 17, 18 that I wanted to run a nightclub party and I wanted to host this party for people who couldn't get Into a nightclub. They're too young. So 14 to 17 year olds. What if during the school holidays, on a Tuesday night when the club is closed, what if we ran a nightclub party? It was just an idea. And my friend's dad, who's a really great entrepreneur, he said, when you've got an idea, just make three calls, see what happens. So I thought, okay, first phone call, I'll ring a sports shed, because I knew this sports shed down the road and I thought, let's start small with a sports shed. And I rang the management there and they said, look, we've run parties before, it's always a disaster. It never works out. No one has a good time. It's not designed for that. Do it in it, they said, just do it in a nightclub. Okay, wow. All right. So I thought, okay, I'll call up a nightclub. So there was a nightclub that we used to go to all the time. And I rang them up, asked to speak to the general manager and said, look, where we're a nightclub promotion company, we run underage nightclub parties and we've selected your venue as one of the venues that is on our short list of venues. Would I be able to discuss with you putting on a nightclub party for 14 to 17 year olds during the school holidays? And he goes, yeah, you can discuss it. Do you mind faxing me through a proposal first? And I said, yeah, sure, I've got a proposal in the office, but I'm not going to be in the office for another day or two, so I'll just send it over towards the end of the week. He went, great, thank you, bye, and pick up the phone. Dad, what's a proposal?

It just makes me laugh. But again, it's those little things. You could have said, oh, well, no, I'm not sure. I might just say, like, yep, we can. I can take care of this, you know, you'll find a way, we'll sort.

It out and if not, he'll forget about me pretty quickly. But it was great because, you know, that led to running a great nightclub party. The same thing. Someone said, oh, you should do radio advertising. Get, you know, get some ads on the radio. Maybe the radio station will give you free ads. So make three calls, right? So we rang the radio station and said, look, we're running a nightclub party. Do you want to have sponsorship rights, the naming rights to the party and it'll cost $4,000 worth of ads? And they went, yeah, yeah, we'll do that. Come in and have a chat with us, talk to us. About it and we'll, if it sounds sensible, we'll give you some ads and we can be the name sponsor. And sure enough, they did. And we ended up with a great deal where we had four grand worth of ads and we had a free venue because of the ads. And we ended up like, first party made, I don't know, maybe five grand in the night. Next party made 12 grand in the night. Around six parties that year. And I probably made 50 to 60 grand of cash, you know, off the back of these parties. It was.

A lot of people would be happy with that at the current year, let alone all those years ago.

Yeah, 1999, I think that was.

Yeah, but what I like about that is it's. It sounds a simple concept, but a lot of people could do well in implementing that with, with a lot of their problems in life, let alone whether it's to do with business or not.

Just make three calls.

Yeah. And I guess now we'll say you've got the.

Oh, and the rule is you can't call. You can't call people, you know.

Okay, that's the important bit.

As in, like, as in the three calls are not, you're not calling three friends to see what they think. You're actually trying to make some contact with the actual market. So, you know, bring three people and see if you can sell it. So you're not, you're not calling your mate and saying, what do you reckon of this? You're making three calls to see if you can actually advance the idea.

And I guess as you're doing that, you're kind of getting out of your comfort zone and it's only going to expand your network, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. The other trick to it is to make the calls as if it's happening. So as opposed to, hey, I've got an idea, Can I run it past you? We're doing this, we're looking at ways to get it done. It's happening. There's something that I call with or without you energy, it is happening with or without you going to happen. But we're just going to, you know, I just want to talk about whether it should happen with you or someone else. So, you know, yeah, you've got a nightclub, we're going to run a nightclub party. It's going to happen with or without you type thing. That's the energy. Not that you would overtly say that, but the whole energy is, we're running a nightclub party, we're looking for a venue. Just wanted to run the concept past you and see whether you're a good fit.

We're always trying to with the whole man academy have not just now podcast, but give guys just little nuggets that are memorable because we could go through hours of content of all these specific things you could do. But you want sometimes the simple things that I've remembered from. I read that, what, five years ago and it stuck with me and I've used it myself. One of the questions where we asked people was what was the most fun book for you to write?

I enjoyed writing over subscribed. It was just, it was lots of stories in oversubscribed and I kind of captured fun stories like going to Nikki beach and you know, the DJs and the, and the champagne and you know, kind of dancing and all that sort of stuff. And I was just capturing a lot of fun stories. Key person of influence was a funny story to write. I went wakeboarding in Singapore, busted my knee and then had to catch a flight to Bali. And I had this torn cartilage in my knee from. From landing badly on a jump. And I ended up checking into a resort in Bali and being essentially immobile. My. My knee was massive and swollen and I just had to ice it and get. Oh, I was going to get back to the UK and then this volcano went off and all the airplanes got.

Grounded because the ash cloud.

Yeah, this Icelandic ash cloud that stopped all the planes from going. So I. In that week, I think I wrote 15,000 words and I was just sitting in this resort and I'd kind of shuffle my way out onto this place overlooking the pool and have them bring me food and pina coladas. And I was just writing and I belted out like 15,000 words plus or 15, 20,000 words. And. And it was just kind of broke the back of the book and it was kind of cool to do it that way.

Apart from the knee situation, it sounds ideal.

To be honest, pretty ideal. Yeah.

Well, with that. So let's say you're planning on writing book number five. And would you then for yourself say, right, I'm going to try and write it in a short amount of time and go away and kind of. I say isolate yourself, which most people do, you know, whether you like it or not. But would that be the way you would do it, is say, you know what, I'm going to block out X amount of time time and go and just get it done.

For me personally, I need to have a few four hour to five hour sessions. This is what works for me. There's a few little writing tips that I've got. So, number one, I create a playlist of trance music, and I only put about 10 songs on it. And that jogs my memory or kind of gets me in the writing zone very rapidly. I put my headphones on, there's a beginning track that is a above and beyond track that's kind of got an interesting kind of intro, and that when I hear that music, I immediately go, bang. I'm in writing mode. That's what I got to write. I'll make myself a plunger of coffee, and I'll sit that on the desk. And then basically, I've got my mind maps of what I want the book to look like. And kind of. I've got my drawings here. I've kind of mapped it out, got all the key ideas, and then I plugged that into my writing. I use a writing software called Scrivener, where you keep all the key ideas down the side, and then you can kind of write, and if something doesn't fit, you just cut and paste it and throw it in a different idea. But for me personally to kind of break the back of it, I need like four or five hours of just uninterrupted sessions, maybe two or three of those to get up to a critical number of maybe 12, 15, 16,000 words that then I can go, okay, I've got the working guts of this. I can pad it out with stories from here. I can, you know, I can kind of go deeper on some of those ideas. I can throw something in. But the guts of it is, you know, it's kind of the core components of the book are all in place. And then I run deep on all of those. After I've done that, half an hour here, an hour there, I can chip away at it. And the other one is to make sure you tell your family that I'm just doing a writing session. I got my head in it. I'm just going to put a Do not disturb on the. On the handle. And would you work.

I know at the moment we're all working from home, but when you were writing the books, would you do that from home? Because I say you've got a small, big family, but you've got a little family running around.

Yeah, exactly. My best writing has always been on air, on airplanes, like long flights. At one point, we were launching Singapore and Tampa, Florida, pretty much simultaneously. And. And I was basically doing eight hours over to Florida, and then I'd be back for a little bit, and then I'd do 13 hours out to Singapore and then I'd be back. So I would just have a rule with myself. No movies, no food, nothing until I've belted out 4,000 words. So. So I would make sure that every flight was a 4,000 word flight. And then I can do what I like after that. I can sleep, I can watch a movie, but I gotta get in the zone. And yeah, that was my agreement with myself. Just get those, get those 4,000 words done.

Do you remember those days when we used to be able to fly places?

Do you remember the days where like a scandal was like that someone had put a pin in a strawberry in Tesco or something like that? Yeah, that was, that was kind of global news world, you know, national news.

It would get blown up because there.

Was nothing else to do. You remember those days where there was. Australia was all on fire and you thought, wow, that's going to be a defining moment for the year. It's like, that's just the entree.

It's interesting because at the moment, if you watch the news, there isn't any other news.

Yeah. And also in your social media feed, everything, everything is coronavirus and lockdown and all this sort of stuff.

Actually, you're right that it's interesting. Our co founder, Matt, is a BBC news editor and when we interviewed him on the podcast, he said he knows that his colleagues wouldn't mind him saying that you shouldn't watch the news, maybe. And his point was it's not to say you shouldn't at the moment for the point of we need to continue to maybe have some information about lockdown, but if you just checked in with the news once a day, if you.

Went to the BBC website, scanned it for 15 minutes, you'd know everything you need to know. The news. I hate to say it and, you know, no disrespect to any news people, but the news, they love it when there's actually something happening in the world to talk about because most of the time they have to make some story up and kind of make a bigger deal of it than possible. But when you've actually got real stories unfolding and they can do so much with that, you know, it's like a weightlifter who's been lifting heavy weights suddenly having to lift something light. These news editors, they've been turning nothing into a story for years, you know, you know, nothing happened or we've got to come up with something around that and then something happens, man, they can really, they can bench press the hell out of that. So they can, you know, they can blow it up and have, you know, death, disaster, people dying, people suffering. It's global, it's pandemic, it's World Health Organization. Trump is picking a fight with the World Health Organization. You know, it's like, you know, what more would you want if you're a news person? But once again, getting back to stoicism, do you have any control over any of this? No. Then live your own fucking life. Like, get on with it. You know, the thing that I like, kind of blows my mind is people just sitting in the spectator seat of life, and it's like, you're not going to have that much time. Like, you know, you got a few decades to make an impact. That's it. You got plenty of time to sit and watch the news, right? You're going to have all of your 80s, all of your, you know, from 75 to 90, sit and watch. Sit and watch the news because you're not going to be able to run around doing stuff.

Is that my partner ever. And I, I mean, she's very much, say, into personal development or we actively don't watch the news as best as we can, and we'll. As soon as we wake up in the morning, she'll be watching podcasts on, you know, nutritionists, usually from the US because they seem to be more advanced than we are over here, and at the moment, various things getting banned online, so you're not even allowed to watch what you want to watch, which is another story. But for yourself, would you try and do listen to other people's podcasts and if so, what kind of stuff are you listening to? Because for you, you're an expert in business and therefore do you listen to stuff and are you still consuming and learning from that, or do you kind of just switch off?

Yeah, I do listen to a little bit of stuff and I try and find some good quality content. Truth is, though, that I think there's three modes you can be in. The mode that I think is most valuable is creativity versus consumption. So creating something tends to. Creating something tends to highlight the gaps in your thinking, and then you go looking for some content to fill the gaps. So if you're trying to create a document on something, or you're trying to create a video on something and need some research, you need some facts to back it up, you need some good stories, you go looking for the stuff that would back that up, and then you're consuming, but very much for the purpose of creating. It's like you're going to the market to get ingredients for something you're going to cook tonight. So you know that, that creativity mode is where joy lives. It's where, you know, that's where you're going to experience joy, happiness, fun, flow, quality, frustration. You know, all of that lives in creative creativity mode. Consumption mode is just. And I really, honestly, I don't even delineate all that much between news and personal development podcasts, you're just consuming stuff. Consume, consume, consume, consume. The third mode is silence and just resting the mind. So giving yourself time to mentally wander. The thing that most people are missing more than anything at the moment is just silence. Just let your mind tick. Give it time, give it space to tick. Don't feel, you know, like people used to have an idea on the toilet, but now you're sitting there watching something on the toilet, you know, you used to, you know, I've even been guilty of it since having a waterproof phone, I've actually checked a message while I'm in the shower, you know, so I've seen my phone buzz, I've grabbed it while I'm in the shower. I've leaned across, grab the phone because it couldn't wait, right? And I'm even checked a message in the shower. Recently, I've been doing a couple of things that are helpful. I make sure that I charge my phone and all my devices in my office and I don't put them by the bed. So the first thing when I wake up in the morning, I'm not tempted to just go and start checking something. I can just wake up and let my mind drift. And then the other one is I've been getting into the habit daily of going for a walk without my phone. So I go for a 20, 30 minute walk and I don't have my phone in it because it used to annoy me that I'd be walking along, I'd have an idea and I'd think, oh, I better Google search that. I better, you know, I better do something, you know, and rather than having the idea and letting it ruminate you straight into consumption mode, these devices are built to get you consuming. They're not built, they're not built at all to get you creating. That's, that's a byproduct. But creativity, I find is where joy, happiness, you know, and energy comes from. Consumption actually wears you out when you're consuming, consuming, consuming. You'd think it would be amazing to have 12 cars, right? I know people who've got 12 cars. Ferraris, Porsches, and all this sort of stuff. They spend all their time tinkering with these damn things. They're forever breaking down, they're forever this, you know, it's actually exhausting managing a little fleet of cars. And it doesn't bring them joy anymore. It brings them joy for the first couple of months when they get a new one, they're addicted to that new month. And then they're, you know, that actually be happier having no cars and just having space.

Yeah, well, it's funny you brought that up because we spoke to a really interesting chap called Chevy Ruff, who was probably our longest podcast we did, which was about two and a half hours and he was good value all the way through. But we spoke about being okay with solitude and as you said, just going for a walk on your own. And it's good to hear you admitting that. It is hard because we've had it. Even though we live in a nice quiet area of the countryside. It's like, oh, my phone's over there, I can't leave it because what if I get an Instagram, Twitter, sorry, you know, WhatsApp, text message, one or two of my emails, blah blah, blah, blah, blah. Like what if I miss one of those?

Yeah, exactly. And it used to be, I mean, what's crazy is it used to be wasn't that long ago. I mean, you know, my first several years in business, you had a mobile phone, you didn't use it all that much. You know, all it did was make calls and texts and it was, you know, the big game was Snake. And you know, for a long time it was just this thing that kind of was around. But you know, it wasn't, it wasn't, it didn't consume you in the same way. You had your laptop and you had your phone and if someone needed to call you, call you, often you left your phone in your, in your briefcase or you know, in your bag. You didn't even sort of carry it on you.

That was the good old days. I know. I mean it's like anything, I guess. Mobile phones are brilliant for some things and as you say, they can be a hindrance because you're kind of spending so much time on them. I remember having the Ericsson little flip down phone and you know, all that did was a pathetic text and a call. Sometimes they're like, wouldn't that be great now just to go back to that.

Mind you, people built multi billion dollar businesses and they only had that phone. You know, people achieved a lot. You know, people won gold medals and did extraordinary things with just a laptop and a phone. And one thing that is so rare these days is just silence, solitude, isolation. Even in lockdown, even in isolation, we're filling our days full of things. And sometimes it's those moments of silence that you get, that you get your best ideas. I'm always shocked, but not shocked that when I meditate, I get a great answer to a problem that I didn't even know I had. Like, something just surfaces and it's like, oh, wow, okay, cool. You know, an awareness and just creating the space for an awareness to bubble up.

When did you start or have the realization that creating that space for a bit of kind of quietening your mind was beneficial to you?

It was around early 2000 and tens, where one of my older mentors, Guy, who's In his late 60s, he just said, all the joy in life comes from creation, not consumption. I was asking him about, what's it like to have this, have that very wealthy guy. He said, honestly, it all requires management. It's exhausting having stuff. And actually the most happiest I've ever been. He said to me, I'm happiest when I'm on the road and I've got one suitcase and one briefcase, and I'm just. I don't have any stuff. All of it's behind me. And I was like, yeah, okay, fair enough. And then I started noticing this everywhere. I started because I've always had friends who are very wealthy and I've got friends who are, you know, you tend to meet guy. Like, I know a lot of people, so I've met guys who have a wife, kids, mistress, mistress, mistress. And it's not making them happy. It's not actually fulfilling much for them. It's actually pretty exhausting and sucking the energy out of them. And you meet people who've got a plane or a helicopter or a Ferrari or, you know, and 10 cars and multiple houses, and they've. Here's another interesting one. Around the same time, a friend of mine who's got huge house in London, massive house on the side of a cliff in Spain, massive ski in, ski out, chalet in the Alps. And I said, you know, I was talking to him about the realities of that, and he was saying, you know, the reality of this is that when I go to the Alps, I spend my first three days sorting out the sauna, the spot, the thing, cleaning the carpets, getting a tile on the roof replaced that, that fell down, the stuff, all the stuff. And, you know, I rock up and I end up spending 18 grand on, on different stuff that I've got to fix. You know, some underheating thing is gone and blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't enjoy going to the snow anymore. He goes, the reason I bought it is because I came to the snow with all of my friends. We rented this big chalet, we all arrived, we had an amazing week, and then at the end of it, we handed the keys back and we flew home. And I wanted to recreate that week. I wish I could do that again. I wish I could do that more often. And part of me just felt like I needed to own the chalet unless otherwise I couldn't experience that. The actual, the joy of it was, was in not owning the chalet, in.

The turning up and doing what you want to do and leaving.

Yeah, the sauna is someone else's problem.

I guess that's. It's another one of those kind of lessons of people that might be listening that sometimes you know what you aspire to have or the old saying, be careful what you wish for. I know with people that have had other supercars or the boats and what have you that. Is it the same. The happiest day was the day you bought it and then the day you sold it.

Yeah, maybe there's three or four in between.

That leads me to what do you do for fun?

You know, I'm horrified that you asked that question. Right. Answer very simple things. Right. I got, I got three, three kids under six. And it sounds silly, but the, the fun that I have is just seeing them having fun at the moment. I mean, I'm in a mode where I'm acutely aware that these years pass pretty quickly and that five or six years go past and my oldest will no longer think I'm cool. Won't want to go for walks with me, won't want to tell me everything that's going on in his world, you know, and, and suddenly it'll all be about friends and video games and all that sort of stuff. So I'm just kind of sucking up and enjoying having little kids and not trying to. I really don't have any to be perfectly boring. I don't have any real hobbies outside of. I've got my businesses, which is global and on a 24 hour time zone. And then when I switch off, I spend as much time as I can with kids and go out walking and scooting and playing little board games and coloring and kind of all those kind of things. And yeah, I'm pretty dull to be.

Fair, but it sounds very familiar to me. But I guess it's also for us both. You know, I've got two little ones, you've got three. As we know, when you have kids, and especially more than one, the game changes completely. And you know, as you say, when you've got a business that you're running, which is, you know, takes a lot of your time and the family, for a lot of us, and maybe our friends as well, other guys listening, it's kind of being okay knowing that it's hard to try and maintain all the other stuff you did before you had kids.

Yeah. And, you know, the truth is for me is that if I did have big other hobbies that I was passionate about, it would really, it would have to either come from work or have to cut into work or cut into family. I am extremely lucky that I enjoy what I do. Like, I love. I basically have a very fun business, or for me, it's fun. You know, we're involved in the growth and development of hundreds of startups at any given time. You know, we do funding, we do marketing campaigns. We, you know, it's very creative. It comes with status. Like, you know, you get to, you know, be an important person in someone else's life. So all of that is part of the fun of it. And also there's a bunch of other companies that I own too. So there's an IT company in Milton Keynes and a publishing business, film production business, a data business that we've just funded and launched. So there's, there's a bunch of other businesses kind of, you know, the film production business is making music, film clips and all that sort of stuff. The book publishing business, we have 400 authors that we publish their books for them. So there's a whole bunch of like, I'm kind of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, because I like what I do.

How do you keep on top of all of that? I mean, for a lot of people, if you've got one company, it's a lot to deal with. But if you've got all that going at the same time, for you personally, is it having the great team around you?

It's having a really great leader in each business. In each business, you need a number one and a number two. So you basically at all times have to make sure that there is an amazing number one and number two. If you look in the military, everything is broken up into sections of eight people with the corporal lance corporal who lead a team of six. And that's actually not a bad little model. So you've got your corporal, your lance corporal who run the business. You don't need to know the six or the seven or the eight or the nine. You just need to know the lance corporal and the corporal. And basically every, every business that I'm involved in revolves around having a really good number one and number two and then being a servant to them, a servant leader, resourcing them. What do you need? Do you need funding? Do you need, do you need clients? Do you need marketing campaigns? You know, do you need. Talk something through? And sometimes a good, good number one and number two don't need anything for weeks at a time and sometimes they need a lot all within a few days. But ideally just to be a servant leader to the talent.

I wonder with that also how much of it comes into the importance of mentorship and like whether for you, you've had the mentorship over the years yourself or now you're not just you, but your company is obviously mentoring other people.

Yeah, so I think I've benefited from having great mentors. And yeah, I'm just one to. I look for talented people. Really. I just come across a lot of people and we just look for, look for people who kind of stand out. And ideally those kind of people don't need management. They don't need, they don't need leadership, they just need, they need some of the bounce ideas and resources and someone to outsource stuff to. So I just sort of say, look, anything that you think I can help you with, you know, let's get on with it.

What's the. I was going to say with Dent, could you pick the 1 biggest success story of a company that you've helped scale?

Well, we've got lots. You know, Rob Gardner is a great story. He now, you know, he started with us when he had, he showed me his goal sheet the other day from 2012 and he wanted to basically become a global business with hundreds of employees. And he's done all of that. He's built an extremely valuable business. He's exited from the business in terms of his time and he now sits on the board of a FTSE 100 with oversight over 100 billion worth of funds. He's one of the top fund managers in the country, chief investment officer. He's only 40. I think we started working with him when he was about 33, 34. And he's recorded video testimonials for us and all that sort of stuff. One of the companies that we invested in and took a stake in just sold for 45 million after a few years in business. So it was great that they were having issues that are issues at the top level, at a board level, and they decided to go for an exit rather than growing any further. But they, you know, went from 0 to 45 million pretty quick. Yeah. So those, those kind of, those kind of stories buzz around. We've had a number of our clients exit or partially exit to private equity firms and, you know, go over to Silicon Valley and grow their business and all of that kind of stuff. Mind you, that's not the focus of what we do. Most of our clients want a lifestyle business. They want to build a team of three to 12 people leveraging digital assets and media. So we have a lot of those clients, very small number of clients want to build an exitable business. You know, one of the clients that was fun, they've been in, they've been in business for 15 years. They had a goal to sell for 2.1 million. I said to them, you're not going to sell for 2.1 million. It's almost an impossible amount to sell for because it's too big to be small, too small to be big. So, you know, no small business can pay 2 million. No big business will pay 2 million. So you're going to have to sell for north of 5 million. They went, oh, it's going to take us another 15 years and said, no, it'll take you about 15 months. And sure enough, 15 months later, they sold for 5.3 million. So do you think you helping?

You know, just. I guess that's what a lot of people need is just having someone like yourself who can.

Bit of perspective. Yeah, yeah.

And is that then changing their mindset of thinking their business might only worth 2 million to say, well, actually, you know, in not particularly long time you can over double it.

Yeah. So a lot of people don't. Your winning strategies often become your losing strategy. So in the early stages of business, doing everything yourself is a great winning strategy. Keeps costs down, gives you insight into the whole business. But very quickly doing everything yourself becomes a losing strategy. Becoming an influencer in your space is a winning strategy. Attracts talent, lots of people to the business, but very quickly you become the bottleneck. So your winning strategy becomes your losing strategy. Yeah, you got to learn how to monkey mine through the forest. Letting go of one thing and grabbing another thing. And it was just one of those classic situations that one of their winning strategies had become their losing strategy. And as soon as we got them out of their own way. So to Speak. The business very quickly released a bunch of value. And it was the way that we also pitched it. And some of the assets we put in place, some of the stuff that was in their head had to be documented. And also thinking like an acquirer. So someone who buys a business, they only really care about three things. And essentially if you line up to those three things, then you sell the business for a lot of money.

What are the three things?

Yeah, they care about the team. So in particular, an acquirer tends to want 30 plus 40 plus people because any one person becomes a small point of failure as opposed to a seven or an eight person business. One person is a 15% point of failure. So you normally need to get 30 to 40 headcount in order to get a decent size exit. You have to have some proprietary assets, something that they can't create themselves, something that feels like it would be difficult to create self. So they need to feel that they're buying an asset, something that's of unique standout value. And then predictable revenues and profits. So the ability to actually forecast and say these are the levers that you can pull to increase revenue and profit. And this is the predictable nature of the revenues and profit. And there's several ways that you can express that. Either it's subscriptions, repeat purchase or independent studies and analysis. So independent reporting. But ultimately they're looking for an asset that has predictable revenues and profits and a team that's going to stick around and run the business. And if you get those three things right, then you tend to sell for a lot of money.

Such, such a lot to think about. It just gets your brain firing, firing in all different directions. I think it's one of these podcasts where you'd need to listen, you can't listen to it, or you need to listen to a bit and let your mind. Yeah, have a think about it. I've been lucky enough to come to one of, one of your big events, which was in London. I'm trying to think what the venue was, but in the big amphitheater as it were.

Those were the days. Yeah.

When we all actually sat close to each other. And what I loved then was you. You were talking about obviously how important pitching is in business and in life generally, I guess, but. And you made us all get up and go and pitch your kind of. For us it was the whole man academy to three people. And I'll tell you what was great about it is that a lot of people go to seminars or let's call it personal development and the One bit you all hate is the, you want to just sit there and be like, yeah, you just tell me, tell me how to do everything. But actually being made to get up and move around was great. One thing that I remember was a light bulb moment for me was you said, I'm sorry if I get the number wrong, but I think it was. The average age of the kind of entrepreneur is either 41 or 42.

Yeah, about 42 is the startup year. The average age of an entrepreneur who starts a company that goes into the millions is 42. And the average age of the exit I think 57. So the Mark Zuckerberg, the 22 year old who can code is extremely rare. It's the exception to the rule, not the rule. There are so few Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg stories. They're kind of like once a decade, one business, one time is that kind of, you know, that kind of person. And it just doesn't make the news. When a 42 year old starts a business, grows it over the course of 15 years and sells it for £9 million, that, that's not a stop the press moment. No one. It's like, well, good for them. If you go and talk to a wealth manager who manages lots and lots of people's wealth and you ask them what is the typical kind of age that someone comes into money if they're not, if they're not from a wealthy family, it's kind of like mid-50s. And it's always an entrepreneur who started their business at like 39 or 41 or something like that, and then they ran it for 15 years and then got themselves a decent whack of cash.

I think that's. We've looked at the numbers of, let's say primarily the guys that listen to the podcasts and probably about 40% of them are guys between 27, 30, 40 or 35. And I guess the hope that you'd give to those guys is that, you know, you're, if you're in a job like I know lots of people are, that you may be thinking you want to try and start something, but these are scary prospects. Going out on your own is that, you know, if you're, if you're in your mid to late twenties, you're, you're still ahead of the curve. If you, if you start taking action.

Yeah, you're slightly too young. Statistically, I think there's two, there's two periods of time where it tends to be that you can go start a business and it tends to be that you either start one pre kids, you know, in your 20s, because you, you know, you can always fall back on flat sharing and all that kind of stuff, or you tend to start one in your 40s. Once your kids hit a certain age where they're kind of out the house and self, you know, they're self managing and you might have a spouse who's got their income, you know, sturdy, or you might have a little bit of savings, or you might have just clocked up enough experience that you go, actually, it's not risky. Great business ideas don't necessarily feel too risky if you've got the right people. Like, look at what you've done with Holman, right? You've got four or five people who are extremely experienced in what they do. No one's rushing out, quitting their job straight away. They're actually just getting the thing off the ground. It's a bit of a side hustle. It's a bit of fun. You know, you've signed a deal with Dave Gandhi. So hence, you know, you're getting a lot of validation from the marketplace and it's kind of like, well, this isn't, this isn't risky. This is, you know, when you're getting that kind of validation, it doesn't feel necessarily hugely risky. So, yeah, look, there's no necessary, I don't think there's necessarily a particular right time or wrong time to start a business. It should, it shouldn't, it shouldn't necessarily be that you want to start a business. It should be that there's something you want to do and the best way to do it is through the vehicle of business. It's kind of like saying, you know, I really, really, really want to be driving on the highway. Why? You know, because I want to get somewhere, I want to do something or I've got this idea that I want to express. Okay, well, then I guess you'll need to drive on the highway. You know, it's kind of the business is just a vehicle. It's. There's certainly no badge of honor in being an entrepreneur. Most of it is just a lot of it's dirty work. Right. Especially when you're starting, you're picking up phones and calling the IT department, which.

Is you learning at a rate that I think for me is when I was an employee, of course, exactly that. When you sat in front of all your four trading screens and you had a technical issue, you phone up some and say, come and deal with this immediately. And you know, now when the printer breaks, guess what? Guess Who's. Guess who's dealing with it? It's after get my own coffee, actually, which is outrageous as well. I just wondered for yourself also, how important is it to pick something? I mean, you just hit on it there about finding something that you enjoy doing. I mean, we. I love dealing with the whole Man Academy stuff, and it's not work to me, even if I stay up all night, which I feel like I'm sometimes, because it's, it's, it's really enjoyable. But how important is that? If you've got someone coming towards you that says, I don't exactly know what I want to do yet, there are.

Three things that are equally important. And you try to find an overlap on these three things, which is, number one, that you enjoy the work, that you can tolerate the work, that you can tolerate it. You can enjoy it at times. You can geek out on it. You can, you know, you could happily read books about it. You could talk about it for a while. You could write 5, 10,000 words about it. You know, that there's enough of a passion there. I'm not talking about, like, you know, nothing that I do is on the level of snowboarding down a mountain. Like, if I'm snowboarding down a mountain, that, that's the peak experience. You know, if I, if I go scuba diving on a coral reef, you know, business pales in comparison to those kind of moments. You know, if I'm partying at a great nightclub in Bali, you know, then that's way more fun than running a business. But you don't sit there and say, oh, I should open a nightclub in Bali, or I should go and set up a scuba diving academy, or I should go and start a snowboarding shop in the Alps. That, you know, that's a hobby. And hobbies are more fun than work. That's the point of a hobby. So you're looking for something that you're passionate about, but not necessarily, you know, off your head about. Number two, you're looking for a problem that needs solving in the world. And this is, this is what brings the reality down to the business, which is business is valuable because it solves a problem that people can't solve for themselves, don't want to solve for themselves, haven't figured out how to solve for themselves. It's either going to be complex, horrible, undesirable, you know, very, very difficult. It's going to be a problem that others can't easily solve for themselves. If people can solve it themselves, then, you know, like, there's not A great. There's not a great industry around boiling pasta for people, right? Something that you can do for yourself. So, like, it's got to be a real problem. The bigger the problem, the more money there is in solving it. You know, one of some of the most successful entrepreneurs that I know run pest control businesses. They run clearing junk away from building and construction site businesses.

Not very sexy stuff, but it does the job.

Yeah, it's a problem that someone wants to pay to have solved. And then the next one is, is the return on investment for solving that problem. Like, can I quantify the ROI so that people want to spend that? Because your pricing structure, your ability to charge for something, relates to your ability to express the return on investment for solving it. If I told you that if you stick a million pounds into this, it will give you two million pounds back very rapidly, okay, well, I'd be open to figuring out how to get a million pounds to stick into it, Right? Theoretically. So when you can express a return on investment, then you can price really well. So companies like, for example, buying a laptop and being able to run a business is a valuable thing to do. Or having a Zoom account and paying 150 pounds a year, you know that you're going to get a return on investment. It's going to save you money on venues, it's going to allow you to have meetings that you couldn't otherwise have. So there's a return on investment. So you basically have to triangulate my passion, the problem that I solve, and the people who are willing to pay for it. And when you go to the extreme edges of those three, you lose the answer. So the extreme edges of what people would pay me to do is not stuff that I'm passionate about doing. Or the extreme edges of solving a big problem in the world is not stuff I'm passionate or people want to pay for. For example, homelessness, huge problem, Very hard to quantify the return on investment to get others to pay for. So what you're trying to do is you're trying to get three things to intersect that aren't natural bedfellows. And when you get them, when you find that, oh, wait a second, I can do this, I enjoy doing it, I do that. That's really good. I can quantify the value of that. Bang it all clips together and you go, okay, cool, that's a good business that I'm going to be able to stick with long enough for it to succeed. Because, mind you, many businesses don't pay off big until you get about 15 years in. So you got to. You gotta ask yourself the question, if, you know, like, for you, if you're interviewing people, if you're talking to people, if you're running a community of men who want to better themselves, would that be so bad for 15 years? No, quite like that. That's kind of cool. I'm into it. In which case that's probably means that you'll figure a bunch of stuff out. Businesses tend to grow on a logarithmic scale. So, you know, when anything's doubling, say things are doubling in three years. So every two to three years, you double, you double, you double. So in 15 years, you get five doubles. Well, as you know, with logarithmic scale, the final double is actually worth more than the first four, right? In five doubles, the fifth double is worth more than the first four. The sixth double is worth more than the previous five. The seventh double is worth more than the previous six. So the payoff tends to be the final double. And it's only when you get to that last, you know. You know, it's quite. Quite extraordinary. Like, you know, our business is now kind of going from 6 to 12 million in that. In that jump. And it's funny because when you get to like, 12 million, one year's worth of revenue is worth more than the first 10 years combined or 5 years combined type thing. So that's where you get the big payoff. But you have to be just as committed to going from 200 to 400, 400 to 800, 800 to 1.6, 1.6 to 3.2, 3.2 to 6.4. You've got to do all of those doubles in order to get the last double where the payoff happens.

That's got my brain going again. This is the problem with talking to you, is it? Also the big challenge for a lot of people is staying in business that long to get to that point.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, you've got to. You've got to, A, stay engaged energetically and creatively, and B, you've actually got to stay in solvently. You got to keep running a solvent business. That's kind of like, you know, you look at Roger Federer, the guy must get sick of tennis. Like, honestly, he must get sick of tennis. Coldplay must be so fucking sick of soft rock. And it's like, you know, another night. It's like, you know, there must come a point where they go, I just don't feel like playing Goldplay songs tonight. I want to play Metallica.

I want To I want to do something different.

I want to play tennis. And Roger Federer is like, are you kidding? Tennis? I want to play rock. You know, so the trick is that you got it. You do have to stick with stuff beyond good judgment.

It leads me on to also, I was thinking about for you with your little ones and a lot of the guys listening will have kids is the entrepreneurial mindset. How do you, how do you develop your, say, develop your child? It sounds like you're pushing into help them develop an entrepreneurial mindset so they don't grow up thinking that like a lot of us did, you have to just go and get a job.

Yeah. So I think, I think, I think the key is entrepreneurial mindset as opposed to a child entrepreneur. There's nothing sadder than a kid that's pushed into having to be in business properly. I've met a few child entrepreneurs and they're something a bit off about it when the parents have pushed too hard. And then I've met some entrepreneurial kids who have that open mindset. And I think it's little things. It's exposing them to examples of people who live different lives, letting them to just see it and make their own decisions. So you're having the opportunity. Most, most kids in this country haven't seen an entrepreneur. They've not actually seen someone who runs a business or they think of someone who runs a business as someone who's got a fish and chip shop or a taxi cab, you know, or Uber driver. They're not getting exposure to someone who's got 50 people or 20 people on the team or 10, you know, or who's doing something really fun and who can travel when they want to travel and who's making, you know, reasonable money while having a good fun time and being free. It's also then recognizing that a lot of the lessons that you learn in school are the categorically the wrong lessons and discussing that with kids and discussing that there's context, right? So in the context of a classroom, in the context of a classroom, outsourcing your homework is a bad idea. But in the context of running a business and succeeding in life, outsourcing your homework is essential. You absolutely have to find the kid who's good at maths and get them to do the maths homework. That is exactly how you succeed. Speaking up, coming up with a brand new creative answer that's not, that's different to the answer you've been told is essentially innovation. That's a great thing to be doing. Focusing on the thing that you are most interested in focusing on while belligerently ignoring other topics is a great thing to do in life. Not a great thing to do when you've got six different topics that you've got to demonstrate in exam success and then taking the pressure off and saying, look, it's really not going to matter if you score highly on all of these subjects. What will matter is that you find one subject you want to run deep on and that you can figure out who you know enough to know who's good at the other topics. So those kind of things. The other thing is just explaining how your brain works. So I've got very young kids, but they've already learned to distinguish between having a reptile moment, having a monkey moment, and having a, having a visionary moment. You know, and one of the things that I'm really into with my kids is when they're, when they're panicking, when they're having a tantrum that we don't accentuate it. We actually just take a moment to breathe and we just take, you know, when they're ready, take a deep breath. We do this little activity of take a deep breath, take a deep sigh, take a deep growl, take a deep fluff. A deep fluff is where you go. And they, you know, they kind of go through this and by the time they've gone through these four little things, they're back to, you know, calm. And then with my older one, I actually say, you know, when you get upset like that, you know, you know that you can just take a deep breath and you'll be able to calm down and you'll be able to think more clearly and. Yeah, yeah, yeah, cool. And we do like a little two minute meditate sometimes before bed or in the morning, you know, just to kind of start that practice.

Isn't that great? I think if you're, if you're helping a child, I think, you know, in the long term by just doing those simple things that mean that they'll be used to doing that by the time they're in their teens. As you say, just, just the little rituals you might be doing can be, be really helping them.

The other one too that I think is important is not speaking negatively about work. So little things that most parents say, I have to go to work. Sorry, sorry, kid, I've got to go to work.

I can't play with you.

I've got to go to work. I have to go to work. So I always say to my kids, I'm going to work. I'm going to have a lot of fun. I'm going to play, I'm going to create stuff. You know, my, you know, my oldest has asked me what do you do as a job? I say I create things. And he goes, oh like, like drawings. I said yeah, sometimes drawings and like books, yeah, I make books. And like videos, yeah I make videos, I create. So what I do each day is I go off and I create things and. And he's like, oh that, that sounds fun. One day I want to go and create things, you know and, and I say, you know, for me I learned at school, I learned how to create things and then I go out now and my, you know, my work is creating things and it's fun and sometimes I meet people and sometimes there's music and sometimes there's, you know, fun things to do and there's people to meet. And he's like, oh wow, I really want to learn how to like I'm looking for, I'm looking forward to that. So he's not building a negative association to this idea of work. His idea of work is that you go off and you create stuff.

It's another little gem I think of again for selfishly for me but also, yeah, for the guys listening who have got kids or at some point do have kids. Just those little things you can do that can really help. Another question was one of the questions we asked again if people wanted to ask you was about what would you do if you were starting over or let's say, you know, you're a guy and you're mid to late 20s, who wants to start a business? Now I know you say with being a KPI that you know, you really might want to have been in that field for X amount of time, be it 15 years. But I guess starting somewhere and doing something is better than nothing.

Well my first, my first, if I was starting out from scratch, I think the best thing I ever did was working for two years for a successful entrepreneur. Most people, I think they think that you've got to work in a big corporate and then go start a business. And actually there's a lot to be said for working in a big corporate, going and then doing a year or two with an entrepreneurial fast growth startup so you get feeling for that, you know, like if you're used to working in a company that's got two and a half thousand people going and working in a company that's got 20 is going to be very different for you. And you know, literally working day in, day out with the founder and seeing decisions that get made and kind of having visibility of the whole company is going to be, you know, one of my, one of my team members who's in finance, in the business, she was saying that her and her friend that she went to university with, her friend works for a big corporate, has no idea really what they do. You know, she's, she's responsible for like entering, you know, receipts that start with a one and end in a four. That's her whole job. Right. And basically outside of that, really has no idea what the company does or how it makes money or anything. Whereas she said that she, she feels she made the best decision ever working in a small, you know, small by comparison business because she says, you know, I understand what we get for our marketing budget and I understand how we came up with why we're, you know, why we're going to use that venue over there and why we, why we use this software. So I have visibility across the whole business and if I'm confused about anything, I pick up the phone and talk to the CEO or send a slack message. Whereas my friend, you know, would have to go through three layers of command before getting a sensible answer about why we do what we do. So one of the first things I would really encourage anyone is don't have to make a complete leap into your own business. You could do a year or two in a startup business. You probably earn more money in that first year doing that and you'll learn and get paid. Be ruthless in choosing a great option if you're going to do that. Go and find someone who genuinely inspires you. They've got the lifestyle you like, they're doing things that you like. Perhaps it's more holistic as well. They've got a family if that's what you're into. They've got the fitness, if that's what you're into, and they're managing to make that kind of life work. It's incredible to spend time up close. You know, the thing that was amazing for me at 19 and this kind of takes us back to where we started. But that first day working For John, he's 37 years old and I turned up to his house and it was this humongous designer home on the, on the water, on the river. And you know, I remember this big door and it slid open and there's John and he's, he's just dressed casually and he says, come on through. And we walk around and there's his side of the house where his office is looking over the pool and he has three kids and he's got this beautiful home and he's got, you know, I meet his wife and she's lovely. And I think to myself, this guy, he's. He's like, yeah, he's kind of like how I want to be one day. And he was fun. And we, we had a half an hour to talk, and we ended up talking for three hours. And we, you know, just had good chemistry. And it was like, it was that two years working closely with John that basically set up, you know, what was a pretty fast start to my career. And there's no way, there's just no way I could have done any of the stuff I did in my 20s or, you know, by just kind of figuring it out on my own.

It certainly does, as you say. I, you know, spent nearly 20 years in a corporate background, but I've learned more in the couple of years we've launched the whole Man Academy because you've had to turn your hand to everything. And I've tried to be around people who have the similar mindset to yourself and the experience. And, you know, the amount of growth that my brain is, I think has had, you know, in 20 years was a small amount, and in two years has kind of, you know, exploded. And it's all about, as you say, I guess, you know, trying to be around the people that are maybe where you want to be.

Yeah, yeah. And then you get to see what really happens and how it works and how they structured and how they, you know, how they manage their week and, you know, and also the reality of it, like, sometimes things look pretty shiny on the outside. And then behind the scenes you realize, oh, wow, they actually do a lot of meetings and they do a lot of, you know, they're really hands on with this stuff. And, you know, and it's not an accident that they're getting this result. They're actually working really hard behind the scenes to get that result consistently. And then you go, okay. And you might even spot things that you think, oh, actually I'd do that a little bit differently with a bit of perspective. So it is, it is very, very powerful to go and work for someone who inspires you.

Excellent. I like that tip. And again, I just hope it's one that I've got several friends or our network has expanded hugely through the whole Man Academy. And, you know, even with our Instagram, which say we've only got a thousand 1300 followers, but a lot of those are people that we know. So as Opposed to having random accounts. You know, it's. With all the events. We've had 500 guys come to our events and now the online stuff and the podcast. So it's. We've got such a great network of guys, but a lot of them will often be one of their big challenges, saying, I want to do something different. I'm not particularly fulfilled. What should I do? And now I would say, well, guess what? I've spoke to Daniel Priestley and he said, you know, an option would be to go and no go. Go to a startup or something like that and see what you can learn.

Yeah, do 12 months at a startup would be a great place.

See what comes up. Well, I know. I appreciate you've. You've given us already an hour and a. Over an hour and a half of your time. So just. Just to tie up and I literally could. The hardest bit with you, Daniel, is what to not ask you. Because we could go on to each book and, you know, and spend a couple of hours, and when I say that it would be absolute good quality, we're not talking about, you know, it would be time well spent for people. But my last question would be for you is what kind of one piece of advice would you give to a guy? How to kind of do life better?

I would say, in many ways, do the things that you. How do I put this? Marcus Aurelius, in his. In his writings, his stoic writings, he talked about showing up, like, how he should show up, and not how he wanted, not how he. Not how he felt on any given day. He said, what is expected of an emperor in this situation? And then he showed up and he did that even though he didn't feel like it some days. And we live in a time where authenticity is this big word. It's like, oh, you got to do what you authentically want to do. And all this sort of stuff. Well, sometimes you're in a world leads you astray, and sometimes you're in a world is full of. Full of nonsense that got there by watching, you know, too many YouTube videos. In many ways, do the thing that you're supposed to do is it kind of is. Is actually not a bad way to do the thing that serves the most people, that. That adds value to the most other people. It tends to come back. So, you know, be the father that you think objectively would be a great father, even if it doesn't feel like that in the moment, be the type of leader of your company that you would want to work for, even though you Feel like walking in and mouthing off about something that happened. And even though you feel like sharing your burden with your team because you're trying to mentally work through something, shut up, shut up about it. Be stable, be solid, listen, do what's right for them. So it's about, in many ways it's doing the right thing. Doing the thing that is objectively the right thing to do as opposed to what you feel authentically you should do. Because sometimes authentically, I mean we're guys. What do we authentically want to do? Fucking nonsense. Like we want to get out to all sorts of dumb shit. So if you want to lead a better life in many times park authenticity and do what you're meant to do and actually it tends to lead you in the right direction. You know, make solid moves.

Lovely stuff. I think that's one that we can, we can meditate on as well. How best, I mean obviously we'll put your details in the show notes but how would. If the guys wanted to kind of get on board with, you know, either had any questions for you and, or get involved with Dent and the accelerators you do, what would be the best way to get hold of you?

So the books are on Amazon. They're always a good place to start. The online scorecard is cool. The key person of influence scorecard and you just have to search key person of influence scorecard. You can email the team Infoent Global. You can follow my social media stuff, Instagram and Twitter and LinkedIn and all that. And yeah, if you've got questions, you know, leave me alone. I'm busy and I'm not your help desk.

Wait till they meet you in person at one of your events or something like that.

No, I'm focused on doing what I'm there to do. Leave me alone.

When will your events start up? I mean for all of us. Is it now? You've just had to put them all on hold.

Now we're just taking them straight onto the online. Yeah. And we're getting great, we're getting great results. Great. Nine out of tens, ten out of tens. People are loving it. It's just a different, it's a different vibe. We're trying to figure out how to bring our A game to it by having extra people in the session and doing breakout rooms and getting people to network like they would and making sure we stop for stretch breaks and get, you know, let's take five minutes, go make yourself coffee, come back. So just, just being present to what, you know, how the environment could work better.

At least you've adapted.

Yeah, we're just adapting and we're just surfing is what it is, and we're just trying to surf the wave and do it as best as we can.

Lovely. Well, firstly, I'd like to obviously say thank you for spending the time to talk to me and obviously the whole man academy listeners, which actually 25% of them are women, we've found out. So there you go. It's interesting with, with how we, how we kind of shape our podcast and our topics, but also technology for, I guess, for the years of helping entrepreneurs because for people like me who are, you know, are fairly new to it, it's. It's a real minefield. And having the books and the opportunity to kind of listen and learn from your podcast, your content is quite priceless, I think.

Brilliant. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

Beautiful. Well, just to say thank you very much and we will speak to you soon.

Excellent. Talk soon.

Thanks, Daniel.

Thanks.