S1 Ep5: How to Start a Business Masterclass - EXACT FRAMEWORK to Make $10K - $100K a Month: Daniel Priestley

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What is the most exciting thing about 2025 for you?

AI. As a theory, every business can double without adding any headcount. Wow. The threat with AI is that AI's superpower is to turn people into a consumer, not a creator.

You can pick almost any business and think about it in the context of AI.

AI businesses are easy to build. People have no idea how easy. I have this mental model as to how to create an AI business, which is plus, and then it spits out something that's worth more than the sum of the parts.

Everyone, that is actually how you launch a business.

This is the most exciting time in human history.

This is it.

This is it.

I've said this on loads of shows before, like my favorite book in the world is one of your books. I've read pretty much all of your stuff, so I have a very good sense of you. But I suppose for For an audience that doesn't know you, can you give us a bit of background as to how you've got to where you are? Because your story is fascinating in that you've done so many different things and your sport clearly is entrepreneurship. Yeah.

So over the last 20 years, I think I've started something like 8 or 9 companies. I've had zero to a million 7 times in the first 12 months. I've had 3 companies go north of $10 million. So I'm very much into that early stage. I love startup. I've worked with lots of startups as well as an advisor, and we've run an entrepreneur accelerator for the last 15 years. For example, I had the opportunity to work closely with some people who have built billion-dollar businesses and brands from scratch, and I've written 6 books on entrepreneurship. My, my first business was a marketing agency, and it grew very rapidly from 0 to $1.3 million in year 1. And then 10.7 million in year 3. So it was very fast.

That is wild.

Yeah, that was pretty fast growth. 3, 3 years to a million a month. And when it got to there, I've had software, so I've actually bought companies. I bought a company that was a digital business and sold it, turned it around. I was failing and I bought it and sold it and turned it around. I've currently got one of the fastest growing tech companies in the UK called ScoreApp. Bookmagic.com. We've just launched a new business called bookmagic.ai, which is an authoring tool for people who want to write a book with the support of an AI tool. Sitting on about a dozen new startup ideas that are just waiting to go.

You said also previously that this is the most exciting time ever to be launching a business. And, you know, I have launched a new business recently, and I'd say that even, even versus launching Lottie, like 5 years ago, it's a completely different landscape.

Yeah.

And I think, like you say, like dirt and clouds is a fascinating concept, but also AI has arrived.

Yes. Yeah.

And if you can string these things together, you suddenly realize that everything has changed.

Everything's different. This is the most exciting time in human history. You would not want to be born at any other time. This is the moment.

This is it.

This is it. And this is the birth of a new economy, new way of doing things. You can today, you can have a team of 8 people, 12 people, and you can be doing $10 million to $20 million of revenue. You can have— you could have raised almost no money, maybe a little bit of money from a few angels. Um, you can have 80% margins. Uh, you can be having, you know— well, let me just not talk theory. So we launched bookmagic.ai a few months ago. We've got 400 clients who are scattered all over the world. We have—

you tell us first what it does.

Yeah, so Bookmagic is AI, like having a creative editor who helps and guides you to write a book. If you're an author, professional author, and you're signed to a big publisher, they're going to assign a creative team to you and they're going to help you to unpack your ideas and structure it into a framework and to actually build out your entire, like, book process. And they're going to kind of like road test it and they're going to suggest analogies or they might suggest research. We've just basically replaced that with AI. So you just tell the AI what your book idea is. And it will then map out the chapters and you can select chapters you want to do. It'll come up with some analogies for you. It'll come up with some research you should quote. It won't write the book for you, but it'll actually kind of like do all the supportive work. Only 3% of people who try to write a book actually do. Wow. Yeah, it's a huge failure rate. So let me kind of tell you the business case for it. I personally believe that businesses, good businesses, should be built on unmet needs. So people have a need for something or the desire for something, but they can't do it. They want something, but they're not getting that thing. So it actually turns out that about half of all Americans want to write a book in their lifetime. So 200— yeah, about 200 million Americans think they're going to write a book at some point. Now, many of those will be fiction. And, you know, my software is nonfiction, but it's in the psyche that a lot of people want to write a book at some point in their life. They want to— they want to achieve that goal. Um, but 97% failure rate in terms of sitting down and writing versus completing.

It's quite grueling.

Yeah, the whole industry is democratized. If you can write a book, you can easily publish it and distribute it, but just writing it is hard. So what we've done is created an AI tool that, uh, we think is probably gonna potentially 5x the success rate. Maybe 15% of people will complete their book. Maybe 20% of people complete their book with this level of support. Um, you know, so we've created an AI tool to massively increase the odds of people getting that book out.

And that's like a perfect example of a truly new age business. You know, it's the thing is fulfilled by presumably AI and AI. Yeah. Good engineering and good thinking behind it, but fundamentally infinitely scalable product doesn't need to be geographically bound at all.

No, we already have clients in dozens of countries.

Exactly. Like I imagine you log on, it can self-onboard, self-serve.

Yeah, yeah, literally, literally you select the type of person you want to walk you through it, who will talk to you through your writing process. So you can say, do you want a man or a woman? We've got about 10 different people and they're your writing coach. Yeah, you know, and they, and they literally talk you through and they say, well, what your customer's trying to do is try— they're trying to figure out this.

And they, you know, yeah, one of the, one of the interesting things I think at the moment is like you can pick almost any business and think about it in the context of AI, and there's probably a use case for it. And I'm not, you don't have to build a massive business. You could build a small—

AI businesses are easy to build.

Yeah. Small business.

People have no idea how easy. Yeah. It's, AI's a little bit like electricity. So there was a period of time where electricity came out and they said, what's electricity for? And everything.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, you know, it's gonna replace the way that we light the house. It's gonna replace the way we do the dishes. It's gonna replace the way that we clean clothes. It's gonna replace the way we clean, you know, suck dirt out of the thing. It's going to replace all sorts of things. And we're going to invent stuff that we didn't even know was possible, like computers and phones and all that. So electricity had that same impact. AI, it's like, well, what's it for? Well, it's for everything, actually. Yeah. So I have this mental model as to how to create an AI business, which is you, you need to be able to capture customer insights. You need to capture something from a, from a user. You need to then mix that with your unique intellectual property that forms a prompt. So their, their data plus your intellectual property goes over to OpenAI as an API call, and then it spits out something that's worth more than the sum of the parts, and you end up putting that into just a portal. So you build it into a portal. So we've just explored several ways to do this. I've just been exploring a an AI tool for writing a great pitch. And, you know, you share your idea and then it mixes with our IP and then it goes away and then it writes the pitch for you and then it comes back with a better pitch. Well, so we're just playing around with like, how do you build portals where essentially this plus this plus this, and now you've got something that's worth something.

It's, it's fascinating because I feel like we're at the beginning of that and obviously you're an experienced entrepreneur, so you would've seen AI like I did and think, I have to just be involved in it. I have to force myself into it so that I understand it. But the impact that's going to have on companies is, I remember you saying this when we spoke ages ago, like we used to have few big companies and then hundreds of medium-sized companies. And presumably in the future we're going to have millions of small companies.

Well, it's certainly the case that we need that every organization can run with a lot less people to achieve its outcomes that it has today. It can do that with a lot less people if those people are very smart and are powered by AI. You know, we, we are going to have law firms that have a few senior partners, a few AI prompt engineers, some tools, proprietary tools that they've built. I can imagine that the law firm of the future will have AI eavesdropping in on conversations and essentially just like it'll be— you'll just have, you know, the obviously computers listening and it'll be summarizing the meeting and then it will literally just start building out all the documents and then the documents will come in for review, probably have a, probably have a multiple review process of its own where it reviews it 10, 15, 20 times. Iterates, does research, iterates again, does more research, iterates again, then gets human feedback in the loop and then comes back and like all the documents are built pretty much in real time.

I used my first legal AI piece of technology the other day, and obviously I've been messing around with like all the openly available public ones myself, you know, writing contracts and all the rest of it. And I was thinking about that experience of putting together I've had to create freelance contracts for people to join my company. Back in the day, I had to pay a lawyer to create that. Now I literally clicked a button when I'm on a free trial with an app.

Yeah.

And suddenly I have it.

I sold a company recently and I think we did most of it on AI and then we had about £6,000 worth of legal fees just to kind of— yeah, I mean, almost just to tie it all together. And it actually— we spent about £6,000 on legals almost just to make sure that we had a human in the loop sign off. Yeah, but it didn't really need much. No, like it wasn't the human stuff. The only stuff that was valuable that the lawyers did for us was just their deal experience.

Yeah.

So like just kind of saying, hey, approach it a little bit this way, slow it down a bit, ask these questions, do this right, you know. So it was, it was not so much the legal experience, all of that. Was free, freely available. Um, especially too, we've just subscribed to the $200 a month, uh, OpenAI subscription. That does so much. It's mind-blowing.

Yeah. And I, and I think you're right. I mean, Jeff Bezos just has announced he's like effectively going back into Amazon to do, to do AI.

Yeah.

And I think he was using the electricity analogy as well, and that he was like, every single part of the business will be AI. It's not like a thing you do, No, it's electricity.

Yeah, it's, it's just this always-on empowered thing. Yeah, exactly. It's compute. It's like compute, electricity, uh, AI.

Which is why like there is a growing trend of people being like, you should do boring businesses or you should do these like side hustles. I appreciate all of that, but at the same time, I think because we're in the most interesting point in entrepreneur history and technology, if you can push yourself into this space now and get the learning, you can do both. Yeah.

So what you could do is buy a business that's doing $1.2 million a year and then go looking for its intellectual property and see whether you can widen the margins through the use of AI and spit out some intellectual property from that business. So maybe, you know, there's a business that produces, you know, uniforms for cookware, for catering companies. and you know, you could actually double the size of the business with the same amount of people on the team just using AI. And also there's some AI IP about, you know, how we approach this thing, and you could spin that out. Um, so you could potentially do a bit of both.

So I want to— I definitely want to come back to, uh, creating IP soon because I think that is so overlooked in businesses. But I think one of the things I'd love to do with you is talk about how and through your frameworks, things that I've read of yours for years and years now, how we can step by step help someone actually put together and launch a business. And so because I know you have and I have, we've both built agency-type marketing businesses, so I'm going to use that as our kind of vehicle, as it were. So step one, I wanted to talk about how you think about launching and branding a company, like what are the frameworks you would use to think about a new business today?

Yep. So phase 1 is about testing. You're testing the market, and there's 2 things that you're testing. Can I sell something? Can I, um, produce it? Right, so can I sell it and can I create a happy customer? So I like to think of this as a scout team. In the military, they have 2-person teams and they go off to look at something, and they don't— they're not— their job is not to necessarily fix anything or do anything. They just go check something out. So a scout team is a 2-person team Can we build it? Can we sell it? Or can— more to the point, can we sell it? Can we build it? So this is like often it's co-founders or it could be a founder plus an assistant or a founder plus an industry expert who's helping out. Like it could be a founder plus a friend who works in the industry who's agreed to give you a few hours of their time, but you're scouting an opportunity. So you want to scout an opportunity in order to, in order to launch something. I always go for the big 4 things called CAOS, CAOS. And that is what is the concept, the high-level concept, and why should that exist in the world? Who's it for? Which is audience. Which audience are we going to try and attract? Offer— what offer do they respond to? And sales— how do we sell it? So these are the big 4 things that we're going to test. So in order to conduct tests, it's good to do several versions. So you might actually— like, let's say you're testing concepts. If I was talking to someone who just wants to start a business, come up with 10 ideas and talk to smart people and see if you can narrow it down to 2 or 3 that you're going to then do some testing. Um, audience— you've got then got to come up with a few hypotheses around who might see the highest value in this. Um, so you're looking for an audience of people who, for them, solving the problem would be extremely valuable. I'll give you an example. There's this woman called Esther Perel who's a couples therapist. She very particularly focuses on not getting divorced after infidelity. She spoke at TED about this, and she works with couples who have more than $100 million net worth.

Right.

And they've got over $100 million and they're potentially going to get divorced. There's been infidelity involved and she's the global expert at helping them. Now, for that couple, a divorce is going to cost millions and millions of dollars. And being able to move through it and have a profound transformational experience as a result of it is going to easily be worth a couple hundred grand if that could happen. So therefore, she gets brought in for a quarter of a million bucks because she's figured out that there's a particular type of person that if you can solve the divorce challenge for them, it's worth a lot of money. So that's— so she's very clear about her audience. I know a consultant who was a consultant for helping manufacturing businesses and he was earning a few thousand a day, but he actually found a niche within the manufacturing which was willing to pay $20,000 a day. This particular niche, they were having real issues around health and safety and they were actually, you know, they were getting costly claims, but B, they didn't want people being injured, but they were getting a lot of people injured. And he had the experience and the knowledge and the intellectual property to go in and solve a very particular type of product, uh, problem within this, uh, niche industry. And inside that niche, he could go in and for about $100,000 and 5 days' work solve a problem that they were happy to pay $100,000 for. Um, so, you know, so essentially finding the right audience is a massive thing. You do not want to go to the mass market. You don't want to go out to the masses, you know, competing with everyone on price. You want to find this niche audience that you're going to start with that sees massive value in what you do. Offer gold, silver, bronze version. So I always, if I'm starting a new offer, we're going to road test a bronze, silver, and gold. I love to do like gold being a batshit crazy version. What if Jeff Bezos— what if, what if I met with Jeff Bezos and he wanted to write a book? Okay, well, here's all the things we can do for you, Jeff. Yeah. Okay. What if we met someone who was price sensitive initially and they wanted to test for a limit? What would we do at a basic entry level? We also love surveying, like just asking a set of questions. So what's, what's, what's wrong with the current situation when it relates to X? What's, what's currently less than perfect is one of the questions I like to ask. When you imagine a great outcome, what would that— what would be the top 3 things that you would want to see happen? Why do you think you haven't been able to solve this in the past? If someone could solve this for you, what would be the most important things you'd know about them in order for you to buy? You know, so that would be another question. At what price point would this become prohibitively expensive? At what price point would this be so cheap that you doubt the quality? So I'll ask those kind of questions.

Get them thinking.

Yeah. And then we harvest that data. With Book Magic, we were quite shocked. So Book Magic was originally— we were thinking $29 a month in our first financial model. Model was based on $29 a month. The data said $59 a month.

Is there willingness to pay?

700 people filled in a survey, and the most common price point that people felt was the appropriate price for getting support to write a book was $59 a month.

Wow.

So had we gone with $29 a month, we would have had to sign up twice as many clients to get to where we are today.

One of the things that you told me and I implemented was I was exiting my last business and I was thinking about what I was doing next, and I was running ideas by everyone around me, which is what entrepreneurs do. And I said to you, I had an idea to train like 8-figure entrepreneurs on effectively like how to build profile. And you were like, launch a waitlist. Hmm, just launch a waitlist. And I was like, for what? And you were like, for the idea. Hmm, just launch a waitlist, ask some questions, see if anyone's interested, and just follow the path.

Yep.

And I think for so many entrepreneurs, that would just be the best bit of advice you could give them?

Yeah, launching the waiting list. So I almost always launch a waitlist.

Yeah.

So in your case, in 2020, in the year ahead, I'm going to be working with a small group of entrepreneurs who have already achieved 8-figure valuation to work on the personal brand of the CEO. It's going to be a very hands-on, results-driven process. We've got a framework for how we do this. It's only suitable for businesses worth more than $10 million. And CEOs who have a team of greater than 50. If you're interested in being selected as one of the initial people to go through that process, fill in the waitlist.

Yeah.

And then what's less than perfect about your current situation?

Yeah.

When you imagine the desired outcome, what, what are the top 3 things that are most important? What's prevented you from building your personal brand in the past? When you think about selecting a supplier to help you with your personal brand, what are the top 3 most important things that shape the decision? What would be the price point that becomes prohibitively expensive? What would be the price point that was so cheap you'd doubt the quality?

Everyone, that is actually how you launch a business. So definitely do.

And obviously name and contact information. Yeah, yeah.

I, I think the other thing that you, I, I think have spoken about many times before is like at that stage of the business you're assessing demand and creating, yeah, creating demand, but you do have to have some sort of mission and vision origin piece for people to get on board with. And so when we're talking to our entrepreneur that we're launching the business with, they are vision, mission, and weightless. Is that the first 3 steps? Yeah.

So origin, mission, vision, and values is some of the work that I often do with a new business so that the concept— so the internal work, if I'm sitting down with the team, the internal work, which is, are we going to go the distance on this idea? Has to be that we feel strongly that our origin story aligns to this. So for example, if you were going to do a business that relates to helping CEOs build a personal brand, it helps if your origin story is that you're a CEO who built a personal brand.

Yeah.

You know, so do you have the background for it? Then also the vision, like what is it you hope to achieve with this? Like why, why would you even want to do this? Where do you want to get to 3 years, 5 years, 10 years out? Is there something that is— is there a particular reason why this is beyond just making money? You might go, actually, well, these types of CEOs, they're going to rule the world, and I want to be in with them early and help make sure that their business are a force for good. And you say, wow, okay, so if we could build personal brands with CEOs, we could actually have a massive impact in the world. Okay, so we want to have an impact in the world by helping CEOs to be great leaders. Okay, that's our vision, right? And then we say, okay, our mission. So our mission is the thing that we're uniquely placed to do in the world relating to that. So Batman is Batman because he's uniquely placed to be Batman. He's a trust fund kid who inherited a weapons factory, so he's well-placed to be Batman. So a good mission. So his mission is strike fear into the heart of bad guys. And become a symbol that strikes fear into the heart of bad guys. There's very few people who are born into the right circumstances to become a symbol to strike fear into the heart of baddies. But because he is that, we feel that his mission is the right mission because it's uniquely placed. His origin story, he was the victim of crime in Gotham City. So his vision for the future is Gotham City free from crime. So Batman is a great character because the origin, mission, and vision are aligned. So we want to do that for each individual. And then so that's shaping the concept. And then so that's the internal work. The external work is to go out with a waiting list and say, I'm launching something in this particular space. If you're interested in that and you want to know a bit more, join the waiting list and I'll send you some information. It's really helpful if you could fill in a few questions to help me shape the idea. Truth is, if you can't get 150 people on a waiting list, you don't have the legs for this.

And you should, I think, in those early stages of like brand and working out the idea and what the service is, you should be having lots of one-on-one calls with people to sort of run your ideas by them and see how people are responding to them. And I think that's the job of a founder a lot of the time.

So I have this, I have this friend of mine who sold his first company for $160 million and his next company for $900 million. Wow. And now his next company is $2.5 billion that he raised money at. So he's a billionaire, um, he's got a jet, he's got houses all over the world, super successful guy, early 40s. And he, he had an idea for something that they wanted to spin out that was going to be $9 a month. And I watched him do something like 100 one-to-ones for a $9 a month product. When I say one-to-ones, he literally— I was one of the one-to-ones, um, so he literally had 3 people on the call. We did a Zoom call and him and his team sat down and they pitched the product with slides and like little diagrams and stuff. And they got my feedback and they sold me a $9 product as though it was a $900,000 product. And they wanted to know everything that was going through my mind. Now I'm sitting there watching my friend who I know is a billionaire with his notepad, and I'm saying some casual little remark and he's writing it down. And he probably did 100 one-to-ones there. I don't think they actually went ahead with the idea in the end. But actually, yeah, what's interesting is that he sat down down and did that. When I launched ScoreApp, I, I've lost track of how many people I sold ScoreApp to face to face, one-to-one, no screen, no landing pages, sitting down and having a one-to-one sales conversation about signing up to ScoreApp.

But that's why in the end you became so fundamentally brilliant at refining the message, the product, and everything, because the feedback fuels it, doesn't it?

Totally. I'll give you two quick more examples. Uh, one of my friends who's a very successful entrepreneur sold one of his companies for over $30 million. Um, he, when he was launching that business, he had a stack of, um, Styrofoam, uh, iPads. And, uh, so he, what he had done is he'd gone to this printer and they had created lookalike iPads that had a sequence of clicking screens, clicking through screens. So when he would see a new person and he would just do this at like events and conferences, he walks up to you with this thing of iPads and he gets you to come up to the table and there's this pile of iPads and he says, okay, so first you go to this landing page here on your iPad. Yep. And then he says, now click that button and you push the push, put your finger on the button, pulls one of the iPads away and puts it off to the side. He goes, now look, this is where you are in the portal. And then so he had this kind of like UX experience. Yeah. And then he would then— so he'd watch your reaction and he'd just go through and he'd be watching you as you're clicking through and doing this thing. They hadn't developed any code. They hadn't developed any software. All he'd done is worked with a graphic designer to create a UX path.

Couple of screens.

Yeah. And on the back of the— on the back of the board, he had it so that he could write notes on the back of the board. So as he's going through it with you, you're saying, oh, that's a bit confusing. What was confusing? Oh, well, the button's red and I thought it would have been green. Oh, okay. All right. So he writes that on the back of that board and he's going through.

What a way to test it. It's a bit like the Innocent story where they just have people come and try it.

Yeah.

And throw it in a bin.

Threw it in one of the bins.

So I suppose the next stage for our entrepreneur is moving from that one-to-one dynamic to one-to-many. Yeah.

So we've got a two-person team that is scout teaming. Chaos, concept, audience, offer, sales. Those are the first four things. The next one is a four-person fire team. So a four-person fire team. Here's what I like to do. I want to recruit someone who's got high credibility. So I call this person an interim executive or an interim key person of influence, uh, an interim non-executive director. But I want someone who's got high credibility, uh, in this particular field, and I want them to agree to do half a day a month to maybe two half days a month. But I want them— I want their name on it and I want them to be in some way associated with it. So I want some high credibility individual to be in some way associated with the project at this point. And then I've got 3 hardworking people on the team. So we're gonna have someone in sales or sales marketing. We're gonna have someone who's general purpose, uh, gen, like just general everything. So I, I call them a Swiss Army knife, 25 things.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and then we're gonna have someone who's responsible for customer success. So sales, admin, everything general purpose, and customer success with a high credibility individual. So that's our 4-person team. And what we're going to do is we're going to establish something called LAPS, which is lead generation, appointments, presentations, sales. We're going to go through LAPS, LAPS, LAPS. And the goal is to try and get a steady stream of weekly LAPS. So every week we generate 40 leads, we book 12 appointments, we deliver 8 presentations, and we make 2 sales. So it's like we, we want to even out those weekly laps numbers. And then the next one is that we want to build the product. Customer success wants to build the product so that those customers answer the question, would you refer someone to this product with a very resounding yes, so that it becomes referable. So those are our like, that's our next phase of the product, which is essentially LAPS and what's called Net Promoter Score as a technical name.

The NPS.

Yeah.

And the NPS you would send out saying rate us 1 to 10, or would you just ask that question? I think it's such a great tool.

Yeah. So the technical side is the question is, is on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product to somebody else? And then you detect, you get rid of people, you zero out people who are, who are non basically what's called detractors, they scored 7 or lower, and you discount that from the people who are promoters, 9s and 10s, and then you are left with a net promoter score, how many promoters are remaining. Um, but a simple way to do this is just create an average. So an average experience score on a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied were you with, um, this product or service and how likely would you be to recommend it to somebody else? How satisfied were you to the extent that you would recommend it? Right. And you can just come up with an average initially and we just call that an experience score.

And you mentioned a minute ago, like finding someone to be the key person of influence for your business, or I suppose being it yourself. And so for the audience that doesn't know.

Yeah.

You know, that book literally changed the whole of my business experience. But what is a key person of influence?

So the key person of influence is the person whose name comes up in conversation. They attract opportunities. They've got a great story. They're very good at pitching. They've got a great online brand and reputation. If they're going to be involved in something, others are immediately open to the project. So for example, like, let's take an extreme example. If you were going to launch a CEO personal brand program and Richard Branson was the co-founder, or Richard Branson was the— in some way involved. Yeah, right. Obviously that's going to be massive in its first year, and you're going to open the floodgates. Let's say Richard Branson said, I'll turn up 3 times a year and give— like, I'll be there and I'll actually give a talk, and you can promote an event around it. Um, you're going to massively blow that business up. Now, obviously Branson is an extreme example, but in every industry there are micro examples of Richard Branson So, um, you know, but the key is as a founder, you want to be able to demonstrate in this early, early stage that you've been able to bring a high credibility person onto the project part-time, a little bit, a little bit of their time, a little bit of their effort. Um, it's, it's such an accelerant. So even if you're not positioned as a key person of influence, or even if you are, like even me personally, if I'm bringing someone new onto a program, like, um, So when we launched Book Magic, I brought on Lucy Makara, who's got 30 years plus in the publishing industry, considered— she's the co-founder of the Business Book Awards and all this sort of stuff. So I brought her into the project as a high credibility publishing person. I want to bring someone else onto the project.

One of the frameworks within the book is the 5 Ps.

Yeah.

Can you give the audience some understanding of how that works?

Yeah. So the 5 Ps to become a key person of influence is when you're— so all industries are split into 3 levels. There's newbies, worker bees, and key people of influence. Worker bees have their unique set of skills that are functional skills within the industry. So if you're a, you know, obviously if you're a lawyer, you've got legal skills. If you're an accountant, you've got accounting skills and qualifications. So those are the functional skills that make your worker a proficient worker. Above that is the key person of influence skills, and these are the 5 Ps. The first one's pitching, your ability to pitch an idea and get people excited about it. Publishing content, publishing thought leadership. So putting out books, articles, reports, podcasts, videos, all of that is publishing, which is to publish means to put in the public domain. Mm-hmm. Product selection. So making product choices. Key people of influence choose what are the hot products and they shape those products. Raising profile, so being on other platforms, getting social media following, all of that sort of stuff. And then driving partnerships. So it's the key people of influence who put together the big partnerships, uh, that change the game. So if we think about what are you doing if you're a key person of influence: pitching, publishing, product choice, profile, and partnerships.

I remember watching something you said a very long time ago that I watched being like, there's a big difference between like direct value and indirect value. And I was like 27 or something at the time, and I was running my agency focused on luxury brands. And I remember reading your stuff being like, wouldn't it be amazing if I could make myself the key person of influence in luxury?

Yeah.

Like, I know it's not going to happen overnight.

Yeah.

Wouldn't it be amazing if I was the person speaking at all the conferences for luxury?

Yeah.

And I, I went so down that alley of like focusing on my personal brand, on luxury and so forth. And we just started realising after a couple of years that rather than us asking to attend the conferences, we were asked to be paid to speak at the conferences where all of our ICP were.

That's how you know you're—

And you're suddenly like, who's watching? Okay, well, it's like Bugatti, Aston Martin, and like Harrods are in the audience, and I'm talking.

And you're up on stage.

Yeah. And then you do start to think to yourself, like, as the levers you have in the world we are in today, like, to create indirect value.

Yeah.

Speaking, publishing.

Yeah.

You know, pursuing the teachings of that book is like huge leverage.

It really is. And this is the beauty of digital that, like, for example, this podcast episode, we spend a couple of hours together talking. So it's 2 hours of inputs. Let's say 10,000 people watch it. So it's 2 hours of inputs, 10,000 outputs.

Yeah.

So that's the beauty of digital. Same as when you speak on a stage. If there's 100 people in the audience, it's 1 hour of your time on stage, 100 received hours of value, and it creates competitive tension as well. So it actually—

I had this thing the other day where I was trying to explain to someone that they should spend time trying to build their personal brand and they were like, I only get, you know, 600 people viewing my posts. And I was like, can you imagine 600 people in the room though? Like, can you imagine 600 people reading your content about your business?

600 people is a huge room.

Yeah, massive room.

Like, if ever you've been to an awards, a big awards ceremony, there's probably 600 people in the room. Like, imagine stepping forward and being able to read that post to 600 people in a room. You know, eventually you get bigger and you get 5,000 people seeing the post. That is a Royal Albert Hall. 5,000 people fills the Royal Albert Hall. You might put a video out that gets 15,000 views. 15,000 doesn't feel a lot when you see it as a number under a YouTube video.

It's like a stadium.

That is Centre Court at Wimbledon.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's, that's the power. And I think that for a lot of entrepreneurs, they feel uncomfortable. And I think, again, like, one of the things I think you teach people just by creating what you create is that you can create frameworks around how you think, and therefore people can learn from you a lot easier than, than otherwise. And it's quite interesting to hear that now you've built a tool that helps people build frameworks to deliver their ideas.

Yeah, I'm a framework thinker. Yeah. Once you get in the habit of frameworks, you're like, oh my goodness, everything's, everything's just a framework. Yeah. But, but that's, that's what does the heavy lifting. It gives you the ability to free up time and energy to be creative.

So one of the things I think is really misunderstood these days is how to become a very good salesperson and how to understand that sales is a, is often a bit of a trick and it's a super professional skill. And so how do you advise people to learn to become a good salesperson and then do that at scale?

Yeah, so sales is super misunderstood and people are trying to avoid it. Um, there's no avoiding it when you're a startup, and I almost don't even care what business you're in, whether you're selling paperclips or selling a consumer product, you have to get face to face with customers. And because you're by definition doing something new or under a new brand, people don't trust it. So they need to talk to someone. They need to have those conversations. And sales will reveal insights about how the business itself is going to scale. There's going to be so much value that comes out of the sales process, which is why all the best, all the best founders are salespeople. They all sit down and do sales. So there's 3 big ideas that I think about when I think about sales. The first one is that treat it like a profession. So if you treat sales like, um, you know, any other profession, that you're going to do a lot of training, you're going to do scripting, you're going to do development, you're going to do, you're going to have materials, you're going to look for people who are experienced and qualified, you're going to do role play. You really treat it seriously. It's not some afterthought. You're not just like a surgeon is not going to walk in and wing it. An accountant's not going to kind of like just casually glance at the numbers and go, oh, they seem all right.

Yeah.

You know, so a salesperson is going to be a meticulous professional. They're going to treat this as a super important function in the business and everyone should. So this is the first idea. Treat it as a profession. And by the way, the companies that invest the most money into sales are businesses like Apple. And, you know, like luxury brands, LVMH, and, you know, the big property developers and, you know, enterprise sales companies like Oracle. These are the businesses that spend a fortune turning sales into a profession. So if the biggest companies in the world focus heavily on this and really try and perfect this, then like, why would anyone else not be doing that? So it's really important. So the first one is that it's a profession. The second one is that it's a rhythm. That like anything, you've got to get into a rhythm with sales. And it's very dangerous to break the rhythm, by the way. So I like when a salesperson finds their rhythm, you just want to really protect that. And it's like how many leads, how many appointments, how many presentations, how many sales. So the rhythm is called laps, and it's the number of leads you can allocate to each salesperson that they can get to in a fast time frame, how many appointments they can book where they make a time to speak, how many presentations they can deliver where they share the, the value proposition, and how many sales they complete. And you want to be able to measure these laps every single week, and you want to try and get yourself and your salespeople into a rhythm where we can process leads, appointments, presentation, sales. What you don't want is lumpy sales. Yeah, so you don't want to have like 150 leads this week and 14 leads next week, and then 600 leads, and then, you know, 20 leads. You want to try and build a system where it's consistently about the same number of leads, appointments, presentations, and sales every single week so that you're getting this kind of like consistency. So you're trying to optimize for that nice pipeline. And then the final thing is— the, the third thing is that sales conversations follow a pattern. There is actually a proven way of talking to people. Yeah, that is a patterned conversation. So you're not just having chitchat, you're not just randomly sitting down and chitty-chat. You're also not like blurting in with, you know, solutions early. So there's this pattern of going through rapport building where you're actually just finding some common ground and building a little bit of rapport and trust, and then followed by getting permission that you'd like to talk about, you know, topic in more detail, followed by a discovery process, followed by permission to make some suggestions, then sharing some insights, sharing a methodology, sharing an actual packaged up solution and a price. So there's actually a set of steps that you go through, and a great salesperson like really perfects those set of steps, and they have that conversation, and they can drop into that pattern at any time, and they can go into sales mode. Um, and then they're, then they're doing their job really, really well. They're making sales on the right terms. You know, people feel respected, they feel listened to, all of that sort of stuff. So the— a profession, a rhythm, and a pattern. Um, those are the big three I focus on.

I've seen you before talk about the idea of winning high-quality clients, not just any clients. And I can't remember, did you call it the Cinderella—

it's a new business model, the Cinderella business model.

And so how do you qualify a good opportunity then?

So the Cinderella business model is Prince Charming throws a ball for 1,000 people knowing that he's only trying to meet one, um, and he has a glass slipper in order to find who is Cinderella. So he's got a very rigid criteria as to who's Cinderella or not Cinderella. So if we think about these new business models, uh, you might have thousands of people subscribing to your channel or millions of people who are subscribing and following your social media, but you need to have a way of qualifying who is Cinderella and who's not Cinderella. And, and under a Cinderella business model, Cinderella is 1 in 1,000, right? So, you know, for example, Gary Vaynerchuk, he puts out so much content. Yeah, millions of people watch it, but he only has about 1,000 clients. Millions of people are watching his stuff, but only 1,000 brands work with VaynerMedia. So the vast majority experience something for free, but a small number of companies sign up for the full shebang with VaynerMedia. So that's a classic example of a Cinderella business model. So what you're, you're trying to achieve is a big audience with something that you ask them to do that triggers the glass slipper moment where you go, aha, there's my Cinderella.

And so what are some practical tips that our entrepreneur could follow to try and avoid bad clients? Because bad clients in the early days of my company were the bane of my life. And like they kept us small.

Yes.

For much, much longer period than we should have been. Whether it was we weren't charging enough, they were just beating us down, they were making us work additional hours. We were building stuff for them that was outside of our core competency.

A classic example, I spoke to this entrepreneur last week. He's a landscape gardener and I said, oh, how much do you charge per client? He goes, oh, it varies. I said, tell me, how much does it vary? He goes, oh, I've got one client who's paying $36,000 for like a transformation, and I've got another client that's doing £600. Why are you taking on the £600? Yeah, like the amount of time, energy, and effort. I said, how many of these £600s have you got? Oh, you know, there's a few dozen of them. It's like, honestly, get rid of them and focus all your energy on getting another £36,000er. If you've got— if you know that your business has capacity to take on a £36,000 client, you know, you only need a small number of those and pass the £600 clients off. You know, especially if you know it's not going anywhere, they're never going to suddenly turn into a £36,000 client. And this was a revelation. He was like, aha, really? I can turn people away? It's like, yeah, you absolutely can and should.

Yeah. And it gives you so much power turning people away in that you understand more what the client is that you're serving. And I think if you take the £36,000 example there, you will get better at serving that client by just working on that client.

And that client will be so much happier because They're not calling you up and you're like, oh, I'm sorry, we're busy today serving some little thing that's annoying. So we really get into this thing called customer needs analysis. So customer needs analysis is a secret assessment where the customer is filling in an assessment to see what their needs are, but you're actually qualifying them at the same time.

Right.

So, so what we do is we like to— in the signup process, you'll say, look, what I want you to do is I want you to fill in an online assessment. We're going to have a meeting. I want you to fill in an online assessment, answer 30 questions, and just go through all those questions. And that is— that's going to tell us exactly what you need and nothing more. It's really going to help us zone in on your needs. Um, so people then fill that in on their own time, and then the customer needs analysis reveals, is this going to be a good, good client or not?

Yeah, so like the right budget, they want the exact service, you've maybe psychographic questions to see if they're reasonable.

Yeah.

And you pull all this together and that's how you determine clients.

Totally.

One of the questions I think a lot of young entrepreneurs deal with is like, how do you raise your prices tactically? Like strategically, how do you increase your price from say £500 a day to £1,000 a day?

Um, let me tackle this philosophically first and then we'll go tactically. Philosophically, there's no such thing as objective value. It's all subjective. Everything is subjective. Nothing is objective. So a bottle of water is worth more than a Bitcoin on a different time and place. Mm-hmm. A nurse should theoretically be worth more than an art dealer because they're saving lives and this person's just selling an old Picasso. However, that's just not how the world works. So the first thing you have to get back to is this idea that there is no objective value. Everything is just a balance of demand and supply. So, the reason prices go up is because you have more demand than supply, and that's it. That's it. There's nothing else other than that. So, you could say, well, why is this restaurant charging higher prices? Because they can.

Yeah.

That's why.

Because they've created the demand.

Because there's people lining up out the door. Why is that restaurant discounting? Because it's empty. But their food is just as good as their food and their location is just as good as their location. Doesn't matter if that one's empty and that one's full. That one discounts and that one doesn't. It's as simple as that. There is no objective value. You could charge $1 million for a cheeseburger. Why? Because 2 people want to pay $1 million and there's only 1 cheeseburger.

Yeah.

So, so I know that's— I know I'm saying stupid examples, but I'm saying these stupid examples to make a point. So what, what you want to get away from, which is the big mistake most businesses make, is justifying the price. Mm. The price is the price and it's based upon demand and supply. So ultimately what you want to do is you want to have all sorts of reasons that attract people to signal their interest. But what you ultimately need to do is you must get yourself where there's an imbalance between what's called signaled interest and official capacity. So official capacity is how many people you officially say that you can look after each year. Now, when I say official capacity, it's because this is what you talk about publicly. And of course, there's going to be some exceptions to the rule. You might say my official capacity is 30 clients a year, and of course you might have 31 or you might have 28 or whatever. Someone might want to be slightly higher and some— someone might come in, you know, with a friend or something. Okay. But, but there's an official capacity, like a restaurant has an official capacity and a nightclub has an official capacity. So if you go to a nightclub, they say, well, this place can hold 600 people. Maybe it can hold 603, but, you know, it's got an official capacity. So your business needs to have an official capacity. This is, this is the upper limit to what we can serve and still look after everyone right now. And it can change month to month. Your official capacity could change in the future, but right now this is how many clients we can look after. So you need to promote the official capacity and then you need to market for signaled interest. And the signaled interest needs to exceed the official capacity 5 to 1. So for every 100 clients, you need 500 signals.

Yep.

Now at that point, the prices go up.

That's how you do it.

And it's so— it's— you could sit there and say, well, our prices should go up. Like, you know, let's take it— let's take a silly example. Let's say that Kia, the car company, says Every single metric, our car's better than Rolls-Royce. Our prices should be higher than Rolls-Royce because we've covered every single thing that a Rolls-Royce does. Everything it can do, we can do better. Okay, well, why isn't it the same price as Rolls-Royce? Because there is a demand and supply imbalance and there's not a demand and supply. It's like, I can't get this point across enough because— and the reason I say this, I struggled with this. I kept trying to justify things. And then I realized it's all meaningless. It's just demand and supply imbalance. It's official capacity versus signaled interest. And if the signaled interest is high versus the official capacity, prices go up.

And I think in that example played out, I remember the first time ever that our pipeline exceeded the amount of money we needed in our old marketing business.

Mm-hmm.

And so I was suddenly like, we need to, you know, land £80,000 of retained revenue over this quarter, for example, it looks like I've got, you know, $300,000 in the pipeline. And then a consultant said to me, why don't you just charge one of them twice the amount, and then you have the same client for twice the amount? And we did, and we ended up getting the client for 50% more than our ordinary price. Yeah, but I would have never had the confidence to go to them had I not had a much bigger pipeline.

Yes.

And so practically, it's a good— it's a good signal for yourself.

Absolutely. You will naturally move to higher prices when there's a demand and supply imbalance. It feels like the most normal thing in the world to do. I'll give you, I'll give you a practical example. There was a business coach that I knew who was charging $2,000 or $3,000 for coaching package. And I said, I'm shocked. You should be like $2,000, $3,000 a month. He goes, well, I don't think I can charge $2,000, $3,000 a month. I made the suggestion that this guy pay $5,000 to sponsor an event where there would be 300 executives in the audience. And stand up on stage, deliver his talk about his previous background and history, put a QR code up on the screen and say, if you're interested in working with me, here's an application form. Now what happened is in the audience, half the audience, 150 people pull out their phones and they take a photo of the QR code and start like tapping the thing. And it was interesting because in that audience, he said everyone could see that person to the left, person to the right, everyone pulls out the QR code. So everyone had a sense that half the audience had started applying, but he dropped into his presentation, I can really only look— I can really only work with about 12 retained clients per year.

Yeah.

So what happened is that when he went back to everyone, he said, I had about 150 people fill in an application, I can take about 12 retained clients per year.

Yeah.

How much is it? It's 3 grand a month. Guess what he does? Gets all 12. Yeah.

And that's just it. It's an official capacity versus those nights.

Signaled interest.

Signaled interest.

People have signaled their, people signal by pulling their phone out.

And so the next evolution of our business in the analogy of the fire team, what's the next stage?

So we've got a 4-person fire team. Now it's time to double up to an 8-person core team.

Right.

So now this is the time that you as the founder double down and become the key person of influence. This is your time to shine. You're going to write a book, you're going to be pitching on stage, you're going to be putting out content into the market, you're going to be making videos, you're going to be doing podcasts. So now you're the key person of influence, but you've got this other amazing team of 7 people that are working with you. So here's who's on the team. There's a general manager who runs the business. They, they are an experienced general manager and their job has always been running businesses. They used to run a restaurant, they used to run a nightclub, they used to run a coffee shop, they used to run a McDonald's, they used to run a Starbucks, they used to run a team of 30 people in the military, they used to be a lieutenant, right? So any of those previous jobs and they're a good general manager typically. So coffee shops, restaurants, nightclubs, military. So GMs. So you're looking for a GM. They're going to have someone in sales, someone in marketing. So someone who generates leads and someone who makes sales and maybe an appointment setter. You're going to have someone who's a financial controller and an admin, perhaps an executive assistant. And you're going to have someone who is in IT, so technology, and can also do a bit of media, technology and media, and someone who is in customer success. So now you've got this amazing little core team and you've got one person whose job is to manufacture the desire for the business, manufacture demand, and then the rest of the team, their job is to turn that into actual sales and happy customers.

And so how does the founder and the entrepreneur in this situation get enough good people to apply for their company? Because I've certainly found in my experience that the longer I do this, the thing I actually realize is that my key value add as time goes on is probably attraction to the business, but then getting and retaining amazing people.

Yeah, well, the more that you're a key person of influence, the more that your, uh, you know, your, your star ascends. The easier it is to get those people. And as you're roaming around having adventures, you're just telling people, I'm looking for people to join my team, I need someone in sales, and— right? So you're just telling everyone all the time, I'm looking for people to join the team. The second thing that has to probably happen around this time— so if you're not getting the right people, you need to lower the threshold as what is a good person. So I'll give you a really classic example that I see as a classic mistake. I see a lot of people who have come out of corporate who think that a good person for their company is someone who used to work at Microsoft or someone who's, you know, just finished up with Google or something like that. These people are a nightmare for small businesses. Typically they just, you know, they come into a small business and they're like, oh, how do I book a meeting room? And, you know, who do I call for that? And it's like, yeah, there is no meeting room.

We don't have an office.

We go down to the coffee shop and there's a corner that we sit in. Yeah. So these people typically they're not a good fit. Uh, some of the best people that have joined my company, uh, have run nightclubs, restaurants, cafes, you know, ex-military. These are the best people who are for small business. They roll up their sleeves and nothing's too much trouble, and they just get stuff done. They're GSD people. Um, they, you know, they're more than happy to build their own desk So when they join the team, it's like, hey, duck down to the shop, buy yourself a desk. Here's the credit card. It'll come with an Allen's key. All right, build the desk. You know, they're up for that. They're more than happy to turn up for the breakfast meeting, have the scrambled eggs, make a few calls where we're all sitting around the, you know, following up on a few leads that we never got back to. So they're down for all of that because they've previously done it. One of the things that I tell people all the time If someone previously ran a nightclub, they can run almost anything because a nightclub has razor-thin margins. You've got all sorts of dramas. It's late at night. You're getting unreliable people to turn up for work. There's alcohol, there's hooking up, you know, personal relationships, drugs, police, all this, all this nightmarish kind of stuff. If someone has been a general manager of a nightclub, they can handle anything up to about $3-4 million of revenue. So they can handle a team of 30 people, they can handle any, almost anything you can throw at them. So this is one of the first people you want to bring on, like a general manager who's going to run the whole business. I've got a business that's pretty successful business. It's, you know, uh, you know, it's a 7, almost 8-figure business. Um, the person who runs this used to be a hospitality Uh, sorry, a travel industry business. So, she used to work running a business that took people to the snow. And imagine this as a business. They used to take groups of high school students, 100 to 300 at a time, and they'd get them onto an aeroplane, take them over to Switzerland, get them skiing for 3 or 4 days, get them home safely, and get them back to their parents. And then they'd do it all again and do it all again and do it all again.

That sounds wild.

And little Johnny left his glove on the ski lift and we need to get the glove back because Sarah, his mother, is an absolute nightmare. And Mary's got her scarf, which she left on the bus, and we've got to get that back, right? This crazy, like, nonstop. And, oh, someone's brained their ankle and now we need that. And so-and-so hooked up with someone else and now we've got to notify the parent, right? So all the crazy that went into getting groups of teenagers to and from the snow. And then she comes into my business and she's like, she can do it. She can do it with one arm tied behind her back.

Like, so nice.

Yeah, this is, this is easy. This is effortless. What else do you need me to do?

Yeah.

So I'm looking for those types of people.

And so I suppose at that stage, the founder and the entrepreneur needs to be thinking about how to build a bit of a culture within the team. I've seen you talk about like a deck of cards before and how you think about building a team.

Hmm. Yeah. Around 12 actually is where it tends to divide in two. If you've ever had a dinner party and you have less than 12 people, you'll pretty much have a self-organizing dinner party. Everything just kind of flows. It's one conversation. Few people break off, but there's one group.

Yeah.

As soon as you have 13 at a dinner party, it's 2 or 3 distinct groups and they're completely out of alignment with each other. This group over here are talking about sports and this group over here talking relationships. This group's talking about politics. They have completely 3 different conversations and these groups don't even mix. The same thing happens in companies. 13, 14, 15 people, you've divided in 3. You've got the sales team who are not talking to the customer success team, who are not talking to the admin or finance team. So everyone's pulling in different directions. So this is where culture becomes important. So you could— you almost— someone's going to hate me for saying this, but up to about 12 people, you don't have to put a lot of thought into culture. Like, no, the team kind of just organizes around a pizza.

Yeah, exactly. Just have food.

Yeah, have food and you'll have culture.

Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah.

But once you go past 12, this is where you have to have things like how do we run Monday morning meetings? How do we do Friday afternoon debriefs? What is the origin story that we want to give to everyone? What is the vision that we want everyone to know about? What is the mission that we want? What are the shared dashboards that everyone can see? What are the metrics that we want to achieve 3 years, 1 year, 90 days out? What's the headline for the press release that we want to release in 5 years from now? So you need all of these types of things, these tools that we use to kind of align teams. So things like the future state press release is a great one. So on this date, we're sending this press release. What do we want to say? And then what would we have to have achieved a year from now in order to do that? If we had a $10,000 budget— this is a great question— if we had a $10,000 budget for bonuses in 90 days from now, what would we, what would be the list of things that we would pay for as bonuses in the next 90 days? So like, what outcomes would we achieve that would, that would draw down the $10 grand? And how much would we, what bounty would we put on all of these things? So I go through those kind of things with teams, and suddenly the team goes, oh, okay, so we're trying to get to that point, and then we need to hit these things, and this has to happen in the next night. Okay, great. And this is our vision, this is our mission, these are our values as to how we want to show up. And this is where this becomes really important. If you're a second-time founder, you kind of embed these from the beginning because you know that they're going to become important later. So why not get them in early? So like early days with ScoreApp, we said elegant, powerful, fun, and we just embedded elegant, powerful, fun as our three core values. We said we're building something that's elegant, it's understated, it's, it's beautifully designed. It's powerful, it gets results, and it's fun to use. It's enjoyable. So everything has to be elegant, powerful, fun. Is that email elegant, powerful, fun? Is that landing page elegant, powerful, fun? Is the product elegant, powerful, fun? How do we— are you showing up elegant, powerful, and fun?

Yeah.

Are we choosing to take the team on a Christmas retreat to a place that represents elegant, powerful, fun? You know, so are we talking about elegant, powerful, and fun in every performance review. So like just by embedding those 3 core values right at the beginning, it's like, okay, well then that allows our culture to scale.

I think people also glamorize headcount. So I just came from working in my business with my brother where there's like, I don't know, 100 people now. And that took 3 or 4 years to get there. The funnest 2 years was the first years when there was like 15 of us and I could feel it because I was a third time founder by then, I could feel the processes coming and the changes, and you no longer could sit down for a pizza and solve the big tech issue and whatever. And then now in the new company, which is small but new, there's like 6 of us, but I feel like we can conquer anything.

Yeah.

You know, and then I'm not now sort of running at the idea of hiring more people.

No.

Yeah. It's not, it's not appealing to me.

Yeah. You probably want to make sure every single person's got AI capabilities.

Exactly.

Can do the heavy lifting twice as much. Yeah. Um, yeah. And this is, this, by the way, when you come, when it comes time to sell a company, the acquirer will, will definitely want about 30 people. That's not because that takes you past founder dependence. Um, at 30 people, you're not dependent upon the founder like you once were. Um, but after you've achieved, say, founder, you're not founder dependent, less people is better when you sell. So you need enough people that you're no longer founder dependent, But, but after that, keep it as small as possible.

What do you think about the growing trend of like solopreneurship?

Yeah, I don't believe in it personally. Even with, even with the world's best AI capability, I really fundamentally believe that business is a team sport. Two-person scout team will always outperform a one-person team. Four-person. If, if your talent, especially if you're second or third time through, if you're talented enough to put the right 3 or 4 people together, you're going to just get so much done, you know, then, then 8. And for me personally, here's my, my plan is always 2, 4, 8, 30. So I go 2 people, 4 people, 8 people, 30 people, and we just go and we actually literally, we just, we hit this set of bases for 2, then we move to 4, we hit those set of bases, then we move to 8, then we hit those, then we go to 30. And I'm just moving my companies from 2, 4, 8, 30 as my standard operating model where I enabled all of that sort of stuff. I know people who describe themselves as solopreneurs. They're running around like chickens with their head cut off half the time. So they're chasing up on like some HMRC thing there. You know, they're like, if you're valuable, have an assistant. Yeah, right. And if you're generating leads, have someone who follows up with some leads, you know, like, like there's hundreds of thousands sitting on the fence. Just bring them in.

It is definitely very glamorized, but I think it comes down to like how much you value your own time.

Oh, by the way, one other thing. There's— there are people whose whole gig is talking about solopreneurship. They have a team. I'm actually not— I'm not even joking.

I could— I can see that.

You're not going to name names.

Yeah, I can see that.

But they're— and they go, oh, but I don't have a team. And I go, why do you Why do you say you don't have a team? Oh, because I've got like people in the Philippines. What are they, not people? And then I'll ask you a question like, do you ever get them together on like one Zoom call to get everyone on the same page? Yeah. How many people are on there? About 6 or 7. Like a team meeting?

Feels like a team meeting. It feels like, looks like, probably is.

Do you do some training? Like a team?

I mean, there are these bizarre concepts now of like like passive income and, you know, solopreneurship. And I think that there are obviously elements there. And I think that as a one-person company, you could run a very small company, but I think that it's not a sellable business.

It's certainly not sellable.

Yeah.

It's also like you will never switch off. No. You will never go on holiday and experience a holiday. You might be on holiday with people who are, who you might go away with people who are experiencing a holiday. Yeah. Maybe your spouse might get a holiday. You're not going to have a holiday. You're going to be sitting there checking your emails and stuff like that. You're going to be, you never switch off. When you've got 8 people on a team, if one person goes on holiday, 7 people are covering for them. It's totally fine.

And that's how I'd always say your book was my favorite. One of my other favorite books was 4-Hour Workweek. And I think that in thinking about those two books, I think that there are systems that you pull away from them, which are like, one system is demand generation and understanding supply versus demand. The other is like, how can I create high margin product? How can I create something that doesn't require my life to be traded.

Yeah.

And so I think that as an entrepreneur, you should try and build a systemized business.

Yes, I agree with that.

That doesn't need you—

high margin.

Yeah, working on every single thing.

Doesn't— you don't have to work on it. I personally, I think solopreneur by definition is you're working on every single thing there is.

Sounds like hell.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I just think even, even if you stopped at 4, like a 4-person team I know people who are a speaker and a coach and they've got a 4-person team. So there's the speaker coach who's the key person of influence delivery. There's someone who does the like sales bookings. There's someone who does a bit of follow-up and support. Not expensive people, not senior people, not a heavy burden. These are people who set this guy free. Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

You know, so like having 2 or 3 people around, having a bookkeeper who does the book, maybe that person comes in 2 days a week. Right. So the bookkeeper's doing that. You've got someone who works from home who's doing a bit of sales. You've got someone who make— when you sign up a client, they're making sure all the books arrive and the workbooks and the slides and the this and the that. You know, a few little things like that. And suddenly you've got an operation that's fun, making more money.

And so how does an entrepreneur transition from 8-person team, which might be doing £10,000 to £50,000 a month?

Yeah.

Towards a much bigger business.

30 people.

Yeah. So what is 30 people making? How do you make that jump from 8 30.

So yeah, so that is the big jump. And the trick is to try and do it as quick as possible. You like— the fastest I've ever done it was 3 days.

And what, from 8 to 30?

8 to 30.

Yeah.

So we put together a, a room of 70 people, we put the org chart up, and we said, this is the future state org chart, um, this is why we're going through a jump, um, these are the clients that are ready to sign up, this is the waiting list of, of people that are ready to come off, and start working. We're going to need a team to come on board and start doing this and building this. If you have a funded business, let's say you've got a VC-funded business, you'll go and hire 20, 30 people in a couple of weeks because you've got the funding to do so. So the only reason businesses don't do it is they don't trust the funding, the cash-flowing mechanism. So if you can solve that in some way, and there's several ways to solve it, you know, you can either take out a loan, you can get an angel investor, you can ask people to get paid in the second month, and some people will. Especially senior people will come on board where they get paid in month 3 as their first, first payment. You can give people equity. So there's all sorts of ways you can bring people onto a team rapidly. But when I did a 3-day one, we basically ran a 3-day conference training and enrolling and getting everyone ready. And then we invited people to apply for the roles. Had 70 people in the room. We needed a team of 30. So a bunch of people were going to miss out.

And this is the stage you call crossing the desert, crossing the desert. Yeah, that limbo stage is difficult.

So 12 to 30, too big to be small, too small to be big. So it's that really frustrating phase where you're not a big business and not a small business. So what you look like as a performance business with 30 people is you have a 5-person executive team and then you have teams of teams. So ScoreApp, for example, we've got CEO, CMO, CFO, CTO, COO, so your 5-person typical exec team, and then each one of those is running a team. So the CTO has the team of developers and, and UX and all that, and the CMO has a team of marketers and customer onboarding people. And the COO is like making sure the customers are happy and getting what they want and all that. CFO has got a bookkeeper or an accounts receivable person, something like that. So now you're— you've actually built out your teams of teams. So what it might look like for a tech company is you might have 4 or 5 customer success agents, you might have 6 or 7 developers on the back end and maybe 2 or 3 on the front end. So front end and back end developers. You might have someone who's doing quality assurance testing full time. You're going to have someone who's on SEO, someone who's on ads, someone who's on communications. You're going to— so basically it adds up pretty quick. You end up with about 4 teams of 8 plus your exec team.

And I suppose for the entrepreneur then at 30 people, how do they go through and actually sell their business? Not that you have to sell every business, but I have a belief that real wealth is generated through assets, whether it's either owning them over the long term or building them and selling them.

Yeah, the shitty thing is that in order to be wealthy these days, it used to be that you just worked in a company and bought a house and, and you'd be fine. Shitty thing is, is that as an entrepreneur, you, you need to sell your first baby. You need, you know, it's going to be hard, but you do have to sell your first baby because you're going to need to have your first capital event. Um, you know, the system is called capitalism for a reason. You need capital, um, and you need to have, you know, if you want to be out of the, if you want to be out of the labor system and not have to be beholden golden to anyone or anything ever again, you need a certain amount of capital. So the only real viable— one of the very few viable ways to get there at the moment is build and sell a business. So there are 3 things that you need when you're selling a business. You're going to need recurring revenues. If you didn't build recurring revenues, it won't sell for a life-changing amount of money.

No.

Um, you'll need a team that is not founder-dependent, that the business will continue to run without, without you once you leave. And you need something called proprietary asset. Proprietary assets are the things that make your business unique that are very hard to replicate. So maybe you've won some prestigious awards, maybe you've developed some interesting technology, maybe you've got signed up a whole bunch of large corporates that are unlikely to switch, um, you know, provider. Maybe you have got a very unique data set that, that someone else will, but there's got to be a proprietary asset.

Yeah.

Recurring revenue and a team that can operate without the founder being there. Those are the big three.

And I suppose a lot of businesses, I mean, my business sold on a multiple of its EBITDA.

Yeah.

And so I think that when we went through that process, I was lucky in the sense that I was going to sell the business before COVID COVID then destroyed the business and then I rebuilt the business, but with some good advice, which was change the business model slightly.

Yeah, yeah.

Retained. And so by the time we came out of COVID we were a slightly bigger business, but all retained.

Yes.

And the multiplier was— it was like chalk and cheese. It was like getting 6 times profit versus 11 times profit.

So this is what most people don't understand. You used a term called the multiplier.

Yeah.

So the multiplier is when you sell a business, there's the profit that you make times by a profit multiple to give you the valuation. So if you make $100,000 of profit times a 6x multiplier, you sell for $600,000. Technology businesses that have proprietary technology and that are scaling quickly, they sell on a multiple of revenue, which is wild.

So wild.

So a really good SaaS business or an AI business might sell for 7 to 10 times the revenue. So if you can build a $10 million company, it might be worth $70 to $100 million on exit. So yeah, you, the, the dream scenario is that you build within something that has a very high multiple. So anything that is data, high multiple, recurring revenue, SaaS technology, high multiple, finance, signing up people to insurance or finance contracts is a very high multiple so that you can actually Google search the value, something called the valuation multiples by industry. So if you actually do a search called what are the valuation multiples by industry, it will tell you what each industry is valued at. And that is the typical average multiple for a business within that industry. So for example, if you're going to build a restaurant, you might sell for 4 times profit if you're lucky. So you might be making—

survive.

Yeah, you might. And which is crazy, right? If you get everything right and you're making half a million a year of profit, you might sell it for $2 million. In. Yeah. Whereas that exact same business, but it's a software that you've developed, might sell for 18 times profit.

The best bit of advice you've given today, but it's one of the hardest to internalize upfront, is think about the business you're building before you start it. Think about what it's worth at the end. Because in that example of the restaurant, like, I know restaurant owners and pub owners and so forth. They work so hard. They work all hours of the day and they're normally treated quite terribly. Yeah. Whereas if you think about someone who, like, I've bought a business before that was a SaaS technology for care homes.

Mm-hmm.

And I bought, we bought a few of these businesses, pushed them all together, and suddenly we've got all of this revenue, which is like low cost to run at an unbelievable multiplier because it's forever revenue.

Yep.

And you are not having to work hard on that part of the business anymore.

No.

And so I do think for entrepreneurs, sometimes you get a little bit trapped by your first business.

Yep.

And that's quite painful.

Yeah. And if anyone's in that situation, I would love to say that on the other— especially if you're, say, under 50, on the other side of selling your business for the first time, an entire world of opportunity opens up to you because you're now gilded in some way. Yeah, you're now a safe and reliable pair of hands once you've been through a transaction. You've now kind of like, it's almost like you've run the gauntlet and made it out the other side. So you're now more investible. You have a new mindset, you're more objective. You know, it's worth going through and doing it. A lot of people, they're always saying like, oh, when my business gets to this, then I'll sell it. Yeah, just sell it. Just sell the first one.

Yeah.

Like, just, just sell it now.

That gilding point is such a fair point that you've almost got all the foundations of your future key person of influence, like selling my business. Obviously I made a lot of money from it, but it took 10 years to make that money effectively. But every year since I've sold the business, I feel like there's like an accelerant.

Yes.

In my career. Yeah. Everything that I'm involved in is pre-qualified by the fact that I sold a big business.

Yep.

And now everything is easier, whether it's capital, people, attraction.

Everything can, can happen much faster. And in hindsight, Was that the first one you sold or the second one you sold?

The first meaningful one I sold.

Yeah, but you sold one before.

I did sell one before.

Yeah, that's, that's it, right? So that, that— don't overlook that. So let's say you sold one for a small amount of money. Yeah. That just simply going through that process of building something and then selling it, that's— that actually probably set you up for the big one.

Totally. Yeah. I believed it was possible as well. So yeah, I sold a business when I was like 20 for about $100,000.

That. So, you know, our mutual friend Timo Amu. Yeah, I think he sold one for $60,000 or $70,000 early on, and it was like that, that just like got into his head, oh, I can do this. And it was just that, like, you've completed a learning cycle, um, and, and then you can repeat that at a bigger fractal. Yeah. So like a lot of— I see a lot of people, they're hanging on so tightly to some little agency that they started 12 years ago it. It's like, just let it go.

Yeah.

It's like, oh, but it's only worth 350 grand if I sold it today.

Take that out.

Take it out.

Yeah.

Just sell it.

And do what you just said, which is like, what business could I build? What could it be worth? And how do I think to scale it fast? And some businesses are so trapping. And I went to a founder event the other day and the amount of entrepreneurs I met who run sub-£500,000 businesses who have been doing it for 10 years. And are just exhausted.

Yeah.

And someone would buy those businesses for a couple hundred thousand.

Well, the funny thing is, I have bought many of those businesses. What's crazy, and this drives entrepreneurs nuts, is that I've— I regularly buy those businesses and never set foot in them, ever. So I have owned a business for 5 years that I've never visited. I've never been to the premises. They've changed premises 3 times. They're in their third office since I've owned the business. I've never been to one of the offices. Wow.

And so how do you now manage, I suppose, your portfolio? So you have a variety of different businesses.

About 8 different businesses that I've got a major stake in.

And are they predominantly in the same country or are they global businesses?

Yeah, mostly British, but they sell all over the world. And I've got a couple of agencies, I've got a publisher, 2 tech companies, and an education training business.

And I suppose you truly do practice what you preach. You are a facilitator. You bring demand to those businesses, you connect those businesses. Do you work in any of them?

Nope.

None of them?

None of them.

Wow.

I have a value proposition.

Yeah.

And the value proposition is the entrepreneurship of the business, as in setting them up with vision, mission, values. And like, for example, that business that I've never been to, we've hired a boardroom and we've done stuff in the boardroom, but we've done that in London. So we've done offsite. Stuff. So as a silly way of thinking about this, the CEO of Microsoft— Microsoft is hundreds of businesses that's called Microsoft— the CEO of Microsoft has probably not visited most of the Microsoft offices and, and also has probably not gotten involved in many of the Microsoft business verticals. So like, how much time has he spent you know, on like LinkedIn is, I think is owned by Microsoft.

Yeah, it is.

Yeah. How much time is the CEO spending in LinkedIn and going and doing that? Probably very little. Maybe the CEO, maybe the CEO of LinkedIn comes to see the CEO of Microsoft and ask a few questions, talk strategy, and then they go and implement. So that's kind of the way of the world when it comes to successful business. So I have a value proposition that is around solving certain problems and achieving certain outcomes. Outside of that value proposition, my value falls off a cliff. I'm not a good worker. I'm not a good— like, I'm none of those things. So I'm good at what I'm good at. And then we bring in people for the rest. So the way my group kind of works is I have a centralized CFO and myself, right? So think of me as a centralized CEO and, and I have a CFO. And then think of all the other companies as being run by a COO, CMO team. And each COO, CMO team, not that we necessarily use those titles, but essentially that's how it runs. They're running the business and marketing the business, and then they come to us for finance and vision.

And so when you're now thinking about 2025, what is the most exciting thing about 2025 for you?

There's so much exciting stuff going on. So the first one is AI. Every business can be empowered by AI. Every business, as a, as a theory, every business can double without adding any headcount. Just through AI. So like, that's, that's a good idea just to have that as an idea. The threat with AI is that AI's superpower is to turn people into a consumer, not a creator. So AI is a double-edged sword. It can make you a hyper-creator or a hyper-consumer. The default is that AI makes you a hyper-consumer. So TikTok is the perfect example. Once you're on TikTok, you are screwed. You are basically, you either delete it off your phone or it's going to just get you and get you and get you and take an hour from every single day of your life. So, you know, imagine a tax that is an hour of your day tax called TikTok. And that's because AI is so powerfully integrated into that product to find the best videos to keep you hooked. So AI is going to either tax you or it's going to give you superpowers. So you've got to make sure that you're on the superpower side. Second thing that's super exciting is the demographic changes that are happening. So the baby boomers, the youngest baby boomers have just turned 60.

So Right.

1946 to 1964. So we have had the 1964 cohort, which is the end of the baby boom, is now 60. So what we now have is that the baby boomers are officially over 60 in retirement. Majority is— majority are now up around 70 or older. So we now have the biggest cohort, uh, who are officially in retirement age. And that means that they're getting rid of their businesses. They're going to probably start downsizing their houses. They're going to do all the things that baby boomers intended to do, you know, spending a ton of money, going on crazy travel and adventure trips, getting divorced and trying to find a new lover. All sorts of random, weird things that baby boomers will do. But they're in a very different phase of their life, which means that the companies are now going to be run by Gen Xers and millennials. It means that those business opportunities that the baby boomers were controlling are being passed to the next cohort. Um, uh, it also means that government has their biggest voting booth who are now in— the biggest voting block is now baby boomers who are in retirement. So they're now having to pander to people who are non-productive taxpayers. So that's going to mess with them. So there's some big trends that are happening there.

The baby boomer trend is is something that was pointed out to me when I was 27, 28. And I remember the person talking to me was like, how many of the agency owners do you know whose businesses you would like who are, say, 55, 60? And I was like, wow, staggering amount of them. A staggering amount of them. I would love their businesses. And then they were like, well, why don't you ask if you can buy them?

Yeah.

And so I got a private equity group to lend me money and I used the lent money to buy—

to buy the agencies.

The agencies.

Well, it gets even better than that.

And they wanted to leave.

Because if all of these boomers want to sell at once, you don't even need private equity. They will be the private equity firm. They will fund you into the business.

You'll just pay them over time.

Yeah. So let's say you say to them, how much do you think your business is worth? And they say, I think it's worth $2 million. Say, great, I'll take it for $2 million. There's only one problem. No one's going to lend me the money, so you're going to have to lend me the money. So we're going to set up an agreement where this business owes you $2 million. And over time at a rate that the business can afford, I'm going to pay down the business loan and you're going to get your $2 million over the course of 8 years. And I'm going to then own the business.

I mean, I know to people who don't and haven't done it before, that might sound crazy, but there will be—

Happens every day.

Thousands of those.

Every day of the week.

Like I met, I met a team of people the other day who were painting lines on the roads in America. And they were like, we're going to grow through like mass M&A of mom and pop shops. And the mom and pop shops make like a couple million each because it's a big business, big business space. And they were like, we're going to hoover up hundreds of these things and our capital will be provided by the businesses themselves. And I was like, so you're going to build a massive line painting business? And they were like, that's what we're doing.

That's it.

And I was like, I can see it.

Yeah. There's a book called How to Make a Few Billion Dollars, which basically is that strategy. And he talks exactly through that. Every day of the week, you've got to remember what must it feel like to be 65 and have promised your spouse that you're going to retire and that you're going to go and spend more time south of France and that you are, you know, you've already got the house paid off with millions of equity. You've probably got a holiday house or a share in a holiday house. You've probably got a whole bunch of money sitting aside. You've probably got some grandkids that have arrived. All of that basically means getting money out of the business right now today is not your main priority, provided you feel some sense of security that the person taking over the business will pay you over 8 years. Truth is that for many baby boomers, a 10-year payment plan is actually not a bad deal. No. So provided they're getting the amount that they want and you're not haggling with them on the amount, but you're saying, I'll pay you off over 8 to 10 years, and they go, okay, so I get a couple hundred grand a year for 10 years. It's not a bad deal. From 65 to 75, while you go and travel and spend time with the grandkids, you've got $200 grand a year coming in and you're on the board. Yeah. You know, so you do 2 or 3 board meetings, you get to still say that you're non-exec or chairman.

Could get paid for that.

You could get paid for that on top. So all of that stacks up to a really good opportunity. So that's, that's another, another big, big trend.

So for everyone watching that wants to keep up with you, I would say, as I've said to the audience loads of times on loads of podcasts, some of your books were transformational for me. Complete mindset shifts in like how to think about business, leverage, demand, sales. So how can people keep up to date with you? And then how can people reach out?

So LinkedIn, I'm actually quite active on LinkedIn. If you want to hear some political rants, then X. I love your rants. And then every week I'm putting some new content onto YouTube now. Now. So I do a Sunday session every— it's a 5 to 10 minute video on entrepreneurship every Sunday. Um, and I've just been doing that for about a year, and about 40,000 people are now subscribed to that.

So amazing.

Yeah, it's a, it's a cool little project.

Well, thank you so much for coming on.

My pleasure. Thank you for having me on.