How to Prosper During Every Economic Crisis with Daniel Priestley

Hi, welcome back to another episode here. My name is Eric Edneads, I'm your host and I'm very excited as I always am when I bring people onto the show. But today I'm particularly excited to be bringing to you guys a really good friend of mine, Daniel Priestley. And I want you to know that it is actually people like Daniel Priestley that inspired me to want to create this show in the first place for a number of reasons. The one is this, there are a number of people in my life where I sit and have conversations with them and afterward I think, wow, people could have benefited from eavesdropping on this conversation. And Daniel is definitely one of the people that I've had many conversations like that over the years with. And so now here we have the opportunity for you to eavesdrop in on the conversation. The other reason is that I'm excited to have Daniel here is Daniel. He's got a first rate mind and he sees patterns and he watches what happens with history, with the economics. And so as a consequence of that, I think he's going to give us some really interesting insights into entrepreneurship and how to evolve and reinvent ourselves during this time. Daniel's the developer of the phenomenally successful and effective Key Person of Influence program. He's a multi best selling author of a number of books including Oversubscribed and just genuinely, he's a really good guy. Daniel, thank you so much for being here.

I'm so really, really thrilled to be on your show. When you sent through the invitation, I was like, it was just the highlight of, total highlight of my day. It was really cool.

I appreciate it. I love that you dressed up and shaved for it too. Oh wait, that was a different show. I'm like, this is the, this is the lockdown.

This is my lockdown uniform.

I like it, I like it. It's all good. It's all good. So let's jump in with a couple of things here. You posted something the other day that's very in line with stuff I've seen you speak about in the conversations you and I've had in the past. And you talked about recession really being a time of reinvention. So maybe let's give a little overview of what you mean by that.

Yeah. So there tends to be two phases to a recession, which is the reset and the reinvention. So you end up with a shock, some sort of a shock to the economy. And what happens after that is there's a typically a reset phase followed by a reinvention. Phase where people reinvent themselves. Now, for big companies, the FTSE 100 or the S&P 500, the reset phase can last something like 18 months. If you look at the big recession in early 2000, it was about two years from top to bottom. If you look at the 2008 recession, the global financial crisis, we're actually kind of the high was November 2007 and it went right down for about 18 months. It was a big downward spike. So the reset phase is all about cutting back to original first principles or core concepts, getting back to your highest value, rediscovering vision, mission and values, cutting away stuff that's not aligned to values. If I speak quite plainly for large corporate world, the reset is offloading people, offloading jobs, cutting back on costs, cutting non core businesses. And then the reinvention phase is essentially innovating, coming up with new ideas, thinking about the economy or the world in a different way. And there's only a small number of events that have this kind of an impact. 911 was one of them. Life was never the same after 9 11. There was before 911 and then after 9 11. You know, a lot of what we think of is now just normal. Part of the vernacular of, you know, sort of terror, war on terror, surveillance, all of that sort of stuff was post 911 and the global financial crisis. The way we feel about our financial institutions and the way we have a distrust and the bailout and all of that kind of stuff came in because of that. So this is, you know, we're living through a historic event. This is going to be on the same kind of scale as a massive global reset, which will then require a massive global reinvention.

Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about like, you know what, all of that stuff's great at a high level, to understand what's going on at a high level. And then there's the practical realities of. Some people right now are thinking that's the end of the world economically and all that kind of stuff. In the meanwhile, Papa John's just advertised that they're trying to hire 20,000 drivers right now. Some industries are clearly going to go into a very strong reset mode in a downsizing kind of capacity. But there are many businesses, like Zoom for example, that are going to be thriving during these times. A lot of your clients, like through key person of influence are very similar to ours. You're talking about the small to medium sized business owner or the creator or the, or the industry thought leader or what have you. They have a Business that is maybe not a big corporate. And they're going to be facing some of those same things. What I'm curious about from your perspective is, okay, look, when the last big recession hit, which is not far off of when we first kind of met, not long after that, I think the fact is it didn't really affect me at all. I had just sold my business. I was largely in cash. I had some money in the stock market. I had taken a lot of it out to buy a house. And you know, it hit and it wasn't that big a deal. I watched everybody around panicking. And so on this time around 15 full time staff, live event calendar, absolutely full. It's a whole different world out there. So talk to me about what you're telling your clients at this point. Like what are some of the emergency steps they can take to not only survive, but let's be really clear, and I think you and I are, if I think about the people that are way past wanting to survive this, that are truly seeing the opportunity, wanting to thrive, what are some of the sort of like immediate steps that they would take?

Can I stay? Not high level, but mid level. And we'll get our way down into grassroots. So the mid level is this. In the late 2010s, the FTSE 100 was going like that. At the same time the economy was flat. And what that basically means is that large companies are taking opportunities from small companies, right? They've run out of economic growth, so they're competing in the economy. There's not alchemy, there's competition going on. And when big companies are growing at 7 or 8 or 9% and the economy is only growing like this, it means that. Let me talk in really practical terms. I run business accelerators. And one thing that really frustrated me in 2018 and 19 is every bank started running a business accelerator. Every large consulting firm, every accounting firm started running a business accelerator. And they're all doing this kind of like, you know, they're just flooding the market with all these training programs. It's not their core business, it's not something that they wrote that they kind of intend to be. And it's just an opportunistic thing that they think they should do. One of them does it and then they all do it and all this sort of stuff. And actually, here's the mental picture I love to put in people's heads. Imagine the big companies, they've got this cookie jar or biscuit tin if you're in the UK and they're Putting all the biscuits into the biscuit tin and they put the big ones in first. And then they start putting all the other biscuits in the biscuit tin. And actually they've locked up a lot of the economy in those big companies. Along comes an event like this, shakes up that biscuit tin and tips it out on the table. The big companies, the first thing they do is they go straight back to their core business. If you're kpmg, you go back to auditing and accounting for the biggest 500 companies in the economy, you forget everything else, you cut away everything that's not core business and you protect the core business. And what happens is that 10 million, 20 million, $5 million $100 million business opportunities get left on the table for entrepreneurs to pick up if they want to. I know for you, last recession, you picked up an incredible film and television business, media business, special effects business that was jettisoned because it wasn't part of the core business. They jettisoned this incredible business. And that's a classic example of what big companies do. It's how they think. They just simply say, what is the bulk of our revenue? What makes 80% of our revenue? Everything else goes. And that's what they're doing in the reset. Now, what that does is it creates enormous opportunities for entrepreneurs to pick up, whether through competition, innovation, or actually acquisition, to pick up huge chunks of multimillion dollar parts of the business of the economy that's now floating around out there without a home. And it's an amazing opportunity for entrepreneurs. If you're entrepreneurial, this is actually heaven, because when the biggest companies in the economy going like that, unless the economy is growing at the same pace, you're actually looking at the big companies taking opportunities from everyone else. That's just kind of the truth of it. So now everything's up for grabs. There's another couple of things that are really exciting and relevant about that idea in 2008. 9. I bet you, I bet you a lot that Vodafone or any of the big telecommunications companies, they had a little voip division where they would have been experimenting with a hundred engineers working on something that looks like WhatsApp. And they would have been testing it, but it didn't make any money, it didn't pay anyone's payroll. So Vodafone would have gone, Forget about that VoIP thing, forget about that, like, app phone idea that we've got. We don't know how the hell that would make any money. So we're just going to scrap that and let's imagine a big company like Vodafone, they just cut off all of that and they go back to their core business of traditional telecommunications. Well, guess What? They missed WhatsApp. That was a $19 billion sale and it is massively transformed the nature of telecommunications in a decade. No one even thinks about long distance phone calls costing anything. You expect to pay more for a local phone call than an international call now. And that is the type of thing that happens during these events or post these events. And I'm going to make a prediction. And the prediction is the very first company that goes from zero to a trillion dollar valuation will happen this decade. It won't have even been started yet, or it'll have only been started this month. Somewhere in the 2000s, there will be a startup and it will by the end of the 2020s, by 2030, it will be tipping a trillion dollar valuation. And that is how much wealth creation happens when you have these kind of events. We've got 5G coming into the marketplace, we've got new technology, Internet of Things, AI, machine learning. All of that's coming in to disrupt everything. We've just had the most incredible disruption event. Someone somewhere out there in the world right now is sitting there at their home with three months on their hands without a job to start coding, to start playing, to start researching, to start connecting the dots. And there are, there's going to be a dozen multibillion dollar companies that start. There's going to be hundreds of hundred million dollar companies that start. There'll be thousands or tens of thousands of multimillion dollar companies that start. There is going to be a wave of entrepreneurship that is caused by this reset moment that we've just experienced.

You know, it's funny, I mean, I've considered myself an entrepreneur largely since I was about nine, I guess. But one of the things that's always amazed me as I've traveled around the world speaking about business is that one of the key differences between somebody who finds their way out into the world of entrepreneurship and somebody who chooses to take a job is there. They say, well, I enjoy the security of it. And I'm always like, wow, that's an illusion. You know, it really is an illusion. And unfortunately a lot of people are seeing that right now. I imagine we're going to see massive furloughs in the airline industry. We're going to see all kinds of, that kind of stuff happening at the moment, showing us that being employed by somebody else is not necessarily great security, but the great news about that is that that false security has imprisoned a lot of people in a time for money employee relationship when their creativity really could have been inspired to do something really big. I, I know that my brother, for example, brilliant mind, he created Twitter long before there was Twitter. But you know, he had a job, like really, he created microblogging long before there was Twitter. And I remember him doing this, you know, like, why are you telling me you're shopping? You know, like you're shopping at the store right now. Like, what's this microblogging thing? But the thing is, I think a lot of times in his life he's been in a place where he's had a job and he's got kids to take care of and what have you. And all of a sudden now I think, and he's still working quite hard, but all of a sudden now I think he's looking at it differently, like, wow, this is a time for creation, this is a time for reinvention. And I really, I love the way you put that. It's powerful.

Something is happening right now that has never happened before, which is millions of employees across the UK and probably everywhere else in the world as well, but millions of employees across the suddenly have two and a half thousand a month coming in for the next three months and nothing to do. And they can't even leave the house. So they can't go get drunk, they can't go hang out in a restaurant, they can't go walk around the park. They got to sit around thinking.

And there's only so much stuff on Netflix. You got to get bored.

Eventually there's going to be plenty of people who binge watch Netflix. I'm pretty sure that's definitely going to happen. But there's going to be some people who are sitting there going, maybe now's the moment to start my startup. Maybe now's the moment to connect with a small team online and find out who's passionate about this thing that I geek out on all the time. Yeah. You know, there's this whole other world that you and I aren't really connected into much and like there's a couple of places that I doubt you spend much time. I don't spend any time. But like there's World of Warcraft and there's Minecraft and right now there are 20 year olds, 18, 19 year olds who are building these incredible structures in communities on these virtual worlds. There's also TikTok incredible media people. Alright, so one of the things TikTok is doing. It's educating a billion young people how to edit, how to make engaging content, how to create something that goes viral in a good way. So we are about to have this wave of young people who are very media savvy. They know how to communicate powerfully, very community like, they form teams online just naturally, because that's what they been doing. And now thousands, millions of people with time on their hands, enough money to survive, the whole world's in lockdown. This is going to be one hell of a magical time. The other side of this is this is going to produce scientists. You know, a lot of scientists are going to do their research during this period of time. We're going to have a scientific boom because people are going to be inspired to get into medicine and biology, and they're going to see that the hero, and not the hedge fund managers and the Instagram influencers who can take a photo next to a jet, the heroes are actually going to be the people who stepped up to this challenge, and that's going to cause a scientific boom. You're also going to see people sitting there going, wow, we now have the climate science that we need. We're going to be able to actually see what happens when you ground most of the airplanes.

Yeah.

I personally cannot believe how clean the air is. And I've got birds, beautiful birds coming and nesting in my garden. And I've never seen these beautiful birds before. And it's only been like a week. And we've got bugs that are flying up in the air, which never are there and silent. You can hear the birds chirping at night. There's different. You know, nature is actually behaving differently already, and we're going to be able to measure that. And maybe that's going to be the catalyst for addressing some of our environmental issues as well. So there's going to be phenomenal reinvention off the back of this.

You know, I asked. I had a big group of people on a live call with me a couple days ago, and I asked them, you know, if any of them are having fun. And, you know, and they're all like, well, yeah. And I said, any of you feel guilty about having fun? Yeah. And, you know, they feel guilty about it because, you know, we're so. It's socially responsible to be serious right now and socially responsible to be afraid.

And.

And I'm like, you know, no, that's not socially responsive at all. Like, this is just a big adventure and some incredible life change can be facilitated right now. I think on the last show I was doing, I came up with this crazy, you know, this sort of crazy metaphor, but I was like, I think everybody should be in their mind designing their Corvid 19 montage. And what I mean by that is that you, you know, you remember Rocky, he's got to go fight the, you know, Drago and. But we don't have six months to watch him train. So they make a montage. Right. You know, he's pulling the thing and he can't pull it at first, but then he can pull it a little further, then he can pull it, and he does the whole thing. And I'm saying, I think everybody should start creating their Corvid 19 montage of how they lived this next few weeks, months.

How they put on three kilos.

No, how to take them off or put them on the right way up top with the. But the fact is that montage can include things like working out and eating well and. But also learning to code, reading books, and building a business. I really love that, your clarity on why those opportunities are going to be there. Because they are.

Yeah, they really will. And so the head start that entrepreneurs have in this is that big companies are going to take 18 months to two years to reset. It's going to happen in waves for those big companies. Stock market, then making layoffs, then collapses and M and A and all that sort of stuff. The entrepreneurs have a head start. And the entrepreneurs. In fact, I ran a poll today on one of my groups, and 80% of people actually explained the concept. Are you in reset? Which means that you're dealing with a world of crap. You're trying to cut things out. You're trying to find the bottom. You're trying to find where you need. You know, you're dealing with frustration and panic. Or are you in reinvention? You hit rock bottom now. You're actually creative, You've got clarity of thought, your heart's open, your intuition is clean, your mindset is broad. Which way are you feeling? And of my entrepreneur community, I'd say 80% are in reinvention mode already. They're actually. Their mind is open, their heart is open, their gut is tuned in, and they're ready to go. And that's how you know you're in. That's how you know you're ready for reinvention. Yeah, the ideas come flowing naturally, and you don't have this closed, fearful heart. You kind of have this open emotion. And then you have this kind of, like, intuition about what would be good timing and all that. So when I explained it to my community, they just immediately stepped up and said, yeah, we're ready to reinvent. And then we're going through a set of steps as to how to reinvent. So there's actually a reinvention set of steps. Broadly speaking, entrepreneurs, you essentially have to come up with a concept and a value proposition. And then you have to become an influencer, run some campaigns, formalize some digital assets, and then focus on developing a team that gets better every quarter. And it's like we've got the steps all nicely mapped out, and we're just going through and we're saying, okay, let's start with the concept and the value proposition. And we're discussing what makes a good concept, what makes a good value proposition. We're just moving through those steps. And it's wonderful because it's kind of like we were all at different levels in business, but now we're all starting from the start, same place. And it's wonderful. We're all reinventing our businesses at the same time.

And there are many opportunities to do that. You know, there's suddenly demand in areas where there wasn't demand before. The demand for, for example, online education is bigger than it's ever been before. Every kid is being taught online at the moment, and obviously that's going to begin to happen. Like, we're going to see a lot more of that type of demand as this stretches out for time. We don't know how long this is going to last. But then, even after it's done, people will think differently and there will be different demands and different opportunities. And I love the thinking. You know, corporates will scale. It'll take them time to rejig and what have you. And those of us that are nimble and quick and have the right people in our networks that can make stuff happen. Real, real opportunity. Let's just talk about people in reset for a moment. You got your business owner, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 12 employees, let's say in that category, their business is kind of falling off a cliff right now. There's a lot of uncertainty for them. What's your thoughts for them in terms of, okay, what do they need to do in the next two weeks? And then let's call it a disaster prevention mode. And then how do they start evaluating what opportunities they can go after?

Yeah. So let's be really real. You need to protect your business from going under so that you have a business to go forward with, or you. Either that or you have to make the decision and say, it's going under. So I'm going to end it and end it as best I can. There's a little basic rule of thumb that I have around entrepreneurial team sizes and it's based on the British military, which has got a 400 year track record of HR experiments. And basically the British military teams people up in team sizes of 2, 4, 8 and then 36. So this is called a scout team, which is 2, a fire team which is 4, a section which is 8, or a platoon which is 36. And one of the things that I encourage entrepreneurs, bigger entrepreneurs, when I'm talking to entrepreneurs who are actually got a bigger size business, is you need to drop down a team size. If you're anywhere under 36, you probably need to be 8. If you're somewhere around 8 or 9 or 10, you might need to be 4. If you're 4 or 5, you might need to be 2. And it could be temporary, it could be that you do that for, for three months, you furlough the staff, you come up with a strategy where you absolutely minimize, you minimize cost. But it's a common thing that I question my entrepreneurs on, which is what does the business look like at the next team size down? So if we said we're going to drop from a platoon down to a section, who is your pick of eight and then who do you put on the bench and bring them back when the time is right. So that's one of the things. The next thing is you want to go looking for anything that does not impact the customer experience at all. So for example, if you've got offices, cancel, it doesn't impact if customers don't come into your offices. And that's not a big part of the experience. Even though you love your offices and you spent that time painting them and decorating them and all that sort of stuff, shelve it. They got to go and you got to make a few hard decisions in order to reset. You do have to make some hard decisions. If ever you've known a friend who goes through a divorce, they do that thing where they're like still kind of seeing each other and then they're like kind of living together and not. And then they're kind of we're going to get back together and then we're not going to get back together and that whole period of time eventually is wasted and you, and eventually the inevitable happens and you know, you've kind of some, you wasted three years. And then if sometimes you meet someone who goes, you know, we've made the decision, we're divorcing, we're moving into separate houses, we're splitting things up, we're behaving like adults and we're just going our separate ways now. And you know that both of those people are probably on a fast track to a more healthy future. So, you know, in many ways, if you do a bit of a hard reset and you just get back to the core value, the really, this is what's important. This is so close to our vision and our mission and our values and our purpose. And there's no fluff on it, there's no fat on it. We are so close to the original intention of this business, it's a joke. And then as soon as you cut right back to that vision, mission, values and core promise of the business and everything else that's not that. There's this great saying by Michelangelo which is, I look at a block of marble and I see the angel inside and I carve away anything that's not the angel. And it's like I look at my business and I see the original intention, the vision, mission, values, and I carve away anything that's not that and that's the reset. And it's weird because there's so much anguish about it. And as soon as it's done, it's like an energetic shift like that. Suddenly that, that afternoon you go, oh, wow, just had a game changing idea. I've just thought about how the product could reinvent, like the speed at which you move into reinvention if you reset properly. It's fast, it's incredible. And you don't have to, it doesn't have to take weeks or months. It can be some difficult decisions and then you're on the way.

We've really seen that if I use your example. So, you know, we run a number of businesses, you know, business freedom, doing business education, wildfit doing, you know, food psychology and nutritional coaching and speaker nation training, speaking and that kind of stuff. So we look at each of those businesses and take a look at like, like what is the angel inside? Cause frankly, there is fluff around the outsides of them. And so what is the fluff that needs to be carved away? And one of the things we took a look at is, well, if we really get down to what our core assets are, it's IP and capability and an ability to transform people, we've got that capability. Our programs are among the highest rated in any of their classes. We're good at it. But then we have to take a Look and go, well, yeah, but nobody wants to get on a plane anymore, and everybody's locked in their houses. So we have to cut away outside, cut the rock away. And of course, you know, full live event schedule booked up, and boom, that business just drops off a cliff.

Right?

But immediately we start to look at internally what's still happening. And so one of the changes that I would suggest any entrepreneur makes right now is where they used to be looking at their reports monthly, they should be looking at them daily. Things will be changing more rapidly. So we started looking at reports daily. And one thing that happened was we were concerned. You know, as people get financially concerned, maybe they stop buying stuff. Maybe even the digital business falls off a cliff. Who knows? But. But, Daniel, people kept buying Wildfit. They kept looking for help and coaching. Guess why? Because they're home right now and they're dealing with food, and they want to. They don't want to get fat while they're sitting at home. And they want to change things. And so they're still. And I was like, oh, that's not good. No, it's still steaming along. Thank God. Some years ago, we decided to digitize that program and not make it a personal coaching program like it started. And, you know, we've had similar things happen with, you know, where we moved some of our speaking training online and fully sold out one of our workshops in a rejig that took a week.

Right.

It was just one of these things where we were going to be doing a promotion anyway, and we took this product that we were releasing in 2021, boom. Brought it forward. Boom. Sold out in a week, just last week. So in some areas of our business, we're thriving.

That's a very fluid reset, reinvent. You literally just went, you know what? We're not going to cling. We're not going to cling to live events. I mean, part of the beauty of this particular event is that they've, like, the government's made the decision for you. It's like, Eric, you're not getting on the plane. You're not going to the event. In other situations, you might still have it in the back of your head. Maybe I should go. Maybe I should test it. See, you know, so it's kind of like, kind of cool. But there's certain things that you now can't do. So it forces you into a real, real hard reset, reinvent phase.

You know, there's a metaphor. You know, I spent a lot of time working in the. In the film production industry, and you Know, we got to work on some pretty cool movies. Avatar, Pirates of the Caribbean, and that kind of stuff. And consequently, we learned a lot about, you know, old stories about movies and stuff. And one of my favorite examples is the contrast between Spielberg making the movie Jaws and George Lucas making the middle three Star wars movies. When Steven Spielberg was making Jaws, they had decided they designed this, like, big mechanical shark, and this mechanical shark was going to eat people, and it was going to be, you know, horrible and what have you. But then they couldn't get the shark to work, so they had to start, like. And the actors were there and the crew was there, and they couldn't get. They couldn't get things to work. And so now they're like, well, we got to shoot this scene anyway, but we don't have the shark. Okay, well, why don't we shoot from the shark's perspective? And so now they do that shot, the famous one coming up under the female diver. And so you don't see the shark. You are the shark. And then they're like. They continue going, damn, shark. Still doesn't work. Well, we need the shark in this scene. I know what we can do. They harpoon the shark with floating barrels so the barrels can whip around outside. No shark, just the barrels. Which, by the way, is just a blatant stealing of the clock inside the crocodile in Peter Pan.

Right.

And so now there's the shark, and they finally get the shark to work at the end. At the end. And you know what? I want to say, in as much as I think that film was an ecological disaster and it was a terrible film in terms of the impact it had on the ecology. If we're simply talking about the economics of it and the quality of the experience, I believe had the shark been working from the beginning, it would have been a shitty B movie because the shark wasn't working. It drove them into creativity. It drove them into having to think. And same thing. Lucas went off and did Star Wars. The studio didn't want to do it. They're making sound effects like opening ovens. Oh, that'll work. But then when he came to make the next three movies, he had an unlimited budget.

Unlimited budget.

He would walk into our studio. It was just before I bought it, but he'd walk in the studio, and all the technicians told me this. They'd have a set they're building, and he'd walk in with unlimited budget and go, I don't like that. I don't like that. I don't like that. And cost a Quarter of a million dollars in eight minutes and make three unbelievably lackluster movies because he had no constraint. This is the time of constraint which is going to make us creative.

Yeah, it's constraints that build creativity. You know, one of my friends who's a billionaire, he's one of the very few billionaires who's had massive exit without any investment whatsoever. 1.3 billion exit, no other investors, just him and his brother. And because he was born in the wrong part of India and because he had the wrong kind of parents in India, there wasn't even a chance of getting funding. So they just had to figure shit out. And they had to come up with ways of getting people engaged and they had to come up with competitions rather than marketing campaigns. And, you know, they had to do all this kind of wild stuff. And because of the constraints, it forced creativity into the team week in, week out. And then because they were the most finely tuned company, they just exploded. And he ended up, he ended up selling that company. He's a billionaire. Him and his brother are billionaires. And they just literally, he said, had we got investment, there's no way we would have gotten so creative. Yeah.

All right. Now we're talking about some very big high concept things like, you know, starting a trillion dollar company or being a billionaire. And all that stuff's kind of fun. You know, it's. It's kind of fun. But what we're really also talking about is the people that are running their nice little quarter of a million dollar a year business or their one or two or three million dollar year business. And I think that I really like the discussion we've had around what they can do to kind of start to protect themselves. Let's talk about this. What would you suggest for opportunity spotting? How do they activate themselves and their team? Identifying the angel in the rock? And I'll give you my answer right now for how it drove for us and why we've been so nimble. We just listen to our clients a lot. Like when we started telling our clients that this event might get canceled, they're like, yeah, but we still want the education. So we're like, oh, all right. So we have to come up another way. What are some of the maybe sources of inspiration techniques that you might ask small business owners to band together and do with each other to help them find the right opportunity?

I'll give you some strange opportunity. I'll give you some strange answers to this. The first thing is that you need to acknowledge this idea that you're already standing on a mountain of value and there is a mountain underneath you. Of stories, case studies, insights, existing networks, customers, clients, product ideas. Already that is the mountain of value that you're standing on. As you know, when you're standing on a real life mountain and you look out into around you, you can see everything except the mountain. So you cannot. You can, you know, the mountain below you looks like dirt. It looks pretty impressive from a distance, but it looks like dirt up close. And here's the thing about your own story. Your own story looks like dirt up close and it's really impressive from a distance. And one of the things that I see people do at this particular moment is they think when they hear the word opportunity spotting, they go, oh, I got to become an Amazon drop shipper. I got to get into E learning modules, I got to, I got to start doing machine learning, AI, etc, etc, etc. So I'm going to go run off and detune from my own mountain of value and tune into something that I know nothing about. And here's the thing, if you're going to go off and do something that you currently know nothing about, you are at the back of the queue. You are 2 million thin line to the front. And that is not going to change anytime soon. So if the only option for opportunity spotting is to look really closely at your own story and your own circumstances, anything that is emotional, whether at high or low, that's a big part of your story. Whether it be painful, anything painful, there's valuable IP in pain, anything pleasurable, there's valuable IP and pleasure, anything you've achieved and won an award for, there's IP that went into that, anything you're proud of, anything you're ashamed of, there's valuable IP lying all around, all of that stuff. So you've got to go digging into your own mountain of value and you got to really pay attention. Don't let the reptile or the monkey brain take over at this moment and start buying dumb shit. Because everyone's buying dumb shit all the time. Right now I'm seeing a thousand people signing on for how to. How to sell pink kettles on Amazon. And it's like, you're not gonna make. You're not gonna make.

That's about as useful as the extra toilet paper.

Like it's already too late. It's a moving bus. Like by the time you know, it's just never going to happen. So the first opportunity spotting is in your heart and your head and your gut and your story and your past and in your phone and in your email messages and in the stuff that you can write. One of the best things you can possibly do is start writing. Write blogs, write articles, write about what you know. Write down your list of 7 mistakes not to make. Write down your list of 5amazing things that speed up results regarding to X. Go Mining for your insights and your intellectual property and go and reconnect with the most high value people in your network that you've lost touch with and you haven't reached out to them and you've been a bit of a jerk and you've distanced yourself, maybe not deliberately, but accidentally reconnect with those people. That's your mountain of value. Someone that you were great friends with years ago and you just haven't spoken. Reach out to them, you know, talk to that person who might mentor you. But just please. The number one thing that I say to people is, it's not. There's nothing out. There's nothing going on out there. There's no opportunity out there at all that's anywhere near as good as what's happening right under your nose.

You know, I really like that so much because what I often see people doing is exactly the opposite. They're looking for the opportunity, opportunities externally, they're looking for the trends and going, I could get in on that trend. I'm like, well, what training do you have in that trend? You know, what experience do you have, what contacts you have, what resources you have in that trend? You know, Daniel, you were an Uber early adopter. And I know that because the very first time I saw Uber, I was with you and you and I had lunch at some other club in Adam street or somewhere in London. And then you, you were like, oh, my car is coming. And I was like, your car? And you go, yeah, my car. And I go, you have a private car. And you, and you just looked at me and you went, yeah, more or less. And then you, you got in your car and went. And it was later that you revealed to me that this was Uber. And I had no idea about Uber and app driving cars and what have you. But I'll tell you something that Uber's an example of a good example of external versus internal opportunity spotting. Everybody should have spotted the opportunity of Uber. Everybody. Anybody who's ever come out of an airport and couldn't get a taxi. Anybody who's ever come out of a conference in the rain and all the taxis were gone. Anybody who's ever come out of a nightclub and there was a queue for the Anybody should have sat there and went, there should be an app for that. And the problem is, is that anybody spotting that opportunity that didn't have some experience with coding or within their network, have the experience of coding, is behind everybody else that's spotting that opportunity too. Whereas somebody spotting that opportunity that has some background in coding or has a network that can support them on that, that's. Now, that's an internal opportunity.

Totally, totally. And the other one I hear is like, people saying, I've got this amazing idea, but I don't want to tell anyone because they're not. And I. And I kind of go, if. If the only thing protecting the idea is that other people don't know about it, then it's a shit idea. Because the best. The ideas that you make money from are the ideas that are so obviously linked to you that you could tell the whole world and then join your team. So, like, for example, I just put. Thank goodness. I put together a funding round for a new startup which completed about four or five weeks ago. Four weeks ago. And we raised about £210,000. And it's really fun and it's really cool, but the idea itself is something that me and my co founder, we're the only ones that you'd want to back for this because we've been doing it 10 years accidentally. Right. And when I show you, when I basically show investors, this is where we came from, this is our first go at it, here's our second go, here's our third go of it, here's where we got it, right? And here's the 2.7 million we made in this other business as a result of, like, having this technology. Then they go, okay, cool, so what are you going to do? Well, we're going to scale that technology.