My 2025 Marketing & Sales Lessons That Will Make You Rich

Sa. Sa. Sa. Sa. Sam. Boom. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the YouTube channel for what I hope is going to be a truly epic live stream. And so we are here to talk about 2025, in particular my 2025 marketing and sales lessons. You see, I want to share all of the good stuff that we have done this year and the bad stuff. Because normally at the end of the year there's two reasons why I've decided to do this today. The first reason is that I have a practice with our team as well, to look back at the last year and reflect on all of the things that went really well and all the things that did not go very well so that we can solidify as a business and a team our learnings from that so we can move forward and apply them and do better and better next year. Pretty standard stuff. But also I will admit that some of the favorite content that I consume from people in the kind of business space is their kind of annual wrap ups. Because so much goes on in a year and we have tried so many crazy things. And to summarize it all into a little presentation and pull out the key things that we have learned and what we are going to do differently I just think will hopefully be of interest to some of you guys and just be very helpful because this is the kind of content that I love myself. And so my plan for today is as follows. I'm going to start off by sharing some fails and the lessons we learn before we go into the big wins, the things that went really well. I have got a few personal reflections as well that are outside of business life that I think are hopefully somewhat relevant and insightful for you guys as well. And I'm going to round off by talking about our focuses for 2026 and just kind of take this opportunity to show you under the hood of what we do here at Entrepreneur's Circle, how we're thinking, how we're looking at this landscape and ultimately what we're going to be doing differently as a result. So for anyone who does not know me, I'm going to give you a very brief history. So my name is Ali Bottrill. I started my job in marketing and sales about 10 years ago at MNC Saatchi Performance, which is one of the largest independent advertising agencies in the world. There I was, little junior boy out of university. I joined the search and social team. I started running Facebook and Google Ads for some of the biggest brands on the planet. Amazon, Audible, Bethesda, Pokemon. And we were spending, you know, upwards of £100,000 per day. It really blew my mind at the time. Then August 2020 kind of rolled around and we all know what happened then, but I quit my job at this agency and started my own agency. Plan was to take all the skills I had learned and, you know, do it for other businesses and hopefully make a little bit of dosh myself. And that was the plan. So we set up shop, we started providing a done for you service of running paid ads, building landing pages and then sending out email follow up as well. And we took that from me and my best mate in my mum and dad's front room over the course of about five years to a nice big office with a nice big team. And yeah, it was by any measures relatively successful. We took it to about 120 grand a month and it was awesome. Opened up all sorts of doors. I got to geek out and have the pleasure of talking about marketing and sales stuff and go to all kinds of masterminds and meet some of my idols in many cases and really just enjoy the ride. But earlier this year then, I sold my agency to Entrepreneurs Circle, which is where I am stood right now, and I formally became part of the team. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer here and wow, we've rounded off this year. This was taken just a few days ago, our beautiful team at our epic new HQ here in Solihull. There's about 70, 70 odd of us now and yeah, that is where we're at right now. Now, my opening little message to kind of summarize this year is that this year, this year was tough. This year was a tough year. Now for us at Entrepreneur's Circle, we have grown this year. We've done very significant growth. It wasn't quite the epic growth we had planned at the start of the year, but it still was a good year. But it was hard. I'm gonna talk about why it was hard and talk about how we're addressing some of those things throughout this presentation. So as we are about to go into the Christmas break, for all of you business owners watching, I just want to salute you for getting through this year because I know it wasn't easy and I have the utmost admiration and respect for anyone running a business, especially when we get to somewhat challenging years like this when there's all sorts of stuff going on in the world. So I'm going to share a bunch of stuff with you today, but I need to give you the important layers of context before we do, because I'm going to share really the stuff we've done. It's important you understand our business and the business model a little bit because then you'll be able to understand how this is relevant for you. So I thought the best way to articulate this is with the good old fashioned value ladder. And so our business can be split into five kind of core pillars. We obviously have content like this that we put out for free. And then we have the Entrepreneur Circle core membership. This is what I would define as a low ticket community. So it's a £99amonth rolling subscription that gets you access to Entrepreneur Circle, gives you access to our online vault events that we do, and so on and so forth forth. Amazing, tremendous value. Then we have Genie AI, which is the next step up on our value ladder. This is our software company. So software as a service, so you can get access to this for £199amonth. It is the best sales and marketing system out there. And yes, I'm biased. Then the next step up we have the master plan. So this is what I call high ticket coaching is the bucket. It would be categorized as 7.99amonth. And that is where we work with you to help grow your business by taking you through our nine step master plan methodology. And that is truly amazing. One of the most impactful things that we do and then at the very top would be private equity, where we look to take very small minority shares and businesses that we can then help grow using all of our resources and so on and so forth. And that's the very top end of our kind of value ladder. And so why this is important is because the failures and the wins and all the reflections I have today are really coming from the learnings of these business models. So low ticket communities, software companies, and indeed high ticket coaching, because that is the stuff that it is my job to fill with as many new customers as we can reasonably handle. And so that is the lens at which all the insights will be coming to you today. So another frame of context. This year we spent about £1.15 million on our own internal marketing, primarily across meta ads, with a little sprinkling of Google Ads in there as well. And roughly with that, we generated about 89,753 leads, 6,611 sales calls and then 66,000 sales, which looks really good. But that includes all of our monthly recurring stuff, which all of those products are all of the ones I've just outlined, whether it's ec, Core membership, GENIE AI or master plan, that is a rolling monthly fee that you pay so that is the kind of engine of our business. So with that out the way, you now have a useful frame as to where this is coming from, because it is very important and a big lesson that I certainly take from this year. There's all sorts of people talking about all sorts of things on the Internet. And with the rise of AI as we'll get onto, you know, people say all sorts of stuff now, you've got to be very, very careful who you actually choose to listen to. And it's why you need to do your due diligence beforehand, because there's people who just preach these things that they may have heard or read or got AI to create for them. And whilst there's nothing inherently wrong with that, that is very different to what I would define as procedural knowledge and experience. That is people sharing stuff based on the fact that they have done it and therefore they can directly speak to that experience. So everything I'm about to share with you today is purely based on what we have done. And so I will be sharing our experience, I'll be sharing data in depths that we have never really shared before to show you our results. And I will then share my implications of those results. And it's up to you what you do with that information. If it worked for us, will it work for you? Maybe, maybe, maybe not, who knows? But it's important you have that lens so you can be clued in to all this crazy information you're seeing online. Anyway, with that out the way, let's start off with some epic failures, AKA the stuff that did not work. That is the first stop on our whistle stop tour today. So the failures are just as important as the wins. Okay? And in fact, it was none other than Mr. Einstein himself that said failure is simply success in progress. And I love that he's a smart guy, this guy. But one of the most valuable things you can do every single year, and in fact you should do at least every single quarter, is reflect and identify the very specific actions that you took that did not work. Because in everything that we do in business, yes, it's great, we get the wins, but every time something doesn't work, that should be a useful data point for us because that will allow us, if we are cognizant to it, to not do it again and therefore increase the probability that we get a good result. And over time, if you do this enough, this is how you're able to progress very, very quickly. A lot of people, they make the failures, but they never reflect on why and they Never understand what the very specific tangible outcomes they or their team did that led to the negative result. And if you don't do that, then the failure is a failure because you've not learned anything from it. It and you've not learned anything from it if your behavior has not changed as a result of the insight you have gained. So we always like to dwell on the failures and we praise them. They're not something to be scared of, you know. So failure number one for us. This is a cracker. So hooks with crazy promises and guarantees. So I'll tell you a little story that illustrates this. So for this particular case, we were running some ads for the master plan. So our high ticket 799 pounds a month coaching program. And the funnel was deadly simple. We would run Facebook ads to a nice landing page and the call to action was to apply. Now they click the call to action. We have like a 10 question application form would open up that would ask them all sorts of stuff about their business to try and qualify them and make sure they'd be appropriate. And then ultimately they'd get a chance to book a call, they'd chat with one of our team and we would try and you know, sell them onto Masterplan. That's how it works if it's the right fit for both of us. So this funnel is very simple and we love this. This is what I would describe as a book, a call funnel and we have a VSL or a video sales letter on this page that does the majority of the kind of selling. And so earlier this year we moved into our swanky new hq, the Epic Nelson House, home of Entrepreneur Circle here in Solihull. And so immediately we wanted to shoot some ads outside of this bad boy because I mean, why wouldn't you? It's just so cool have a building like that. And so we did, we shot some ads and let's just say we went a bit heavy handed with the over promising and guarantees not even over promising because we do actually guarantee this stuff as part of the program. But we let with the fact that we effectively guarantee the results and mention how you don't pay a penny unless we double your profits, which again is factually true as part of our program. But we only let the right qualified people in that we know we can deliver for. So this is all very true. But then we had headlines like this scale risk free. And so what this led to was, I'm not gonna lie, an absolute avalanche of booked calls. And so I'm going to show You a little chart now. So this chart shows series of weeks along the bottom and then we have two lines here. The blue line is the number of calls that we were booking through this funnel. And the pink line is the cost per booked call. So on this first week, this was in May, not many calls, very expensive calls is what this shows. Then we launched these ads and within a week look what happened. Our volume of calls went up, but our cost per booked call came down like 60%. So we're sat there licking our lips thinking, oh my God, we have cracked it. A couple more weeks go by and our marketing team, we're just in bliss. We are feeling like God's gift to man. Our cost book call was flat. Then look how far it came down. This is now like 90% drop in cost per book call and the call volume is just going up and up and up. So our sales teams calendars were just getting flooded and it did not stop there. This kept rising, kept rising, kept rising and our cost per book call just kept getting lower and lower until it kind of flatlined here again about 90% lower than where it started. And so anyone in the kind of business to business niche will recognize that a 24 pound cost per booked call through a 10 question application is absolutely fucking insane. And so we were just like, oh my God, we have well and truly cracked it. Thank God for that building. Let's get that money in. But that's obviously not what happened. So here you can see some of the stats. We spent about 17 grand over the course of this, about eight weeks. And you can see in real time our cost per book call was at 150. Then it went 76, 74, all the way down to like 22. And then it started to go up ever so slightly. And again we were licking our lips thinking wow, we've cracked it. But it wasn't the same story on the sales team. You see what we'd noticed was those two ads I'd shown you, Facebook had put all of our budget through them. So you can see these two ads here had spent about pretty much 80% of the budget that we'd had because they were getting the best cost to book call, but they were the ones that led with the guarantee, that led with the crazy promise. And so unfortunately what happened was all those calls were getting booked in, but the quality of them was just not very good. It was pretty shocking quality. And so we were making nexa noses, which is very disappointing. So what did we do about it? Well, we dove in and we did a constraint analysis and we looked at, okay, why, why are we getting the wrong quality people? And when we looked at the ads that were top performing, it just became very clear. And so we had to change the messaging. There's a good lesson here around how the messaging in your ads is so important when it comes to the quality of people you're going to get through. So we tried to dive really deep into this messaging and one of our big learnings for this year is that clearly articulating your ideal customer profile, that's what ICP stands for. Their current problems will hook their attention equally as big claims. Because yes, we want to, you know, lead with a bombastic, outrageous claim, but if we actually are able to specifically and clearly articulate their problems in the way they think about it in their heads, that is actually equally as scroll stopping as these big claims. But the real benefit here is that we don't attract all the wannabes, we don't attract all the people that have no money and see a guarantee and just want to try and, you know, the chances. So that was what we did. Then it begs the question, you know, what is the best source of your customers actual problems? Because it's all one and good to say, okay, we want to do that. How do we operationally now go and execute on that? And so where do we get the real insight into their problems? It's a bit of a trick question because of course your customers are the best source of this information and so that is where we want to go. And so what we did was very, very simple. Firstly, we spoke to our customers to understand the specific problems that they had at the point in which they chose to join us. We then also went through all the transcripts of our sales calls where our sales team had obviously spoken to hundreds of people and we had the data as to what were the core problems that they would have in the way that they would literally say it. But then we use maintenance, I'm going to talk a lot about maintenance today, to analyze and identify angles and then ultimately create new ad copy and hooks from it. So this was just game changing because I love Mainness. Mainness, for anyone who's unaware, is an AI engine. It's a bit different to Chat GPT because it's credit based, which simply means it's incentivized to use more intelligence. And so it has a larger brain and more capacity to do stuff than ChatGPT on its own. And so we would literally take all these transcripts of all these hour long sales Calls and I would dump 50 in at a time and get it to run an in depth analysis throughout all these calls, pull out all the problems, the exact words people used to describe it, the frequency at which these came up. And then we then ask it to turn that into groups of angles for us to test. And then for each angle, we would create ad copy and video scripts. And so all of a sudden we pivot our entire messaging away from these crazy promises to these very specific problems based on our real customer data. And it started to cut through, deliver results and increase the lead quality. So that was failure number one and how we kind of turned it around a little bit as well. Failure number two, controversial. The 30 day free trial offer. And so in this instance, I'm talking about Entrepreneur Circle, our £99amonth core membership, which is just tremendous value. And so the way we have sold Entrepreneurs Circle because even before I joined the company, they were a client of my agency for like five years. So we know and have done all the marketing for them for a very long time. We've always packaged up the offer of which you get so much stuff. It's actually crazy how much stuff you get when you join Entrepreneur Circle for such a small price. But we've always given it away for free. Voila. And so the reason we gave it away for free was because one, when people come across us for the first time, they don't know us, they don't like us, they don't trust us necessarily. And if we have these very bold promises, sometimes it's just like a lot for them to believe. And so we offered it for free under the thinking that these people, they just need to see it, to believe it. Because if we can get them in, if we can prove to them that we are good by letting them come in and consume our resources and speak to them, then they're going to love us and stay. And now, to be fair, that worked tremendously well for many, many years and ultimately built this to like an eight figure business. So we knock it now only with much respect because it has worked tremendously well for many years. But times change. And what we started to notice this year was through this marketing that has worked so well for a very long time, it started to get seriously expensive and our cost per acquisition was just going up and up and up and up and up on getting people to opt in for something that's free. And so what we have felt a lot more of as the market has matured. And there's an important concept in the book Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz. He talks about market sophistication and markets sophisticate over time as the people in them try more and more of the thing to solve their problems and they develop much more awareness and education around what is out there to solve their problems. And obviously we operate in the business growth marketing space where there's all sorts of charlatans and crazy people saying all sorts of crazy things. And the reality was people were looking at it and saying, well, if this thing is free, surely, surely it just can't be that good. Why would you give it away for free if it is that good? And so what we were inadvertently doing to a lot of people is lowering the perceived value of our offer, so much so that they would just not even opt in. And so this is a really. I love this little graphic because it just summarizes marketing and sales in a nutshell and articulates that if the price is higher than the perceived value, you don't get the sale. If the price is less than the perceived value, then you do get the sale and in our case our packaging to a large amount of people because it was free. We just obliterated our perceived value and didn't get the volume of people through. So we made a big change this year and we went from spending about £80,000amonth through this channel to about £8,000amonth, which is very interesting. And I'll talk a little bit more about where we reallocated that budget later on as well. This brings me nicely into fail number three, which is actually evergreen webinars. So we love webinars, as you will see. But evergreen webinars are classic funnel where we get someone to opt in and they get to watch a webinar and it's evergreen because it's not live, it's recorded, so they can tune in and watch it at their leisure whenever they want. This is one of our most successful ones, the 42 minute Facebook ad formula. And so this one, you opt in, it's totally free, we give you access for 48 hours, so you have a time constraint to actually get in and watch it. And these served us well for many, many years. We would have at 1.10 different evergreen webinars running with all different angles and different offers. And again, this served us well for many, many years. But this year we saw this undeniable trend. And so this little chart shows the evergreen webinar performance. This is just my scribbles to articulate what happened rather than the precise data. But over the Course of this year, we saw our customer acquisition costs from these evergreen webinars start well below our target, which is this green line. And over time, it slowly went up, slowly went up until it breached our target. And it didn't just breach the target, the bastard kept going. And all of a sudden we were like so above our customer acquisition cost across all these funnels that despite pumping in new ads and trying to make changes, just we couldn't get it down. But the thing was, all this time our team was working to optimize these funnels, we were massively increasing the volume of people that are actually opting in. So we were getting more leads come in, but the customer acquisition costs were just going higher. So that led us to realize that our challenge with this type of funnel was consumption. And this is a big area that we're really going deep on next year. Because for an evergreen webinar, it's very easy to get people signed up, but it's very hard to get them to consume. Because when you have access to this video and you can now consume it entirely at your leisure, the impetus to like get through it then and there just dissipates and they lose all reason to focus intently on it unless it's like the absolute perfect thing that they need right then and there. And so what this led was that we were getting loads of people signed up, but they just weren't consuming it. And so we had to do a salute to our evergreen webinar funnels, but wish them goodbye for now, and we had to do something very different instead. So it was a complete pivot in a lot of our strategy this year, which I'm going to touch on in a little while. But I've got to talk about fail number four first, which was LinkedIn. Okay, so LinkedIn is a funny old platform, isn't it? I kind of like LinkedIn. I'm not that prolific on LinkedIn. I will say over the last three years I've done quite a lot of posts on LinkedIn. I've easily done a thousand posts in the last three years. I reckon easily. Posts are not that crazy good. As you can see, I've got 5,000 followers, so run of the mill. Definitely Not Pro on LinkedIn in any way, shape or form. And I will just give a pre context to this that I firmly believe in the importance of building an audience and growing a brand. And that is a big part of our strategy for next year. It's why we're trying to make a big effort and do things like this on YouTube and post more in depth content talking about the stuff that we're doing. So I get that. But LinkedIn, I don't know if you guys have seen this this year as well, but the amount of AI slop that has just taken over LinkedIn for me, honestly it got to the stage where it was unbearable. And so I made a conscious decision in Q4 this year to effectively leave the platform. And I was on a pretty good streak of like posting every day. And I, you'll see I've not posted in a long time because I just, I couldn't bear it. It just the amount of AI slop of people just regurgitating these ChatGPT generated posts, talking about things that clearly they have never done in this, you know, classic LinkedIn post formatted way. It just felt so unauthentic. And so I had to, I was just wrestling with, I was like, I see the value in posting on LinkedIn, but I don't appear in all this AI sloppy stuff. So I spent a while thinking how can we utilize LinkedIn? Because I recognize it has a lot of potential, but how can we stand out properly in what I would describe as the AI slop landscape? And the way that we are going to do it is as follows. So we are going to follow strictly the 108010 principle, which not a lot of people talk about now with AI. And so I've got nothing against using AI, as you will see throughout this presentation. I'm a hardcore AI guy. We use AI for flipping everything, but we follow this principle. And this is the idea that the first 10% is always done by us. That is we feed the AI with a ton of specific information that we have generated ourselves, whether it's stories, ideas, context, how we speak, our history, so that what it's working off is actually genuinely stuff that we have done. Then of course AI does 80% and it can actually write the posts and pull out the ideas and do the vast bulk of the work. But then the final 10%, we inject our own humanity and personalization into it as well. And so you will see me making a return to LinkedIn in January. And we have got a little AI system where we are going to basically accumulate and take content that I put out on LinkedIn, content from when I'm speaking with private clients and even useful internal meetings, and turn that into posts. And then we have a specific human editing process where our job is to now make the posts fully authentic and as if they have never been touched by AI. And that's like our mission. And so that's the experiment we're going to be running in January, so you'll be able to see it for yourself there. But ultimately, one of the reasons we pressed pause in Q4 was because I wanted to allocate all of that resource and time and effort and mental bandwidth away from LinkedIn towards a platform I'm even more bullish on, which is YouTube. So, I mean, confession I have had on my New Year's resolutions to, like, start and be consistent on YouTube for like five years in a row now. And we failed every time, guys, which is sad. Drop a sad face in the chat. Guys. Drop a sad face in the chat. But this year, mark my words, is going to be the year. And it's also going to be the year where we invest in better cables so the TV doesn't keep going out. So luckily it's back. And that brings us into bail number five. This one again came from some deep introspective reflection that I was doing this year and it was over consumption. You see, I would actually pride myself on one of my traits, is that I'm very tuned in, into my space and the business and marketing and sales space. I'm very tuned in. What I mean by that is I have curated over the last few years a lot of streams of information from people that I know are legitimate that I've done my due diligence on, that I seek to learn from, because I'm very hungry to learn. Because I knew early on in my career, you know, that the key to success in business is to understand what you're trying to do, find people that have done it, and then simply learn from them so you can skip all the trial and error and just get the results. And so your ability to go out there and find the very specific bits of information that help you solve these problems is like the superpower. And that was our. You know, I've always prided myself on doing that. And I've been very tuned in, whether that's on YouTube, whether that's through newsletters, whether that's joining people's paid programs, masterminds, you name it, I've done all of them to the nth degree. And it has helped me a lot. I'm not going to, but this year. Be right back. Let me just fix the clicker. I had to tune out. I felt I was almost too tuned in. And what do I remember that I felt like I reached this stage where I effectively knew what the next step was that I needed to do. But I was just. I was just consuming too much information. Because one thing I've definitely noted over the last few years is the rise in people publishing stuff online like this. So there is so much information out there. And so I took the kind of proactive decision in the second half of this year to filter out as much of that as I can, because I recognize that when you know what your next best step is, you just need to stop consuming and do it, take the action and get it done and stop faffing around. So my big learn there was to carefully curate your feed of information so you are learning from people that have done what you're trying to do, that have solved the specific problems that you are facing right now. And once you've got the information, put everything else on pause and do it. Take the action, get the results and then go and find the next step. And at the end of the year, I always reflect on this from the book essentialism by Greg McCowan. And this always helps me just lock in a bit because it's so true. We all have a finite amount of energy and we choose how we spend it. And if we decide to pursue a billion different things at once and bombard our brain with 10 trillion ideas of how we can grow our business, then you get a bit frazzled and you get a bit stuck. But when you keep it focused laser tight on the one thing and channel all your energy there, you're going to go much further, much quicker. Whoo. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, so those were the failures and some of the little lessons that we have learnt from it. We are now going to get into the good stuff. Speaking of good stuff, this is the best coconut water on the planet. It's very nice. Ah, that is beautiful. Shout out to the team. If we could just lower the temperature in this room as well, that'd be fantastic because we're spitting so much fire right now, it's getting a bit hot. So what did work win number one is that we cracked cold marketing for our cold offers. This is what was, I should say, so big. This was so big. So again, back to a whole little value ladder for our business. Historically, we've always pushed people to consume free stuff and then get them into our core membership because we know if they get them into the core membership, they get to know us, like us, trust us, they get a result. Then it becomes very easy to get them onto genie, AI or the master plan and bump them up the ladder. That is what has worked for, you know, a decade now. And it's been a very time tested, proven model. But as I've articulated this, this was getting quite hard to put people here. It was getting hard to do it efficiently. And for Entrepreneur's Circle, our ideal customer profile is typically business owners that are already established and doing over £100,000 a year and we help them grow their business. Right. In a nutshell, which obviously is just quite broad, there's a lot of nuance to that icp. And so our marketing strategy was always have a bunch of different funnels that we would run ads to. One on Facebook ads, one on managing your staff, one on managing your finances, training your team, whatever it might be. All of the different problems that ICP would face, get them in and then they'd enter our massive email sequence and eventually they would be upsold onto Entrepreneur's Circle and then onto everything else. And that again worked very well until this year when we were struggling to fill the front end efficiently. So we took a different view and we went back to probably my favorite form of marketing, the humble live webinar. So live webinars, these were such a major thing quite a number of years ago and they kind of died out a little bit. And at Entrepreneur Circle we always had really good success with the live webinars, but they are very time and work intensive. A lot goes into a live webinar and I actually mean a lot because to do it properly, this is our live webinar model that we do. So you have your ads that go to an opt in page and depending on if you're qualified or not, you go to different thank you page. Once you're registered, we now have to get you to show up. So we have a set of indoctrination ads. We have value dense emails, a WhatsApp community, a show up sequence. Then you have the actual live event. You have to do the whole presentation that has to be structured perfectly to intro people, give a ton of value and then have a good pitch at the end to get people to take action. You then have to drop the CTA in a way that gets people to do it. You have a massive email sequence. You then have to do, you know, sales calls after. It's a whole thing thing. This is not an easy piece of marketing to do. And that was why, even though it had worked well in the past, they had kind of stopped doing it and opted for, you know, evergreen webinars instead. But of course this was no ordinary year because it was the year that they acquired my agency and my team. And instead of looking to do that as a source of additional revenue and a new business unit. The strategic plan was to take myself and the team and turn all that marketing firepower to growing entrepreneur circle. And so of course we now have a massive team and we can, we can do this, we can do these webinars. Not only that, throw in the technological advancements of Mr. Mainus. Oh my God. We can now turn around live webinars like it's nobody's business. Because let me tell you, me and Manus have just become best friends this year and I highly encourage you to do too, because especially in the production of something that is quite intensive like a live webinar, we can now do it in absolutely record breaking time. So why did we opt for the live webinar route? Very specific reason. Firstly, we have to acknowledge the current market conditions, which is that in general, people's trust is quite low. In general, skepticism is quite high. And in general people's attention spans are absolutely fucked or very short because of everything that's happening in the world. Just follow it through, okay? People getting burnt with bad promises, more people starting businesses over promising under delivering TikTok reels. Da da da, boom. Crazy. Now we know. Based on a study that Google did many years ago, now a typical user will consume around 7 hours of content across 11 different touch points and 4 different mediums before they buy. And this generally holds true. It's crazy to think that someone needs to consume seven hours. That seems insane. Seven hours of content across 11 different touch points, at least across four different mediums before they're actually ready to buy. And this is all about going from absolute cold prospect, never heard from you before, to okay, I understand you, I know what you do, I trust you, I'm willing to buy. And so the challenge is, how do we actually, how do you do that? How the fuck do you do that? That is a lot of content, that's a lot of TikToks, that's a lot of 30 second reels to get in front of someone and a lot of emails to send to build up these touch points. And that is why we like the live webinar. You see, the 90 minute live webinar compresses a ton of relationship building into a very small period of time. And there is absolute magic to the fact that it is live. Because when it is live and people know it's live and you have to do things specifically to make sure people know it's live, like have the date on the screen and have someone human holding the camera and stuff and they are just magic. They get people to pay attention because the element of thinking, they're going to miss something, think and just. I can't even articulate it. Just the magic of it being live gets people to stay and watch. And so all of a sudden, when we're fighting on Instagram and TikTok, where you're coming up against all sorts these days, whether it's crazy cat videos, people getting injured, all the onlyfans girls, all the crazy shit that's on that feed and you're trying to come in with your business content, the attention is just so hard to maintain. Whereas the live webinar does that in a way that the evergreen webinar does not. And so our plan was, okay, what if we do a webinar for the master plan and just go straight to our high ticket offer? What if we do a live webinar, sell people. And then if we sold them on our highest, best thing, then arguably it's going to be way easier to get them to trickle down and do the other stuff as well. And that was the plan and that was what we set out to do. So we launched a new webinar. It's called how to get your business to 100k a month. It was in August of this year and let me tell you, it was an outstanding success. As I said, we followed this entire model that I very briefly ran through. But to give you an idea of how we use AI, the ads were done by main us. The opt in page was done by main us. The value dense emails were done by main us. The indoctrination ads were done by main us. The show up sequence was done by main us. The presentation, a lot of it was tailored by main us as well. The 72 hour hellfire sequence was done by Maynus and that just shows how much AI we're using. So we could do that in a really short period of time. We then ran this webinar for a total of five times. And this is the real authentic data from this webinar. So across these five webinars, we effectively spent £109,000. So about £20,000 average per webinar. Our ads were shown to about three and a half million people. We had 37,000 people click on the ads for a two pound 89 cost per click. Landing page conversion rate was 14%. It's quite low in my opinion, something we're working on. But we had 5,413 sign up from ads. We then had about a further thousand sign up from our Email list. We then had 322 people apply to join the master plan. We had 225 scheduled calls and we had 103 people actually sign up, which meant our day one cash collected, which is how much money we collected on the day of doing the webinar, effectively was about £72,000. But the total revenue, because MathPlan has a 12 month commitment was £1.4 million. So that is a so 0.66 month one return on ad spend, but a 13.21 lifetime value return on ad spend, which we were very pleased about because again, we become very profitable in month two and so on and so forth. So this became a very good channel for us to just actually skip the waiting skip trying to get people painfully onto a free offer and then wait ages for them to get value and upsell them and just go directly to the high ticket thing. And we were able to do that because the live webinar compressed all that relationship building because we have people's attention for 90 minutes, 2 hours. Some of them ran until. And people were there from start to finish getting value, building all that trust and then jumping on call and signing up. So it was awesome. So we put a lot of effort into this. We're very blessed. We have very good studio set up here, very awesome video squad who are behind the scenes at the moment as well. And so it ran very well. That being said, you definitely do not need a fancy setup to do this. And in fact, inside my secret vault, which is my very secret network of little private clients that I work with that you won't see advertised anywhere else, I have Samantha. And so Samantha, I've had the joy. I've worked with Samantha about a year now, and she is a mindset coach for anxious horse riders. And so she helps them conquer their anxiety around getting back on their horse so they can go and ride and compete and do amazing things. It's a really, really lovely business and offer that she has. And she was struggling, but over the past year we've just had so many breakthroughs with Samantha. It's been great because she does a live webinar and she committed to doing a live webinar every single week. And she does it in her nice little room at home with her little rustic fireplace and her presentation on her laptop. And she goes through and she does it and week in, week out, she gets like a 425% return on ad spend, meaning she spends a thousand pound. She gets 4250 back and her Only cost is the thousand pound ad spend that she's put in. So Samantha has been very happy and we've had a great time. And that's just to prove you don't need the fancy setup, you don't need these cameras in this stuff. You know, whilst it's nice, you don't need that at all. Now, if you want to dive deeper into these webinars, I do have a 30 minute breakdown video on YouTube going through that system in a bit more detail. But one of the big challenges with live webinars is getting people to show up. This is the tricky part. And so that brings me into win number two, which is WhatsApp communities to increase the live webinar show rate. So at this stage, I've got to do a big shout out to my boy, Jean Baptiste. I had the pleasure of meeting him at Mastermind of Ollie Richards back in November last year at this very cool castle. And Jean Baptiste, he runs an epic business and he's the one who shared this with me. So full credit to him. But I took this tactic and there's a great lesson about why you should go to these masterminds and learn from other people. Because this one tactic has paid for that mastermind about 50 times over now, which is awesome. But what the tactic is is that when people opt in for the webinar, we invite them to join the private WhatsApp group. And so, as you can see here, this is the thank you page once you've opted in and there's a button to join the WhatsApp group. And we basically create these WhatsApp communities which are different to WhatsApp group. It's a community where all of the people join in for the particular event and we as admins, as the owners of the community, we can post messages into it. People can like, like it and they can reply, but it's not a chat, so people can't just message in it, only the admins can post. And so what this does is it gives you a beautiful direct line into your live webinar registrants. And because it's on WhatsApp, which we all know is a very, you know, personal messaging app that we use to talk to our family and friends. The delivery and the consumption and the engagement is so high. And so again, this is not, this is a community, not a group. And so in WhatsApp on your mobile, you will see the communities tab in the middle and if you click on that, you're able to create a community. And again, it will explain Kind of how you do it. So it's basically a WhatsApp group, but only you can post it. And our big learn from this year was that 70% of the number of people in the WhatsApp group would show up to the live event. So whatever number of people we managed to get into the WhatsApp, 70% would be the amount that showed up live to the webinar. So if we had a hundred people in the WhatsApp, 70 would show up to the live broadcast. If we had a thousand people in the WhatsApp, we'd get 700 show up to the broadcast. That was very, very consistent across the five and even six now webinars that we have done. So definitely do that when you're running a live webinar. But it begs the question, what do you actually post in the WhatsApp community? Because it's one thing to have it and it's another thing to execute on it properly. So the first thing we would do is post videos. So here we have Nigel. He was on holiday in Singapore, Malaysia. And so we asked him to basically record a video of himself getting everyone excited and explaining why he was in Malaysia. And as you can see, people loved it. I would then post some kind of behind the scenes stuff. So a little picture of the setup and teasing people, reminding them of the day and basically building the value that they can expect to get from it. Because again, people attend a live webinar because they want the information in it. So you want to remind them of the information, how good it's going to be and what they're going to get. Yeah, this is a very good one. Call this the everything you need to know message. Because one of the big blockers of people joining a live broadcast is they forget about it or they just can't find the link and don't know how to join. So you have to really repeatedly make it blindingly obvious how to join the webinar. And so we would send a message like this, reiterating that we're going live on this day at this specific time. Here is the link to join us. We would create a print at home work, which is another sneaky tactic to increase the consumption and engagement of the webinar. So we'd have a link to that as well. We would then give bonuses to people that join live. So if you show up live, you get extra stuff, extra valuable stuff that will help you that's related to the topic. Talk about how there's a live Q and A and so on and so Forth. It's exactly as I described. It's an everything you need to know before joining the webinar. So people have the full information and they know where it is. It's in that little WhatsApp group. Group. I enjoy doing behind the scenes messages. So I would come in on a Saturday because we have a gym here. I'd use the gym and then I'd come into the studio and film a little video. Being like, guys, we're in the office and we are getting the studio set up, which again was true. And put that in the group. So people feel, you know, sense the anticipation and the preparation going into it. And then honestly, a lot of reminder messages. So again, we are live and about to kick off the biggest and last live event of the year. The time to join is now. Link, link, link. And again, loads of reminder messages. A two minute warning as soon as we go live. Talking about people in the chat, just being very engaging. Even when we're halfway through the live webinar, we would put messages. You know, there's a bonus coming up shortly. Now's the time to join. Get in here, get in here, get in there. So the more active you are in there, the better. And you want to do it in an interesting way. You don't want to be reminding people you want to do it in a creative way behind the scenes. Talk about the bonuses, talk about what's in it for them. You know, share little videos, have fun with it because it definitely helps. And we definitely found the more active we were, the higher the show rate to the webinar. Well, that's all for the live webinars for now. And that brings us to win number three, which is email and phone verification. This is a brilliant quick win for anyone running ads and getting leads that's not doing this. So this was in our software company, Genie AI. We were running a bunch of new ads that we filmed here in the studio and lo and behold, they went really well. And this is our sales teams calendar. We have three salespeople at the time. So you've got orange, green and purple. And their calendars were just full. And so we were thinking, fantastic. This is brilliant. The sales team, as you can see, here's Adam and here's James. These guys were pumped. They were loving it. They love a full diary. Challenge is they quickly became very sad because it turns out when we looked at the leads that were coming in, we had all these leads that were from IBM.com, their emails were bm.com and so we were just Getting spammed. And these people, they weren't even just opting, they were booking a call in a calendar over from IBM.com and then obviously not showing up and not being real people. So that is really annoying, especially when you're spending like £100 per one of these. That's so much money wasted right there. So we were like, damn, we've got to fix this asap, Rocky. And so luckily in this case, this is one of the beautiful cases where there's one simple button that we could literally press to fix this for good. And so this little button was the email and phone verification. So this is our cool booking widget from within GENIE AI. And so when people go to book in a call, we now have these buttons. And so these buttons, you have to press it to verify your email and then again to verify your phone. And what this does is send a one time password to your email and to your phone that you have to enter to verify that this is real. And only then does it let you actually go through. Because in our experience, the capture wasn't good enough to stop these IBM leads. We had that before, we had to have the email verification and the phone verification to prevent this. Now luckily in GENIE AI, which is of course our software, so shameless plug here and of course loads of other systems will do this too, I'm sure. But it is very easy in here because when you're editing a form like this is the one from our calendar, in the settings right at the bottom here you have validate email. And so you just have to literally toggle that on and this setting will appear. And then it's the same thing for the phone number field. So you have the validate email field and the validate phone field. And so this is tremendous protection against spammy leads, which trust me with AI is becoming an increasingly big thing. And it's actually a bit of a worry for next year because you've got all these AI web browsers that are going to be crawling your website and submitting inquiries on behalf of their users. And so you got to be able to filter out the good ones and the bad ones. Right? One of the reasons why we hadn't done that was because of what I call the lead quality paradox. And so this is just the never ending seesaw battle that you have when it comes to lead quality. Which is the better quality leads we want, normally the lower volume we get, because as we look to increase the volume of leads, those actions typically correspond with a drop in quality and vice versa. We want to increase the quality of leads. Typically those actions decrease the volume of leads. And the main reason, it kind of comes down to friction, because the quality of a lead will typically increase with the more friction that we add. And so friction can be additional form fields, it can be additional questions, it can be getting them to verify their email and phone, which is like quite a lot of additional effort to go into your inboxes and get your phone out. There's a bit of a pain. And so people that drop off because that is too much effort, effort most of the time are lower quality leads. And the ones that do it and persevere with the effort are typically higher quality leads. And so I'd always thought that verification thing would, would just kill our volume, but I was very surprised to find out it really didn't. It had a very marginal effect, about 10 to 15% increase in our cost per book to call as a result, but a tremendous increase in our lead quality show rates and indeed close rates as a result. So whilst our cost per book call went up, customer acquisition costs went down. And that's why I gotta have the visibility on the whole thing. That brings us to win number four, selfie style videos. So selfie style videos, let me take you back. This was August 21st, it was a Sunday. And I was doing what I do on all Sundays, which is check the performance of our ads because we were running one of those webinars that I been telling you about earlier. And so again, as I mentioned, we have this very fancy building and we were able to build, well film in this studio and get the professional lighting out the professional cameras and make these beautiful ads. And so we filmed all these ads to get people signed up to our webinar. We'd set them live, let it run for a few days. And on Sunday I was checking in on the performance. And much to my dismay, these ads were not slapping as hard as I'd hoped. No, in fact they were performing terribly. And so we were getting like 136 pound cost per qualified lead, which is insane. Anyone who's running a webinar before you know, you know how insane that is. That's absolutely wild. So we were like, fuck, this is terrible. What do we do? What do we do? Because at this point it's Sunday, we have like two days to the event. How am I meant to fix this? How am I meant to fix this? So I did the only thing that I could and was send a desperate text message to Nigel, who is the talent, the man in the Videos in question. And so I said, late request, but do you fancy filming an ad for this next live event whilst you're in Lake Como? Because Nigel was on holiday at this time and luckily, being the jolly good sport that he is, he said, no problem. And so within about a half an hour, I got sent through a series of selfie style videos of Nigel walking around Lake Como filming these ads for the webinar. And I stuck some Instagram captions on and just uploaded them frantically as quickly as possible because we only had two days left. But we went from a 50 plus cost per lead to £12 cost per lead in like a matter of a few hours. And so these particular types of ads lowered our cost in this scenario by like 76%, which was beautiful. And so upon doing that, it then led me to think, well, why did this happen? And it led me to a number of realizations. So the first reason is Instagram reels domination. As we all know, Instagram reels, basically Instagram copy and TikTok. But it has quickly become a way in which the platform gets used the most. And so a large proportion of whenever someone's using Instagram is now on reels. And what that means is when we are running our ads, if we're running just images and not portrait videos, we're missing out on all that reels inventory. And so if your ideal customers are now consuming reels heavily and you don't have creative that is specifically designed to be shown on reels, you're just going to miss out on them seeing it, which therefore means performance will be worse. Obviously, the selfie style video blends into reels because it looks like what people expect on reels as well. Reason number two is updates to the algorithm. So the landscape has very much changed this year. As we all know, AI is doing all sorts of stuff and no one's trying to get on the AI bandwagon more than Mr. Zuckerberg and the folks at Meta themselves. And so they're going really hard with AI and building AI into the Facebook ads platform. So much so that you would have seen a bunch of features beginning to be rolled out into your account over the course of this year in a variety of different forms. So one thing you've probably all seen is when you're making an ad now when you put in your ad copy, you have the this little menu will appear and it will be Meta creating five new ad copies that it has written using its own AI engine. And you can choose to select them and run them or not. You can even choose to tailor variations to different, different Personas, which is kind of cool, but otherwise you have some extra copy that it goes way further than that. And it will now do AI enhancements to your creative. It will even create images from scratch for you and change the background and do all sorts of crazy stuff. So it's using AI to really enhance all sorts of elements of Ad Creative. And whilst on one hand that's kind of cool, on the other hand, this put tremendous strain on the poor Meta algorithm, which we can see depicted here absolutely steaming. Okay, because if the algorithm has got a. Now if there's one ad, but Meta creates five ad copies and like 10 different image variations and then all of a sudden you have one times five, times 10 per one ad and you have 20 ads, it's like so many combinations. So like overnight the algorithm had to learn to cope with like a bajillion new creative variations, all with these nuanced AI tweaks. And so Meta had no choice but to roll out Meta Andromeda, which was their new algorithm that depending on where you were in the world between January and June, it got rolled out to your ad account. And what this was was a fundamental change to the machine learning algorithm that chose who and when to share show your ad to. And so again, as I've said, all these AI features mean the AI algorithm had to cope. And there's some great, highly complex documentation from Meta and their development team that breaks down exactly how Andromeda works and the implications of it, and how the ad corpus and blah, blah, blah, doesn't matter, okay? We don't need to dive into the technical details, but we do need to understand the technical implications of it. And so the new algorithm is designed to handle like 10,000 times more ads. And so in order to succeed, what we now need to do is have creative diversification. So you'll hear all the main gurus talking about this at the moment. So put simply, the more Ad creative we have, the better results we are going to get. But also the more diverse Ad Creative we have, the better results we're going to get. And so our mistake that we made with these ads, well, that they just all were very similar and whilst they had slightly different hooks and messaging, fundamentally it was the same and they all looked the same as well. So Meta did not have a diverse array and this was not looked upon favourably versus when Nigel was let loose on Lake Como, filming these ads around these different points in Lake Como, each with a different story, because in this one he'd be referencing the lake or the town Bellagio where they just had lunch. In this one he'd be referencing the massive staircase behind him. In this one he'd be referencing. You can probably guess what. And so they all had a great difference in visual backgrounds and context. But also the messaging context was very different as well. And so these were looked upon very favorably by the algorithm and they worked tremendously well. That's a key little understanding there. The final reason comes back to legendary advertising principle of pattern interrupt. And so the best ads don't look like ads. Okay. And we made the grave mistake. You know, we're not perfect. This ad obviously just looks like an ad, doesn't it? We have our nice electron here with our logo on. It's all professional and it just looks like an ad. So people will just inherently skim across this. It also has our, like, nicely produced captions, which again is, you know, just looks like an ad versus random guy walking along filming himself with the native Instagram captions. This looks like an authentic piece of content. And therefore people are way more trained to consume things that look like authentic content versus unauthentic ads that are like highly produced. So that is why we're doubling down on this selfie style of creative. We haven't said goodbye completely to the studio stuff and we are having some great success with that as well. Well. But we are now injecting a lot more of this style as well. Okay. This one is a fun one. Win number five Replit landing pages. All my vibe code is out there. You're gonna love this. So relet. Absolute mind blowing tool. I will admit I know there's other tools out there, lovable and whatnot. I've only used Replit and I love Replit. Replit is so good. And so what Replit is for the uninitiated is a tool that is like $20 a month and you can basically speak a command into it and it will build you a fully functioning website or application or piece of software. It is crazy. And so I love Repl it. And so why I love it is because it's never been easier to run ads and get traffic the way the ad platforms are now. It actually has never been easier. You don't have to have complex structures of campaigns and all this nuanced targeting. You just need to have an ad as a specific messaging to a specific customer about something they care about. And you're going to get traction because the algorithm does all the work. Okay. There is just not that much marginal Gains to be had from really intense media buying. Because back in my day at my first agency, there were so many marginal gains or incremental gains we could get from having specific structures and specific targeting settings and buttons and whatnot. And that just doesn't exist anymore. It's all about the creative. What this means is it's never been easier to run out and get traffic. We need killer landing pages. We need killer landing pages. And this used to be a big point of friction. I know it's a big point of friction because I've had the pleasure of helping a lot of business owners. So we have something called ec, which is the plus version of Entrepreneur Circle Membership. And we run a host of workshops pretty much every day in our HQ on like a complete variety of different topics. And there's a few that I run and I really love running these workshops. They are very good, fun. And so in these workshops, you know, I might run one on Google Ads and show people how to, how to build a Google Ads campaign, how it works. And, and what I have noticed is most people just have got terrible landing pages. They just have got terrible landing pages and they come to places like here and we teach them on how to run ads in the right way and they go away and they try and do it, but they don't get the results. And then they ask for some help. And I look at their campaign to try and help them and I look at their landing page and I just think, oh my God, are you insane? Why would you even run ads to this landing page now bless them, you know, they don't know what they don't know and that's why we're there to help. But it's a point of friction. People don't really understand or comprehend what makes a high converting landing page. But not only that, that's not really the friction. The friction is that getting one built seems to be a challenge. And it seems to me that there's a big discrepancy in the market of, you know, good website building. People charge a lot of money, and rightfully so, because landing pages are critical, but the kind of lower end of the website market just are not very good at building websites. And that is why I'm so glad that replit exists. Because one of my favorite things to do in these workshops is I have to emphasize the point about landing pages. And I really go into it, you know, in our Google Ads one, I'm like, guys, we're going to talk loads about Google Ads today. But just so you know, if your landing page is terrible, doesn't matter how good your Google Ads are, no one's going to buy because you could get away with having really crappy ads to an amazing landing page and get customers. But if you have amazing ads to a crappy landing page, you're not going to get customers, okay? So you have to get it sorted. And so what I love to do is take one of the people that are there, take their website, and in five minutes throw it into replit and build them a new version. And so this was for. I did this literally the other week. This is from Adam, who's very local to us, actually. He has a company called Boogie Down Bingo, okay. Which is a cool events company. Now, bless Adam. He's a very hard worker. He thinks in the right way and he built this whole website himself, okay? And he's not a technical guy. And so he was on my Google Ads thing, we were showing him how to do Google Ads and it was all going well. But I said, we need to sort this landing page out because just to be very candidly, I admire your efforts, but there's no way this is going to dry any meaningful conversions for you, so we need to fix it. Now, of course, you kind of stress out about that because I've got to find someone to build a website. And I'm like, no, you don't. Not in today's day and age. Let's stick it into repl dot. And so that's exactly what I did. I took his website, put it into replit and said, please make this look much better, a bit more luxurious, and appealed to his ideal customer. And in literally five minutes, it spat out this working website. It created a new Boogie Down Bingo logo, a new iconic catch line. Not your grandma's bingo. Call to actions to inquire now or to go to the price calculator, because it would then build out a system. A little section here that showed the Boogie Down Bingo, an instant quote calculator. So depending on the number of people and how far away it was from him, the price would vary alongside nice little testimonials and everything else at the end. And so in literally five minutes, his limiting belief of being able to have a nice website without spending loads of money on web developers was shattered. And he now had this version that he could take and run and build. Because with the technology these days, you no longer have to know the intricacies of coding. You can speak to it and feedback and it can interpret it and make the changes. So I know a Lot of people now are seeing some of the most effective gains in their marketing. And we are doing this as well. Because when we have an idea for a landing page or we want to change something, we're no longer briefing it in with the tech team and waiting for it to get done. We're doing it in replit and just deploying it. So it's enabled us to massively compress our timelines for making significant changes and just test more stuff at a really high standard. Because the designs of replit are, I must say, very good. So that is a major win. Win number six is also replant, but this time not for landing pages, this time for internal software. You see, in my world there are two types of actions that me and my team take in business. Actions that are directly revenue generating actions and actions that are non revenue generating actions. And so everything, I categorize everything into these two. Because if we're working on new campaign strategy, scripting ads, filming ads, doing media buying within our meta ads platform, designing a new landing page, scripting a new webinar, those are all revenue generating actions. They have a direct link between what we're doing and more revenue. And then you have non revenue generating actions which are like doing my pleo financial receipts, making sure my expenses are all up to date, and even doing like one on one meetings with my team or over just general team meetings and all that kind of stuff. Stuff that don't get me wrong, needs to happen, but is not directly revenue generating. And as a business owner, in my humble opinion, you need to be acutely aware of these things. Because if your goal is to increase your revenues, then you and your team need to know what are the revenue generating activities and are you prioritizing them? Are you doing more of them? Because I think we can all agree it would be insane to be like, yes, we want to double our revenue this year and then spend all of our fucking time on stuff that doesn't actually generate revenue. Now I say that in a very blunt and blase way, but this stuff creeps in. This stuff creeps in and it can be quite hidden because all of a sudden you're looking at, you know, new project management systems and exploring potential things with your team and like all this stuff that will just happen and come your way and your job is to karate it away and stay focused for as much time as possible on revenue generating actions. And so my calendar gets color coded, okay? And so I always try and color code and everything that's green is revenue generating. Everything that's red. It's not. And generally I'm pretty good. I try to get 75% of the week on revenue generating activities. It's never 100% because I have got other, you know, commitments. And as someone who leads a team and does other stuff in the business, there are stuff I have to do and that's fine. But I never lose sight and I'm acutely aware of when I have a day of lots of non revenue generating activity so that I can make sure I refocus next week or the next day and put more revenue generating activities in there. And so all of that is to say repl.it comes back into play because Replit is now there to not only build a landing page, but to build internal software tools, things that you can use to buy back your time to spend more time on revenue generating action. Because Replit is just crazy. So we've been doing a lot of this in Q4 and we've got a lot more of this planned next year. And so the way to start with this is okay, Replik can create software. Cool. What am I going to create? These are the questions to ask yourself and to actually spend a bit of time reflecting on. So question number one. What is your current constraint in your business right now? What is the one thing that is holding back the growth? What is the one bottleneck that if we solved it, massive growth would occur? Because there is only ever one thing. When you look at your calendar and your to do list, what are the non revenue generating actions that you are doing that you are doing lots of every single week? What do you wish you could track easier? Do you understand the numbers in your business? Do you understand how your marketing is performing properly? Do you understand your customer acquisition cost week by week, funnel by funnel? Do you know these things? Is it easy to find? Because we can build a tool for that. What tool would make you or your team's life much easier? What tool would make you or your team's life much easier? And we are just blessed to live in this time now where anyone without any real technical experience, much like myself, can have an idea, speak to Relet and get a prototype built in 10 minutes. It's wild. So one of the things Harry and my team did, he's our senior creative strategist, shout out to Big H. We wanted to do a lot more on conversion rate optimization and systematically improving our landing pages. And one of our blockers was that Google Analytics 4 is just terrible. Drop in the chat. If you hate GA4 as much as we do don't know what they did with this, but this is so not fun to use. And when something's not fun to use, guess what, you don't really use it. And therefore whilst it does have valuable data in it, we were never really using it that much. And so Harry just took it upon himself to spend a few days of replit and effectively take this not very good platform and build our own custom version. And so Harry built our own conversion rate optimization, landing page analytics software that connects to GA4 and even to some of our other systems to pull through all the data and mix it and match it and show us it in a way that gives us real insight in a way that is fun, in a way that we can one click and see how this is doing. And this is, this is so extensive. This goes down, down. I haven't got the full screenshot in. And you can change by the date, you can filter to our ad campaigns. Serious stuff. And that was all of his own will creating some crazy piece of software. Similar ideas that we're working at the moment is an internal software tool to analyze our marketing funnels and identify the constraint. You know, plug it in, feed it all the data from a funnel from click to close and then get it to just tell us on a weekly basis this is the biggest constraint, this is where the biggest opportunity to improve performance exists. Because yes, we can do it manually, but what if we had a tool that just did it every day, a conversion rate optimization, landing page analyzer where it actually goes and reviews all of our landing pages every single week to make sure A they're working and performing properly, but B identifying based on the user's data the opportunities that exist to improve it. We can just do that now. We recently were building out a lost revenue calculator to show the impact to our clients of not having proper back end systems installed. So if you're missing phone calls, if you're not nurturing your list, if you're not resurrecting old customers, how much money are you losing? Now that depends on a bunch of factors. How big is your business, how many customers do you have, what is your list, what is your offer, all that kind of stuff. And so we could create this calculator that matched all those variables and would basically figure it out for you. An internal client success tracker. This is something that Maya Norbury, one of our head of advisory here at Entrepreneur Circle, one of the creators of the master plan, has built out. And so now we have our own very in depth, complex master Plan OS that tracks all of our customers on master plan and enables us to basically proactively manage them and ensure they get the right levels of result, but also gives us like the perfect analytics into how it's all going. Sales call analyzer. So like I showed at the start, throwing a bunch of transcripts into main us. Well now I can just connect it to my call recording software and it can just run on repeat and every single week give me the insight. And also I think there's great scope for an AI content generator. Not to contradict what I said about the AI slot landscape on LinkedIn, but an AI content generator that goes through a specific sequence to create the most human and unai content possible, I think that could be massive. So that's few days that I've had. And of course in your business, if you actually stop and think about these things, then you'll come up with a beautiful list of ideas as well. And if you've got a team, it's a great thing to challenge them. Guys, if we had unlimited resources and could make any piece of software or tool that we wanted, what would we do? What would make your life easier? Grow. You've got 20 minutes to brainstorm. I promise you're gonna get some valuable nuggets out of that. So we are storming on to win number seven systematic review collection. Now, this is something that has been in place for many, many years. But I'm going to show you why it's so important now and why this year was a big year for it. So what I mean by this, the number of reviews that you have online is obviously very important. So as you can see Here, we have 4.9,961 reviews as of this screenshot. I think we had a push this week, so I think we're over a thousand now. And you can obviously see all of our good reviews. So first things first, if someone Googles you, it's good to have reviews, okay? Plain and simple. I believe that businesses will live or die by their online reputation, okay? Because we are living through a very unique period of time. You see, there's a confluence of three powerful things that has created an immediate and urgent need to have a stellar reputation. And I'm going to explain them for you now. You see, fundamentally right now, we're in a trust recession. You see a lot of people talking about that online where consumer trust is just low. And that's for all sorts of reasons. The uplift in people making crazy promises. And I don't need to go into all the reasons why, but trust is low. The second factor is that more people than ever are starting businesses, which is interesting. The barrier to entry, to start a business has never been easier, especially with AI. This goes up to 2023 and look at this increase in the number of businesses because this shows the number of new businesses created in that year. It's absolutely shot through the roof. And I bet the 2024 and 2025 data is going to be up here somewhere. And so, you know, part of me loves that. Big up entrepreneurship. Yes, let's go. More business equals more choice for the consumer because most of these businesses are going to be are not brand new industries. But for us it means more competitors, whether that's direct competitors or indirect competitors because of new solutions. So they're the first two factors, low trust and more competition. And so those two reasons alone are why you need more reviews. Because you don't need me to tell you in a market where people are comparing who you're going to pick, the person with no reviews or the person with loads of reviews. We know a fundamental rule of business generally is the more reviews, the more business you get. And that's fine. And it is absolutely one of the best ways to stand out versus your competitors. There is a mysterious third factor that has come into play though. The rise of AI search. You see, the way that people have searched has changed forever, especially for businesses. You see Google is no longer on its high horse. Google is on its way out. And you've seen this with how Google now has the AI search element built into it. And we've all seen the rise of ChatGPT, which you know, became the record breaking platform to hit 100 million users. And quick little search tells me that as of late 2025 it has about 800 million weekly active users. That is a lot. This thing has grown a lot. People are using it and they're using it to search for stuff. Because guess what? When an AI can take what you have said and give you a really specific personalized answer, that's way better than just regular Google search. Right? And so that is why Google now even is doing the AI search in its own search. Because this usage is going through the roof and all predictions lead to this being the main way people search. In a few years, time and again, little survey that came up here, 83% of users already are preferring AI search over traditional Googling. And as the AI gets better, that's only going to increase. Think if people prefer it now and it's in its junior stage, Wait till it gets even better. Now this isn't just about people seeing good things when they find you. Of course you want good reviews then, but this is the big thing people aren't latching onto. It's about tapping into one of the most potent and profitable new traffic sources. Super high intent AI search traffic. Now let me tell you, potent and profitable new traffic sources do not come around often. And so there are going to be massive, massive upside for those that are able to get head and use this first. It's like being around in the days of early Google Ads where it was like one pence a click. And Nigel always tells the story of those days where he was one of the first using Google Ads. And oh my God, you could just buy infinite traffic and it was amazing and you could grow a massive business very, very quickly because there's an arbitrage opportunity when these new things come along. And so honestly, what I'm about to share with you really blew my mind. Really blew my mind. And bear in mind, I do like Google. You know, over the last few years this is one of our accounts, we have spent many millions of pounds on Google Ads. So I like Google, but company does study into the conversion rates of AI search traffic versus Google Organic search traffic, which again, Google Organic search traffic one of the highest converting sources of traffic that exists. So Google Organic came out on average 1.76% chat GPT AI search traffic converted at a whopping 15.9% which is absolutely unreal. You then have Perplexity, Claude and Gemini, three of the models, these were 10.55 and 3% respectively. And obviously you know there's going to be a big difference there. But the fact that ChatGPT was at 15.9, that's insane. Even Google's own Gemini is basically double the Google Organic, which is crazy. So all this means is there is a massive opportunity for businesses to appear in these AI search engines because more people are searching there and it's going to be the place where more people search over the next few years. And if you're appearing in those searches, the chance of someone converting is very, very high. So the big prize is for us to be able to appear when they search. Which begs the question, how do you appear in ChatGPT? Well, in its simplest form, what ChatGPT does is it searches its web and its knowledge base and it prioritizes trusted sources. It then presents the user the answer, so what is a trusted source? Well, the most trusted Source are independent third party reviews such as Google, such as Trustpilot. So I did check with ChatGPT, our third party reviews like Trustpilot, one of the best ways to rank in AEO or AI Engine Optimization. Short answer, yes. Third party reviews like Trustpilot and Google are one of the most powerful signals for AI engine optimization, one of the most powerful. And so you'll see this now when you're using ChatGPT and in this case I asked it, you know what you know about entrepreneurs. So great exercise to go and ask what it thinks about your business. Is your business legit? See what it says and you'll notice behind every point it has a reference. And you can click in here and it will show you the websites that are crawled to get that information. And nearly every time you'll see the little trustpilot icon because that is where it goes first and that is a website that it highly prioritizes. So the more reviews we have on trustpilot and on Google, the higher the probability of US ranking in ChatGPT and the other AI engines. Not just when people search for you, but when people search for the best plumber in X area or who is the best business coach or whatever it might be. That's where you, the more reviews you have, you'll start to win in those races. So that begs the question, well, how do you get more reviews? Simple. We have a review gathering system. So the most important part of this is that it is systemized because as you bring customers in, you don't want to rely on humans to do this, you want it to be systemized. So we have a flow inside GENIE I that does all of this. So the first part is we send an automated review request. The critical thing here is that you ask for the review at the right time. Now the right time is when the someone is at the peak of their value consumption. So what I mean by that is when someone's paid us money, the time for us to ask for the review is at the highest moment where they are getting the value from what we are doing. And so to give you an example, in my agency it would be when we've launched some ads and actually got results and hit their KPIs and they're really happy, that would be the time to do it. Because actually all the work we've been doing for 30 days to build the ads doesn't really count if we haven't got the result. So when we've got the result, boom. We would ask them if you're a florist, when the flowers get delivered and you have that exchange, that would be the time you'd ask for a review. If you're a plumber, when you finish the job and you've saved the day, that would be the time to ask for the review because the value consumption is at its highest. The little system is very clever because if it's a four and five star rating, it goes straight to Google and trustpilot. But if it's a three star or below rating, we intercept it. Okay, we intercept it, it gets sent back to us or our team so we can deal with it, so we can make right the situation and make the customer happy so that we don't get the dreaded negative review. Because again, you bet if you start getting negative reviews, guess what Chat GPT is going to be saying about you? It ain't going to be good. And a lot of businesses I think will die by neglecting this because as this becomes the normal way for people to find businesses, you're just going to be silently killed and cut out if your reputation isn't good. So that is the one way we do it. Another way, if you want a big influx, is plan something for your customers. So we have this, you have this big building. And so we took it upon ourselves to host a free one day workshop for our best customers. Customers. And so we invited 70 of them down, got them in our training room, had a whole day of really valuable content. And in exchange whilst they were there, we asked them for a testimonial on trustpilot, but also via film. So we left that day with about 20 new video testimonials and a whole bunch of reviews as well, which was a lovely, you know, influx of testimonials. So if you've got the capacity to do stuff like that, not only is it fun because not only do we like these guys and we like spending time and delivering more value to them, but also it's just a great way to get some extra bulky reviews. Boom. Okay, that takes us to win number eight, which is all about large scale video ad testing. Fun little fact. The top 1% or 0.1% of advertisers on meta test 11 times the volume of ad created than the other advertisers. Let that sink in for a second. They're not doing crazy fancy strategies or tactics or campaign structures. They are simply testing significantly larger volumes of ad creative. And again, as we spoke about earlier, we know Meta Andromeda Flipping loves massive volumes of diverse creative. So as people who are spending hundreds of thousands of pounds a month on Facebook Ads, we want to lean into this. And so our focus right now is on Creating and testing 100 new video ads a week minimum. And to give you an insight from our creative team, we would typically produce anywhere between 100 and 150 static image ads in a week. And, and our aim now is to do 100 video ads as well. And so how do we do that? Well, firstly, we make sure the filming is in the diary every single week. We have to do that. And if you're a business and you're running any serious level of Facebook ads, you're missing out by not doing this. Even if it's bi weekly, that's okay. Monthly is better than not. But having a recurring slot to actually make the creative, so it kind of forces you to do it. Then our team and I, we analyze the top performing ads, we look at what our competitors are doing and we also take the sales calls as our sources of inspiration. We feed that all into main us, get it to identify new angles, new hooks and new scripts for us to test. And then we film them all and do MVP editing, minimum viable product editing first and then we upscale the winners. This bit's quite important because we don't want to spend a ton of resource and time on the editing of these ads in the first place because if we make a hundred, like 90 of them are just not going to work. So we don't want to spend a ton of man hours editing them. We want to do the minimum viable editing, which is normally just framing, trimming and get the captions on and that's it. Then if it works, then we can invest the resource into actually upscaling it and making it better. Then we upload them to the platform and let the algorithm do its thing. We've started doing this in Q4 and it has worked really, really well. And we've been able to combat the inflated ad prices that come with Q4 quite well. But you do have to be on it because if you're uploading this volume of creative, whilst the algorithm tends to be quite good at just diverting the budget to the ads that are working well, you want to be quite rapid and brutal with your kill points. So what I mean by that is you need to know what your target cost per lead or cost per book call or cost per sale is. And anytime that breaches, we turn the ad off. And so I don't like using automated rules for this. Me and Laura, who's our performance media executive, she looks after this and she's in there every day doing this and we stay on top of it quite a lot. That's just a word of warning to be on it. My prediction is that the marketers that commit to building the best creative production pipelines are going to be the ones that win next year and beyond because it's a requirement. And we did a lot with modular ad filming and now we don't do that. And yeah, the creative production, that is actually where it lies. And again, you don't have to be crazy. Selfie style ads are working very well. And for some of my clients, I had to go back to Sam, who's doing the webinar. We have for her now a slot in her diary every two weeks where she goes out to her stables with her horses and she films, you know, 20 or so video ads. And she does that every two weeks now because she knows she needs to keep making these ads to get more people onto the webinars. And if she does that, then it converts and it's built into the process and she recognizes it as a key revenue generating activity. So she prioritizes it and gets it done. That brings us to win number nine, which is using Gamma to create sales assets. So going back to win number one, where we talked about kind of cracking cold marketing for our core offers, it was not an easy thing to do. It was not without its challenges. And one of the challenges was that the colder the people, the less trustworthy they are, obviously, because people have never heard of us before, they've never consumed any content, and then all of a sudden they've come across us in these live webinars and we've kind of got them to book a call, but they're still a bit cold because, yeah, fair enough. Why would you not be? And so we learn from having conversations with them that we needed to create a series of new sales assets for our sales team to give to these prospects that have a ton of proof and evidence and information so we can just build that relationship much quicker and get them to the point where they're feeling confident enough to trust us and do some business together. And so we worked really hard on testimonials, on case studies, on infopacks, team overviews. So for anyone running a coaching program where you're not the only coach, this is kind of like really important because a common objection will be, well, are the coaches any good? And so you need to be able to substantiate that and give a lot of proof and evidence as to why they're so good. And so all of this is Quite a lot of work. And I'll be honest, when we ran a live webinar and we get, you know, 50 calls booked in over the next few days, and then all of a sudden the sales team were like, I need something to send, I need something to send. I'm a bit like, ah, right, quick, let's make something. And so back in the day you'd be a bit screwed. But luckily we have tools like Gamma. So I really like Gamma. And Gamma enables you to basically create very nice designed documents, documents, presentations, even little websites. And I just really love the aesthetics of it. And when we've used it, it has worked very well. So what you can do with Gamma is effectively paste in a bunch of text. So my normal workflow is dictate into Manus the document and information I want it to create, get Manus to format it, take that text, put it into Gamma and then Gamma turns it into like a beautiful document. I can then create a nice little link. It's extremely fast loading, mobile optimized. It will share it with the customer so they can consume it properly. Because again, moving forward and in the day and age we're in, we have to meet people where they are at and we have to enable them to consume stuff in a way that is easy for them. And so Gamma does that really effectively and I do really like it. So an example would be for master plan, we have a lot of people asking about the coaches. You know, are the coaches really that good? Because we have like 19 coaches. And of course the answer is yes, the coaches are absolutely top tier and many of them have sold their own businesses, some of them multiple times. They've got so much cool experience. So I wanted to create a document that had all of this that we could easily share. And so I did that. I stuck it into Manus, gave it the master plan kind of branding, and almost immediately it was able to produce just this beautifully concise, easy to read document, which obviously is quite long, as you can see with all these reviews at the end that in one little link, poof, we can share and it's got calls to action so they can rebook in and do the next step. And it takes what was quite an onerous task of producing a document and getting it designed and then sending them to the PDF, it condenses that down into mere minutes, into a form that is super easy to share. So we're doing a lot more on Gamma next year. We're making more sales assets to support that process us that brings us to win number 10, my final win before we get into the personal reflections, and that is of the podcast. So we started a podcast at the end of this year. And so I know what you're thinking, oh, God, not another podcast. That was kind of my reaction to. My gut reaction to starting a podcast. It's like, the world doesn't need another one of those. But after we thought about it a lot, we thought, you know what? This is going to be a good idea. And so we launched Business Growth Central with the Buttrels, which features Nigel, my father, Cameron, my brother, and of course, me. And we sit down and we talk about business. We talk about a specific problem. And so why we wanted to do this, a couple of reasons. One, we greatly understand the power of building an audience and brand people that know us, like us, and trust us. That is historically something we've not done and not been that good at because we've always been very good at acquiring customers through paid ads. But as we are moving forward and looking to the long term of the business, we want to have a big organic presence. We want to be able to deliver more value and put more stuff out for free so that people know we're the real deal and not some shady charlatans like there are plenty of in our space. We try to do a different format so, you know, there's no guests on this podcast. We're not interviewing people. There's, you know, we don't need another one of those in the world. And we thought we could bring together our three different perspectives and talk about one core business topic each time and just give our own view. Because with this kind of content where it's long, it's unscripted, my view is that you can't fake that. You know, if we're sat there talking about business for 40 minutes per episode and we haven't got 12 or so episodes now, anyone who does watch that, you will just be able to tell that we are just speaking from our own experiences and our own knowledge. And like, you can't. You can't possibly fake that. It's why I quite like doing stuff like this, because even though I put this slideshow together, I'm just talking. And to talk for quite a long time on a subject with no edits and know, like, scripting is just a very hard thing to fake. And so in a place in a world where trust is low, this seems like a good thing to do. So we sit down, we talk about business, and we have a good time. One of the key things I've kind of learned this year as well is that good content is the combination of information but also personality. Because again, you know, there's fucking loads people talk about business, there's loads of people talking about marketing and sales stuff. And so if I just try and talk about business advice and marketing and sales and don't inject any of my personality, then it's just going to fall into the crevasse of boring shit that no one watches. And so my goal is to always be my authentic self on these videos and hopefully you have a good time and if you don't like it, then great, that's fine too. See you later. I'm only joking. And that's a good format. The other key thing is the dreaded C word. Okay. The key is consistency. As we know, organic content is a very long game for many reasons. One you have to like. I think the main reason is you have to do it so many times before you get good enough at it that people actually give a shit about your content at scale. I think that is really the main defining factor. I don't think the algorithm is much of a thing anymore because I've seen plenty of channels blow up after like two or three videos because they are very good. So I believe it is a bit of a case of you just need to do the reps and then eventually you'll get good enough and it will start to kind of take off. And so you have to commit. And we've committed to this with a long term perspective now. And therefore this format, we had to remove the friction because believe me, we had tried to do lots of other content before, but because it was more planned and more scripted, it was just friction. And whenever there's friction when business gets busy, as it always does, the content will be the thing that got dropped. And so this format enables us to just right what we're talking about today. Awesome. Great. Camera's on. Boom. And we're in and we're talking. And so there's no friction, there's no additional planning and it is hopefully very repeatable for us. I'll be eating my words if we don't succeed with this podcast over the next few years. So I'm feeling confident that we will then, so we'll see where that goes. No real tangible business outcomes from this yet. We're playing with the long game with a view that over the next few years we should see an uplift in people that join us because they've seen the podcast. But at the moment there is, there's none of that. Whoo. Right. That rounds off my Big ten lessons, my big ten wins from this year and hopefully it's given you a good insight into some of the stuff that has worked. Worked. I wanted to take this opportunity to also share a few personal wins and reflections from this year as well, because whilst it's all good to talk about business, I'm a big believer in a business is a vessel to enable you to pursue a life that you want to live. And it's very easy to lose sight of that, as I have many times myself before, because a business is a crazy thing and once it grows and you have responsibilities and opportunities, it's very easy to lose sight of why you started the thing in the first place. Lengths. And it's something I have to constantly remind myself of. And for me, that was kind of my theme for this year because actually with entrepreneur circle acquiring my agency and us having to effectively offload those clients and me begin to work internally within a business was like a massive change, a truly colossal change with many highs and lows, I will say, but ultimately loads of highs. But it's just a very big thing to adapt to, to. And so this year has been, you know, a big year for me. And so not more so than I was very lucky a few weeks ago to take a trip to New York with my beautiful now fiance, Helena, where we went to the Brooklyn Bridge and I had the pleasure of getting down on one knee and proposing to her. Thankfully, she said yes. And so we are now officially engaged. And that was a really, you know, serious part of this year because anyone who knows me, I think about things a lot and, you know, I have always thought about the person that you choose to ultimately marry and spend the rest of your life with is such a significant decision and one that can drastically change the course of your life. But I was lucky enough to meet Helena when my business was in its kind of formative stages and, you know, I knew she was the one because she brought out all of the best sides of me and throughout my journey has supported me in every way and enabled me to just get better. And in many ways has highlighted the areas where I was not very good and quite weakened as a person, as a partner, and helped me get better. And so with all of that thinking, it was a no brainer decision that I needed to lock her in. And we're now very much excited to get married and obviously build a life together. You might not know, but she works in our business. I managed to convince her to join my Agency because she was effectively selling private jets before, and I needed some sales help and I thought, come on, please, please come and work me in the agency. And she did. And then since the acquisition, she's joined us here at Entrepreneur Circle as well. And so we, like, live and work together, which is pretty crazy. And I know for most people that's either a boom or bust scenario, but for us, whilst it's not without challenges, it works really well. And so that was a very significant part of this year. I want to talk about alcohol as well. This was something that I have kind of reintroduced into my life this year because, long story short, I went to uni and like most, you know, British teenagers and university students, I drank like a fish and had a great time there and got very fat and unhealthy, but ultimately had many fun memories. But then when I was starting my business and taking it very seriously, I basically didn't drink for like three years. I was the sober person. I was the person that would go out and not drink and have a sparkling water and, you know, be kind of quietly smug the next day when I didn't have a hangover. And that did serve its purpose. But it was on a trip to Florence this year with my now fiance, Helena, where we went to this beautiful, like, vineyard in the middle of the Florencian countryside, which looks like a Renaissance painting, doesn't it? And we had a really nice time. And obviously while we were there, we drank lots of nice wine and the red wine was lovely. And this year I just had a bit of a shift in my thinking. And whilst I totally see the benefits in not drinking and how additionally productive you are, especially on the weekends, what I had started to feel over the three years when I've been completely sober was a little bit of a detachment between myself, quite a lot of my friends, and then even within the business, you know, because my colleagues would go out for drinks and stuff and after a while, if you're not drinking, they're going to the pub and stuff. You kind of like you do you go or you go for a little bit, because then if you're not drinking, you kind of don't want to be there and, you know, it's a point of friction. And so I sacrificed a lot of, I would say, social media gatherings just so I could keep up with my not drinking. Because again, I know some people are totally cool with not drinking. I, like, could do it, but, you know, I would rather not be around people drinking if I'm not drinking. Personally, I Just made a big shift there and I decided, you know what, under the right conditions, I'm gonna start drinking again. And it worked very well. And I've developed a real taste for red wine. And so if you've ever heard of Vivino, Vivino is a great app because I know nothing about wine, but Vivino uses AI to scan a bottle of wine and tell you what the rating is. And so I've started scanning and I'm also Now officially the 2732 highest ranked wine rater in Great Britain. Fun fact, hoping to get top 1000 next year. Although I've got a long way and a lot of steep competition to go. But needless to say, my kind of point here and why I wanted to bring this up was I see a lot of especially young people and young entrepreneurs now really locking in and going full monk mode and blocking out every single possible vice ever. And they're like pursuing their business. And on one hand I totally get it because I did that for quite a long period of time. But on the other hand, maybe it's because I'm nearly 30, believe it or not, and I'm starting to have some wise old thoughts, but like, what the fuck is the whole point of building a business? It's to do cool stuff. And if actually having a few glasses of wine when you're in Florence or actually going out with your mates you haven't seen in a while and having a couple of pints to loosen up, like, yes, that is the whole purpose. So I don't drink heavily, but I do now drink. And especially even with my teammates and my colleagues now I do enjoy going out for a drink with them and catching up because we build a better relationship, we have fun, we blow off some steam. And it's something I've welcomed back into my life, you know, moderately. I'm not going too crazy. Next thing is training. So my training has taken a massive shift this year. I mean, you be the judge of how it's panning out, but I have always been into the gym and really got into biohacking and all that kind of stuff and had a very strict routine for a very long time. And this year it's totally changed. So for a long time I would go to the gym and lift weights like six times a week and that was fine, but honestly, it was a bit, bit brutal, a bit too much. And so this year at Entrepreneur Circle, we have a four day work week. So we work Monday to Thursday and we work from 8am to 6pm so it's kind of a longer, slightly longer day. And as a result, my routine throughout those days has kind of changed because whilst we have a little gym here and sometimes I'll get in there, it's quite hard to get in the gym at the right times because other people are in there, gets booked up, whatever. So I have found myself not really being able to go to the gym Monday through Thursday. I'm not being able to choosing not to because work is so busy, and then getting my sessions in on a Friday, Saturday and Sunday. And so as a result, I massively reduced my gym frequency, going from six times a week to three times a week, so that 50% drop. But I have massively increased the intensity because you bet, after four rest days in a row, when you go into the gym, I am pumped up and ready to go. And funnily enough, I don't know if this is the thing, I'm not a health guy time, but I've had some of the best results of my training career by actually training less and just doing it slightly higher intensity. So take from that what you will, it's brought me back a lot of time. Interesting little lesson, then countered by croissants. So anyone who knows me knows one of my biggest vices in life is the humble croissant. And so, yes, I literally do mean croissants. And so I love croissants. I'm doubling down on croissants in 2026 and there's a great reason why I eat generally a pretty healthy diet Monday through Thursday in the office, and then at the weekend, I love to indulge. I will have one of these types of croissants on Friday and on Saturday and probably on Sunday as well. And, you know, it's definitely not great for the abs, but it doesn't have that much impact, to be honest. But the reason why I do this is I just fucking love this. I love the anticipation of my croissants at the weekend. And the indulgent. The sweet treat is what I call a morale booster because I have learned again over many years of trying different routines and of different levels of intensities, the best routine is the one that you can stick with for the longest period of time. And you've got to inject a beautiful, sweet treat to keep the morale high and to keep the cravings at bay. So you can then tackle the week with, you know, Monday to Thursday, nice, intense, healthy, then boom, relax for the weekend. For me, that's just something that has worked very well. So we're retaining the croissants next year. This has been a goddamn game changer for me. Whisper Flow. So Whisper Flow is just an app because I used to love dictating, so especially when ChatGPT first came about, I started dictating loads of my MacBook and even writing emails and whatsapping people. I just dictate all the time through the standard Apple dictation. But anyone who's used the standard Apple dictation will know that it's not that good. Especially when I don't know if you guys think I have an accent. To me my voice sounds normal, but to Apple Computer it picks up some pretty random words. Enter Whisper Flow. Whisper Flow is like AI powered dictation. So what it does is at any point you can just press a button, speak, and it runs that quickly through an AI engine, formats it properly and then gives you the text output so you can write stuff so quick because you just speak it. But it's beautiful because it actually gets it right. And so I love Whisper Flow. I have it on my MacBook and on my phone, as you can see, I'm on an 18 week streak. I speak at 160 words per minute, which is way faster than I could type. And it's just, it's just so good. Importantly, it has a dictionary so you can add in words. So for example, if I say would dictate Genie, AI, every dictation software will normally pull in the name, gene and something else and just get it totally wrong. But the dictionary enables you to put in common words that you say and therefore it improves the accuracy over time. It's just, it's brilliant. So highly recommend that because now a lot of my idea creation, writing ad scripts, whatever it is, I'm just speaking out loud. Speaking of speaking Epiphany. So this got shared in a little networking group that I have shout out to Noel and Ollie from the entrepreneurs dinner group. Epiphany got shared in there and this is great. Our brains are tremendous for having ideas, but pretty terrible for not storing them. We've all had it. You had a great idea in the shower, then you get out and then you've forgotten it. Well, epiphany is designed to enable you to store losing these ideas and actually put them to work. And again, it's a genius little app idea. So epiphany exists on your phone, but importantly, it's on the old Apple watch. And so I have a little shortcut here to Epiphany and if I press it, it Starts voice recording. And I can speak into my Apple watch now. But the clever thing is that effectively, you set up a series of actions and so on mine, I have email Charlotte, who's my executive assistant, or email myself. And so whenever I'm like, oh, I need Charlotte to do this, Bing. Charlotte, don't forget to pick up some water and dog food from the co op this morning. Boom. Email sent. Now that's been sent to her. In the same vein, if I'm in my little sauna at home and I have a genius idea. Boom. Epiphany. Okay, remember to write out a script for this epic video idea on duh, duh, duh, duh. And then I email it to myself, and now it's in my inbox. The idea is captured, it is stored, and I haven't lost it because again, my beautiful entrepreneurs out there, you will know that you are filled with amazing ideas that will come at you in random times. And this helps you capture them and ultimately action them. So we love Epiphany. That's been a great little breakthrough. And then finally, I felt really stupid when I came across this question this year. There's no other way about it. It's a classic case of when you just go through life and you get caught up in life and you just forget that you can do things like this. And so this question is, what can I do to make my life better? What can I do to make my life better? A really simple question, but I have now began the practice of every week. Normally at the weekend when I'm eating one of those croissants, I think, what could I do, like right now to just make my life better? Because there's so many things, big things for me this year have been we've moved to this little temporary flat whilst we're trying to buy a house. And so we've now finally got a cleaner to come and make it all clean, which is obviously baseline thing to do. Number one, getting someone to take care of all of your laundry every week. I. It doesn't cost that much, but that's amazing. We've started getting all of our food prepped and delivered to us at the start of the week. So Monday through Thursday, we don't have to cook, don't have to clean up, don't have to do anything. Started getting our hairdresser to come to the office rather than us having to go to the hairdresser. Started to get a nice lady to come and give us a massage on a Sunday. Again, really doesn't Cost that much. All these little things that actually make life so much better. Behind me, behind my desk, I have a fridge. And that fridge is filled to the brim with sparkling water and these coconut waters, because these coconut waters, let me tell you, that is in a metal can right there. And when that sucker has been chilled, oh my God, I can't tell you the level of joy I have every day at lunchtime when I crack into an ice cold coconut water and we just, it's just there. And so all of these things on the surface sound almost dumb and almost silly, but when you actually just think, okay, how can I improve my life and then do it, life gets exponentially better. Because it's so easy to just get caught in the rut of life and you're just keeping the wheels going and you don't stop and go, hold on a second, how do I actually make life better? Because especially when you're running a business, it's going to get fucking hard. You're going to go through tough times, you're going to go through times when you, you want to quit it. But if we're actually systematically making our life better along the way, if your life is better and you're feeling better, your business is going to be better. So think of it as a wise investment. And plus, life is too short to not be happy and to not do these things. So think, what can you do? And then actually start doing it. So those are my personal reflections for this year. And this brings me to my final section. The key focuses that we are taking into 2026. So the first one should be very obvious is live webinars. We are going to do loads more of them for Master Plan for genie, for every part of our business because they work so damn well in the current state of the world. So you'll see a lot more of that from us. We're then also going to aggressively do more of what's working because we have fallen victims to this in the past where we did something, it worked phenomenally and then instead of doing it again, we did something else. And that was stupid. So we are now, when something works, we are going to do 10 times more of it until it stops working. And only when it stops working do we then even think about doing something else. Because trust me, in marketing and sales, it's quite hard to find stuff that works. So when it does, you need to milk it for everything you've got. Long form YouTube, as evidenced by today in our inaugural livestream. So thank you to everybody watching God Bless you. But you're going to be seeing a lot more long form YouTube videos. The podcast is going to be staying and we are going to be hitting that hard shit ton of video ads. As I said, we're building that creative engine because I like video ads, because I believe the prospect gets more context from a video ad because they see you and they hear you. And so we're doubling down on that more killer sales assets. We want to arm our sales team with everything they possibly could need to aid the sales. That doesn't become a blocker and that doesn't harm our close rates. We are going big on integrating AI into every part of our business and I promise all my EC folk, you're going to see some crazy things next year with what we're doing with AI. A really big thing that I'm very hot on is using custom AIs to aid consumption. And this is what we're doing a lot of now is building custom AI. Like I have an AI version of me that people in my secret vault get access to and it's trained on all of my content, all of our internal playbooks on specifically how we do everything. And when you interface with it, it's not like ChatGPT, it's like specifically on that knowledge base. So it's kind of like you're talking to me and it's crazy because you can actually call it and it sounds like me as well. It's pretty, pretty crazy. But that is perfect because yes, I can create content and show you how to do something, but in a business there's so much nuance and the custom AI, I can give it the frameworks and the playbooks and now it can use its brain to apply it to your business so you can greatly increase the consumption of your stuff, which leads people to get results faster, which makes them happier by using this kind of stuff. So we're big on this in 2026. And then of course community and in real life events, we are doubling down on these. In the AI world that's coming at us, we are going to be steering clear by putting a lot of effort into our community and doing stuff in real life because you just can't replicate it. So, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining me on this epic adventure. I hope you enjoyed it and found some useful little nuggets. Wishing you a very merry Christmas, peace and love. I've been. Elliot, you've been amazing. Signing off. Bye. It. It's, It's. Sa.