Peter Sage | Scaling Yourself to Scale Your Business

Welcome to the Radical responsibility podcast. I'm Dr. Fleet Mola and I'm excited to guide you on a journey of authentic transformation. In each episode, I'll bring you insights from leading experts to explore trauma recovery, mindfulness practices, positive psychology, and innovative breakthroughs in health, wellness and life optimization. This is a space for real conversations that inspire meaningful change, helping you find alignment with the person you were always meant to be. Let's get started. My name is Dr. Fleet Mall. I'm your co host for this session and I'm really happy to be here today with Peter Sage. Welcome Peter.

Great pleasure to be here. I'm excited, we're going to have a great conversation.

So Peter, you built a reputation for merging personal mastery with business success across various industries. And I know it's tough to encapsulate your origin story as a successful entrepreneur and just, you know, a couple of minutes here, but I'm going to ask you to do your best with that. We have a lot to cover today, but if you could kind of give us a sense of how you got started and where you come from.

Sure. I mean quite humble background to be fair. My parents were kind of working class, trying to get up to middle class. I was born on a low cost government housing estate, dropped out of school at 16. I've got no formal qualifications and I started my first business at 17. I, I essentially had my last 20 bucks, 20 pounds to my name and I went and bought 15 pounds of the toys from a wholesalers and I use my last 5 pound to go to a flea market and I sold everything for 30 bucks. I doubled up and I went back the following week. I bought 25 bucks of the toys and spent my last 5 bucks on a flea market. I was still living my parents, I was getting free food and I sold the lot again for a bit more and I built up and up until I got enough to cover a market store and then I started doing markets and Sunday markets and toy parties and I was 17 years old. My catchphrase was Pete the Toy Boy. It wouldn't work today in my 50s. But when it comes to that was the start. I mean at 17 actually my last paid job, my last employment, I think I was 16 heading into 17. So it's been 35 years now since I had a paycheck from somebody else. So if ever you're going to have an identity as an entrepreneur, it's all I've ever known. I've spent most of my life identifying as an entrepreneur. I go out, I build businesses that's what I do. They win or lose, that's what they do. And since that time at 17, my first million dollar business was at 22. Since then I've probably had, as I say, a dozen or two of multi, six, seven or eight figure businesses. In all, multiple different industries, cultures, countries, climates, economies. And the common thread through that is not understanding product or industries, it's understanding business. And once you understand business, you can apply that to anything. I see a lot of people that understand a product or an industry and if that industry or product changes or the times change, that kind of stuff, they don't know how to pivot. But as an entrepreneur, which I'm guessing most of the people listening to this identify as. When your trade is business. Yeah, not health clubs. I build an international chain of health clubs or nutraceuticals or property or printing or coaching or I've had businesses in everything you can imagine on what I was passionate about or grew into being passionate about. But ultimately when people ask me, what is my trade, what do I do? Yeah, it's business. That kind of sums it up.

Wow, that's a great story. And I think obviously that points to the accessibility to the entrepreneurial life for all of us. And I love that focus on what we really are as business people. And that's the primary focus. We may be in lots of different industries with lots of different products or services, but it comes down to understanding business. And you probably learned a bit about that in that for those first flea markets where you buy this for X and sell it for that and you had your overhead covered at home and you were good to go and started growing from there.

So I'll tell you actually just quickly the most interesting thing that I learned that the lesson that gave me probably the greatest foundation out of that flea market stuff was this, that I noticed that if I had a good day on the market versus not a good day on the market, I was selling the same products at the same price to the same audience, same demographic, same psychographics. What I noticed was that if I wasn't in a great mood, I didn't take a lot of money. If I was in a great mood, I would have more sales. And that fascinated me. That was like, hang on. Yeah, but it's not like I did a price cut today. It's not like I had different toys today that were selling better than other toys. No, same overall factors. My attitude is what translated to a better bottom line. And that's when I got fascinated with personal development and the relationship between the business owner and the business.

So our particular focus is scaling. And I think many entrepreneurs, successful entrepreneurs who've gotten their business to a certain point then struggle with maintaining momentum and actual scaling. Scaling brings on whole new sets of challenges and so forth. And the same person that got that startup off the ground is not necessarily the same leader or with the same minds, can be the same actual leader, but maybe needs a different mindset to take it to the next level. So based on your experience, Peter, what are some of the core habits or mindsets that you consider essential that lay a foundation for sustainable and scalable growth?

Where do you start with that one? Let's talk about the obvious. Yeah, because we can get into systems and processes and all that kind of left brain stuff. Ultimately, if you want to 10x your business, you've got to 10x your people. As you say, what gets you from A to B does not get you from B to C. And a lot of people don't know how to make that level of transition. But ultimately, where does the buck stop? The buck stops with the business owner, right? Yeah. If the business succeeds or the business fails, it's not down to the economy, the interest rates, your competition, ultimately the buck stops with the business owner. And a lot of business owners I feel are quite happy to try to hire better staff. And that's actually a good step up from those that are so ego driven or control freak bound that they don't want to hire people better than them. That's one of the biggest lessons I learned from Richard Branson early on was smart business owners hire people that are smarter than them. It's the old adage, if you're the smartest person in the room, find a better room. But a lot of people forget that the person that is required to follow that 10x growth or invitation is the person in the mirror. Yeah. The business owner themselves. And yes, if you know that where your limitations are now I do. For example, I am not a good CEO. If you take the eos, the entrepreneurial operating system, Gene's kind of overlay for business management and you've got Vern Harnish with scaling up okrs and stuff. But we tend to run eos, the entrepreneurial operating system and Gene Wickman's creation and I am a classic visionary. I am the big picture, classic owner, yet founder, risk taker, maverick. If you don't have a decent integrator, then you are going to dissolve in a entrepreneurial hot soup of either overwhelm, chaos or outpacing your Cash flow. So I know that I have to grow as well if I'm going to expand my business. Yes, you've got to expand your people and your capacity, but you've got to expand yourself. And that may mean letting go of patterns of limitation. It may mean getting over yourself as the person who you think has to control all of the small variables. And now learning how to delegate more effectively, not abdicating responsibility, but delegating responsibility and learning how to improve your people skills so that you can work with managers rather than piss them off or promote from within. So you know how to nurture people rather than just fill a hole in the business, you know. Cause as entrepreneurs, we see a gap in the business, we see a hole. Our focus is how do we fill the hole. So we find the first person with a resume that we think fits, that convinces us that it can solve the problem and we rush to hire. And as you know what I see the problem on scaling a lot of the time is, you know, most people hire on resume and they fire on personality. And one thing I've learned over the years, you know, forgive me for saying, but it's far better to have a hole than an asshole. So the first thing is really focusing on team. Because the team that got you where you are at startup and as a founder, and I've seen it and experienced it so many times, you are struggling, balancing your sense of loyalty to the people who got you to where you are with the realization that you've got to let some of them go because they can't take you to where you want to go. That's a hard call for many founders. And it's usually not the person you hire that puts you out of business. As you know, it's the one you don't fire.

And I think you're focused in right on really the heart of scaling, it comes down to the people. And having that, you're pointing to the exact skill sets you mentioned. You need that integrator and you recognize that you're not the ideal CEO. And I would imagine if you move on to where you're owning several businesses, you may be more an investor with overall kind of high level visionary input. So you might have a number of CEOs running those businesses.

But.

But if you're still in one business, your original business or something, it could be that that integrator is your COO type, right? Is that possible? They might be your partner, your coo? What if transformation isn't just about thinking differently, but feeling differently? Science shows us that true change happens when we align not just our minds, but also the neural networks in our hearts and guts. This Heart Mind connection is the key to deeper healing, resilience and expanded awareness. That's why I created the Heart Mind All Access, membership and community. A space designed to help you rewire your nervous system, cultivate heart intelligence and live with greater clarity and purpose. With over 1000 hours of transformational teachings specifically curated to meet your needs, you'll learn from world renowned meditation teachers, neuroscientists and experts in neuroplasticity, all sharing powerful tools to help you shift your mindset and heartset, regulate your emotions and unlock your full potential. You'll also gain unlimited access to every summit and course we've ever produced, a treasure trove of Wisdom worth over $10,000 and growing, plus live gatherings and an inspiring global community to support your journey. If you're ready to step into a more heart centered, connected and conscious life, I invite you to join us. Click the link to learn more and start your journey today.

Yes, the CEOs are great. They need the systems and the processes that keep the trains running on time, that access the glue between the bricks. Whether you're running a system for that, you know, for example, like Agile or Scrum, for example, or say scaling up or eos, you've got to have when you start a scale, you can run a startup on Got a Minute meetings. Hey, you got a minute, right? You can't run a growing business on Got a Minute meetings. If you want to grow, you can't scale a business on it. You have to have systems and processes in place, but not getting choked by oh well, we've just invested in this consultant that's come in and told us that we have to have a gazillion sops all indexed in Google Drive for this, that you've got to make a practical call as to what is the requirement that'll help the business not fall over without getting bogged down into crap that really doesn't mean a huge amount. Yeah, if you have IBM, hp, whatever, then everything is systems and processes. The time we're recording this, I'm actually flying to Switzerland next week to speak for Nestle. They're flying me in to do a workshop for their team and it's so contrasting when you're dealing with a multibillion dollar company with 200,000 employees, which Nestle has and their systems and processes. For me, coming over and giving a workshop is like. It's like I'm swimming in glue, right? It's like, so frustrating. Whereas if I'm working with companies or sales teams and they want to fly me in a night, it's easier, it's more dynamic. But going through 32 checkboxes with making sure it conforms to their policy of what they're trying to do for staff growth on their self, you know, certified required assessment for the quarter for this kind of. It's just exhausting. But yeah, it just shows me the difference between over regulation, over bureaucracy and doing what's required. Because you're going to drown as an entrepreneur in stuff like that. Yeah, you're going to suffocate and not be able to grow at all. But without that, without some of that, you're going to have chaos. And so it's finding that balance as to what systems are required, required to stop the wheels falling off the bike and what is over regulation. So you've got traffic cops walking alongside you.

Right.

Which are taking too much time, effort and money.

Yeah, I love that. And there are a number of good frameworks out there. You mentioned one, there's several really good frameworks for startups and for businesses that are scaling from seven figures to eight figures and nine figures and having that lean approach, borrowing a bit from lean manufacturing, you can have lean management, lean systems that really are entrepreneurial in nature. I wanted to touch a little bit more on mindset here for a moment. I hear a lot anyway of entrepreneurs that are inspired into their entrepreneurial journey from an experience of scarcity earlier in their life. You said you didn't grow up with a lot of abundance and I think many entrepreneurs are, you know, they're inspired, they're kind of in reaction to an experience of scarcity and they can be driven a lot by fear. But as you mentioned, you did your best days in the flea market were when you were in a really positive mood and you were feeling good and you were having fun. Right. You sold. So how do I know? You've spoken a lot about the mindset of abundance. So how does an entrepreneur who perhaps is driven entrepreneurship out of their fear of scarcity or sense of scarcity and their fear of failure, how do they make that shift into the mindset of abundance? It's going to really allow them to be a visionary leader to take their company to the next level.

Great question. And let's use a metaphor of a car. If you turn the key on a car. Yeah, you have, and it may be old fashioned these days, I don't know, but you have a starter motor that kicks in. Yeah, that Turns the crank that fires off the gas and what have you. And so it requires a different set of energy and gears to start the engine. But if that starter motor's going all the time while you're running, it's not going to be good for the engine. The starter motor for many entrepreneurs can be fear of scarcity. It can be, I don't want to have the life that I grew up with where my parents couldn't afford to, you know, buy me the sneakers or the socks or the whatever it is. I don't want that for my kids. I'm going to get out there and I'm going to do whatever it takes to provide for my family. That's okay. As a starter mode, if you're going to run your engine on that, it's going to have real issue and you're experienced enough that you've seen, and I'm sure most people listening to this have seen so many situations where entrepreneurs go through the feast, famine, they build it all up and then it burns to the ground. They build it all up and it burns to the ground. Why is that? Well, let's look at it through the lens of the question you asked. You see, when most people are starting and they get out of the blocks and they're going, they don't have anything. And they're focused on what they can get. They're focused on winning, they're focused on accumulating, they're focused on sales, they're focused on generating revenue, they're focused on the Ferrari that they want to treat themselves to when they hit their first milestone of X million, whatever it is. Now, once you have that, now all of a sudden you've got, you know, the car, the people. Scarcity is not the issue. But you were driven by scarcity as a frame, if that's still a persistent mindset. Now your focus switches from what can you generate to fear of loss, of losing what you've generated. And so the energy now switches to scarcity around what happens if, or I need to protect or I've got to keep going in case I lose. And of course, then the focus is essentially on losing because the brain doesn't process negation. And now all of a sudden things go downhill and then you've got back to zero. You got nothing against you, not focused on scarcity, of losing, because you're zero. So now you focus again on winning and accumulating and climbing. Right? But you get to the top of that mountain and you're scared of falling off the mountain. And now you're back down the other side of the mountain. That makes sense.

Absolutely. Yeah. So how do you break out of that cycle?

You got to understand that again, what gets you from A to B doesn't get you from B to C when it comes to staff. But I said that also applies in the mirror. If you started your business and you started through scarcity and now you've got it, and that scarcity raises its head because now you're scared of losing it, you're going to lose it when you realize that. And there's several frames for this, depending on the level of emotional maturity, depending on the level of consciousness of the business owner. But if you can come to terms with having a different shift in your relationship to the business. See, business is nothing more than a vehicle. It isn't who you are. It is a vehicle that you're currently riding right now in order to achieve something that has to be beyond money. If your focus is business is a vehicle to make money, you are going to be tied to the result of the business and your self worth. And if your self worth and your net worth are tied together, you will always be in scarcity at a certain level of the mountain, which means you're going to fall down the other side of it. Now, when you realize that your self worth and net worth are not tied right? When you realize that business is a vehicle for you expressing your passion in a certain way that allows you to add value to other people, to clients, to the world, to families, you're making a difference for or companies or B2B, you're making a difference for. When your energy is channeled in understanding that revenue, sales, cash flow is a byproduct or a consequence of you giving your gift through the vehicle of your enterprise, you start to focus on how do I add value? And attach your passion to that rather than looking in the bank because I need to make more money and what happens if I lose it? That's the switch that people need to make. Stop thinking that money's a thing. Money isn't a thing. We make it a thing. The second we conceptualize money as a thing, we get trapped into the illusion of chasing money. Money is a ghost. It is a byproduct or a consequence. When you walk into the gym, you don't say, give me the strength and I'll lift the weights. When you're sitting in front of the fire, you don't say, give me the heat, I'll fetch you some wood. You know you get the strength when you lift the Weights, you know, you get the heat when you chop the wood. When you don't walk into business and say, all right, let me go get the money and then I'll feel good. Let me go get the money and then I'll add the value. No, you get the money when you've added the value, otherwise you're chasing your tail. Money is just a lagging indicator of the lives that you're able to touch in a positive way. And when you have that relationship to it, you're not worried about where you are on the mountain or going up. No. You're focused on how do I put one foot in front of the other with a heart. Centered heart led. Yeah. Head on my shoulders. I mean, we've got to eat. We're here to make profit. But you're not making profit like you're making a cake. You are accumulating profit as a result of the amount of cakes that you're giving to people who are hungry. Does that difference clarify?

Absolutely. And I love what you just said, that money is simply a lagging indicator of the. The value that you're adding. Can you repeat that again how you.

Said that it's a lagging indicator of the amount of value you're adding to the marketplace, to your clients, to. Even to your staff. Yeah, there's a lot of staff there that arrive at 9, are getting paid till 5, but they check out at 2 o'. Clock. Mentally, you're paying 40 hours a week and getting 25. Why? Because their heart's not in it. Why? Because your heart isn't in to them. Your focus is, you know, how do I get these staff to perform better?

Right.

Oh, I squeezed the juice out of this because these are costing me money. Well, then investing in your staff as one of the key principal assets so that you can actually have people that want to show up, that are loyal, that have a situation when, if you know, Utah say, guys, leadership team, the hot air balloon is losing air. Right. And we've got to tighten our belt and throw some weight out of the balloon, otherwise we're going to hit the ground. If we hit the ground, nobody gets paid. I will lead by example. I'll take a 30% salary cut, but would you guys be willing to take 15 for the next 90 days so that we can get the balloon back in the air? Right. If you don't invest in them before that, they're going to turn around and get stuck. They're going to start looking for the next job where the balloons higher. But if you've invested in them from your heart. You understand that your staff and your customers, your most precious assets, in that order. I've had times where I've had to have that conversation. I've had people turn around and say 15%, let us take 30%. All right, now you know that you've got a team now you know you've got a culture. But that reward doesn't pay off without a prior investment.

I mean, everything you're pointing to, there's such wisdom in it. And you know, most of the great teachers of success and wealth creation or the great salespeople even going back to the OG Mandino book, things like that, they always talk about wealth and business success. It's not a thing, it's a flow, right? It's a flow that we align ourselves with. A flow of generosity, a flow of adding value, a flow of abundance, as you've been describing.

Victor Bock in his excellent book how to solve all your money problems forever talks about two things. He talks about your relationship to money energetically. You know, most people have counterintention running to their, you know, abundance mindset they're trying to create based on childhood patterns and et cetera. Usual stuff that we, we've been teaching for years. But also he talks about glad giving. How do you keep the flow of money going? If you accumulate money and you hoard it and you try to hang onto it, universe ain't going to give you any more. And for materialist left brainers, that's very hard to get around because they're trapped in a material world where it is survival of the fittest. It's like, oh no, I don't give it out because I don't trust where it's coming back from next. Whereas you talk to anybody that lives from a place of money comes in. If I get $100,000, I'm immediately going to go and find somebody that needs part of that to be able to give it to with zero expectation in return and then wonder how you get another $100,000 client show up out of nowhere. It's something that you have to use as a mirror to benchmark the blind spots of your own scarcity patterns. And a lot of people can't do that. But flow when it comes to abundance is a two way street, not a one way street.

So let's talk a bit about, I mean you referenced before that we can get into that cycle of building up to a certain point and then we get worried about holding onto what we have and we burn the Whole thing down again. Hopefully it doesn't go to that extreme. But all entrepreneurs experience setbacks and failures. It just comes with the territory. I wonder, reflecting on your own journey, how you've dealt with significant setbacks in business or failures and maybe then turn them into an opportunity for growth instead of letting them, you know, shut you down or become debilitating.

Einstein said a lot of profound things, but one of the things he said is that the most powerful question you can ask in your lifetime is whether you live in a friendly or a hostile universe. And he was alluding to something very, very profound, very powerful. See, if you believe you live in a hostile universe, by the very definition, you're going to be looking at life through a fear based reality lens. Everything with teeth can kill you. Everybody's out to get you. A survival of the fittest. If you believe in a friend, you live in a friendly universe, then you're going to be asking questions like, yeah, oh, how does this serve me? What can I learn from this? Ultimately, if I live in a friendly universe and something bad happens. Yeah, it's only my perception that I'm calling it bad in the moment. I don't see the wisdom of the nonlinear reality. And this could be one of the greatest gifts I've ever had. So the reality is ultimately we don't live in a friendly universe and we don't live in a hostile universe. We live in a self reflected universe. In other words, our perception of that question, the answer to that question will determine how we live our life. And so when it comes to setbacks, that is one of the most profound levels of psychology you could adopt. And I'll give you a practical example. So seven years ago I was involved in a multimillion dollar lawsuit where I'm arguing a corporate contract with a multi billion dollar company that you know, you'll remain nameless as Hewlett Packard. And it was arguing over a, what I felt was a petty excuse for financial bullying. Now they clearly didn't say it that way. They hired $100 million law firm because that's what people like that do who are on retainers and lawyers litigate. That's part of their identity. And it was a nothingness. And they knew it. They knew it would cost me 200 grand to fight this in court. And they said, listen, why don't you give us 100 grand, we'll make it all go away. And I said, well a, that just proves it's BS and no, I'm not playing, I didn't back down. And I'd built a successful business at that point. We've got about 50 staff, we're changing lives, we're doing great. You know, we just had a, this is a new business. I started that recently. We'd had our first six figure month and they threw a contempt of court application at me on some technicality, on a court order. That was, it was just typical legal posturing, you know, show me the man, I'll show you the crime kind of thing. It wasn't a crime, it was civil action. And as most entrepreneurs know, or at least they should know, when it comes to litigation, it's simply a tool for business. That's how most lawsuits are. It's leverage for business against business. You know, when Apple sued Samsung at the Berlin Fair over patent infringements, it had nothing to do with patent infringements. They were eventually disproven, but had everything to do with getting an injunction to stop Samsung displaying their new products at the Berlin Fair while the injunction held them off so that Apple could get a foothold in the market. It's just using the legal system as part of your chess game. But I went to court. I thought the judge would laugh it out of court in five minutes. They sold it to the judge. He gave me six months in prison as a civil prisoner. Never been arrested, never been accused of a crime, no criminal record. And I did six months in the most violent prison in the UK because it was the nearest one to the court. And I lost everything. I lost the bit. I went from 50 staff to three staff in three days. They hit me with hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal debt and costs, all right? They attached court order to my home, gaining interest on their legal debt that I couldn't pay some in prison, I lost everything. I lost my wedding and it was everything that I had. And I walked down the steps in the court in handcuffs thinking why I didn't see that coming. But I knew I had a decision to make at that point, how I interpreted that scenario. And hopefully anybody listening to this, you know, whatever their business upset is, you know, hopefully they can take comfort that it isn't this, right? Don't go to prison to learn the lesson. I'm giving you that. Leave that for the idiots like me, right? But I walked out. I knew I had a decision to make. If I saw myself as a victim of courtroom shenanigans and Fancy posturing with $100 million law firm I couldn't compete against while I was on state appointed attorney, right? And if I, you know, went in as a identity of a prisoner and focused on what I'd lost, I would be done for. So I made a decision walking down those steps at the courthouse, that this was going to be one of the greatest days of my life. I didn't know how, but my attitude was everything. I live in a friendly universe, so I'm excited to see where this bend in the river goes, even though most people need the certainty of being able to look around the corner, which we don't have the luxury of. So I didn't choose to see myself as a prisoner. I chose to see myself as a secret agent of change because I was changing lives. And if the universe, right, is going to test you, it's going to test you to see if you're qualified to walk your talk. And there's probably a lot of people in prison and jail that would love to get the benefit of the work that I can give, but would never have access to personal growth or YouTube or courses or podcasts or anything like that. And I'm like, if the universe really wants to send me into a place like that, to hold a light, to be a sentinel, then hell, yes, I'm going in, and I'm going to do the best job I can. And I didn't see myself as a prisoner. I saw myself as a secret agent of change. And I didn't focus on what I had lost. I focused on what I could learn. And long story short, in the midst of the most violent prison in Europe, actually, technically, somebody just got murdered just before I got there. It was all over the papers. Attempted murders were weekly. Blood on the floor was a daily occurrence. And I wasn't segregated. It's not geared for civil prison. I was the only civil prisoner in the entire criminal system at that point in that prison. And long story short, I ended up getting a lot of prisoners off drugs. I mean, I worked alongside Tony Robbins for, you know, 13 years as an experienced trainer and trained in psychotherapeutic intervention. I'm a mindset expert. I got a lot of people off antidepressants. I was stopping suicides. I redesigned the intake system for the prison for new prisoners to deal with the mental shock, which reduced violence between the wings. Some of the changes I introduced are now being used in prisons all over the world, including the U.S. i even won a national award for the work that I did while I was in there. And it's one way of saying that no matter what happens, it doesn't matter. What matters is what you do with what happens. And I remember in the first short while I was there, I wrote a sign that I put on the inside of my cell door, which was taken from Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich. And it was ding. Crayons. I'd only got some crayons and a piece of paper. And I wrote on there. Every adversity carries with it the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit. The challenge is most people are too busy focusing on the adversity to water that seed. And I would stare at that for hours on end. I would read that to myself out loud and in my head for hours at the time. And I knew something good would come of it. And every two weeks while I was in jail, while I was in prison, I wrote letters to my students. There's no computers, there's no phones, there's no Internet, there's no nothing, but I wrote handwritten letters to my students telling them how I was coping with what I was coping with, the techniques I was using, how I was helping prisoners put all that together in. I wrote 11 letters in total. And when I came out, they told me that I should publish those letters because it helped a lot of people. It helped a lot of them to see that this was real. This isn't second takes and podcasts and, you know, oh, let's just edit this. You know, it doesn't get much more real. And so I published those letters in a book. I call it the Inside Track. And it went Amazon number one in four hours. Since that time six years ago, we didn't audit on the book. At one point, the amount of people that have read that book have realized that the book has changed their life. What would doing one of my programs do and have taken one of my programs. We did an audit on the first point of contact being the book. And then, yeah, the revenue that's come in since then. She's never going to make money selling books. Right. That's just a loss leader to get you in the market. The revenue on my coaching programs that people have joined after reading the book and have been blown away right now is well over $10 million just on the book. It's been a lot since then on other stuff. But imagine this fleet. Imagine that the day of the trial. That wasn't a trial, it was a hearing. That's contempt. It's not criminal. Someone come and said, listen, you're going to go to jail for six months, and as a result of that, we're going to give you $10 million. There's a lot of people would be pretty Tempted. In fact there's a lot of people say hey look, can I cut a deal? Could I do 12 months and get 20 million? Now the key is knowing how to have that certainty and that faith at the time. Knowing you can't look around the bends in the river. Knowing that you have to know, do you believe you live in a friendly universe or you don't? Are you a fair weather sailor or you're going to be tested with the storms and the waves? Knowing that this is right theory doesn't cover the price of admission to the higher levels of greatness. It's all right, we have doing one thing but one of my dear friends, John Esraf, who starred in the hit movie the Secret and is a genius when it comes to understanding neuroscience and psychology of success. John 10 round one time says pieces you do realize after he read the book and he endorses it as well as long as many of the greats in personal growth like Brian Tracy and Kevin Trudeau and what have you. But he says, I think that a lot of people in personal growth and mindset are now going to have to go to prison just to keep their competitive advantage. Just to show that you can walk your talk.

That prison experience was seven years ago. Yeah, your whole thing had fallen apart and you built back to where you are in the last seven years I.

Came out a third of a million in debt, zero credit rating. My ex fiance now I'd got my American Express Centurion card and thought I was going to go bankrupt. So she went and ran up one hundred and something thousand on Amex that month to give herself some money while I was away. I didn't go bankrupt but I'd never got a credit card or a debit card again. You know, I came out, I went from a multi decade 999credit rating to with a million dollar limit on my Amex to like I couldn't open a bank account, wouldn't give me a checkbook and my first and only focus was how do I pay back the people that bought tickets to my seminars or coaching or whatever. And it took me a year to get back there. I paid them before I paid Hewlett Packard and I split with my now ex fiance. And five and a half years ago, April 2019 I got my two little dogs, I borrowed a friend's 20 year old van like a U Haul and I drove two days down the south of France from England, two days down to the south of Spain, got on a ferry for two days and I landed on this island in Tenerife. I'd got back to a quarter of a million dollars in debt from a third. And I had one month rent in the bank. Picture of a McLaren 720 on my bathroom mirror. I said, okay, let's do what I do best and get to work. I had no relationship, no distractions, and that was five and a half years ago. And since then, $30 million in business later, took me two years to get the car, pay off everybody, all my debts. That was going to be my present. It was symbolic. Want to pay off everybody, make good on all my stuff, pay off Hewlett Packard, pay all my every debt I have, then I'll buy that car as a present, as my next toy. Yeah. And here I am. So, yeah, it was a very unique experience. But, you know, it's a long way of saying, but I think the story is worth sharing because, you know, we all have our present. In fact, as you're aware, we're recording this because very soon I'm off to row across the Atlantic. Right, that's another, you know, I'm getting into that. But the hashtag that is on the boat that I'll be rowing across the Atlantic in is called what's your row? And the reason for that is I don't want people to make it about me rowing the Atlantic again. Leave that for the crazies, right? But doing something where I'm rowing two hours on, two hours off, 24, seven for two months, that's my row. But other people, their row could be a traumatic divorce, or it could be the loss of a loved one, or it could be a stage four diagnosis. What am I doing across the Atlantic to try to cope with an insane. It's the equivalent of running 114 marathons nonstop back to back, by the way. I had to put it in perspective, unsupported. And what's your role? What's your role? Look at my prison experience. What's your prison experience? Some people are facing bankruptcy. Some people are facing aggressive competitors. Some people, that is government regulation. Some people, it's their CFOs just been found embezzling. What's your role? And that is down to mindset. You want to scale 10x yourself and that's down to mindset. Don't look at the fancy next AI tool that's going to help you go past your limitations. They're all useful, they all have a place. But nothing is going to help you scale your business like you scaling your mindset.

And I want to return to that In a moment, I want to cover a couple other areas here. You touched on the importance of building the team and you gave us some real wisdom and principles around that. In particular, as you're scaling and as you mentioned, what got you from A to B is not going to get you from B to C and D and beyond. In building your leadership team, what are some of the key principles and qualities you're looking for in building a leadership team that can scale your company, you know, to its ultimate destined success?

Beautiful question and I mentioned earlier that most people hire on resume and they fire on personality. So let's flip the script on that. I have two criteria. Two predominant non negotiable criteria on being able to hire people, especially at the leadership team. It's not as relevant if you got somebody who's a tech support under your tech manager down in your tech department, whatever. But when it comes to the leadership team, pay attention. Is my invitation to people listening to this right now on there. When it comes to skills, it's the price of admission. If you've got as far as an interview for me for a position, the skills on the issue. If you're a CTO and you don't know how to fricking code right, you shouldn't be in the room or whatever the requirement is. If you're coming in as a chief marketing officer and you haven't had companies that you've run successful marketing campaigns for, at a level that I'm aspiring to emulate, don't come in the room. So I'm not focusing on the skills. That's where most entrepreneurs make the mistake. The first thing I'm hiring on is what I call level of consciousness. Another way of not getting as esoteric with that, because that's obviously an internal frame that we use and understand and there's obviously benchmarks we know how to calibrate that on. But I would go another way for the people listening and frame it as emotional maturity. Are these people calibrating at. Yeah, fear or pride? Pride's a big one. If you can't get on with your team, if you're managing by top down dictatorship in your department, you are going to cause all sorts of problems, say culturalizer or what have you. So level of consciousness, are you more focused on what you can give rather than what you can take? Are you a team player? Are you a clock watcher? It's all signs of how do you treat the people around you? If I'm going out for dinner with business partner, a potential business partner, I'LL take them out to dinner. Why not? Because I want to make the small talk where they're just trying to sell themselves on me, buying into their opportunity or inviting them in as a partner. I want to see how they treat the staff that serve them at the table. That's going to tell me far more about who you are when. If I'm getting into financial bed with you, than.

Yeah.

The skill set of the investment that you can bring or the, you know, the IP that you've got or any of that crap. Right. On who you are. Right. If, you know, there's been many men that have married on looks instead of personality, only to regret it later. Right. And I use a gender stereotype there. But, you know, that's from the experience I've had counseling a lot of people that made the wrong decision. And when you're in business with somebody, it's probably worse because there's a much more of a financial impact. Now, first thing is level of consciousness. Are you emotionally mature? Are you an elder? Are you the kind of person that I'd listen to for advice? You're the kind of person that gets it. You're the kind of the person that's been around the rock. You're not ego driven. You're not coming from scarcity. You're not coming from trying to impose your model of the world. You're not trying to look for the. You're looking to take credit rather than give credit. You know my point? So level of consciousness is a benchmark. The second thing, surprisingly, is what kind of archetype are they? And then this is a psychological profile. We know there's four predominant types. You've got your, you know my friend Rory Kilmartin, Archetypal relationships. Yeah. Dot com, I think, is. His website, is a genius. He's peerless when it comes to this as a researcher for 20, 30 years. And Rory is somebody you'd love to have on your program. But if I give a very brief overview, so. Because people will identify with this. Blind Gillette wrote an amazing book called King Warrior Sovereign as well. Get King Warrior, love a magician. And so if you have the warrior energy, yeah, there are people that get stuff done. They have no problem with conflict. Right. If the bear's got a thorn in his paw, he's going to tell you, oh, wait, there's a thorn. But there's a problem here with my order. There's a problem. And that's what you want. You want warriors in your sales division. Because if, you know, if you go to like the lover. This is all about empathy and connection. You want lovers in your client services department. You want them to bond with the people on the phone so they understand their problems. If you've got a magician whose creativity you want your magician as your cmo, you don't want a magician as your coo, right? You got chaos instead of order there. Your CEO, you want the sovereignty, the organizational level of energy, right? So. And you'll have a primary and a wing. Now, my cmo, one of them, I've had many, obviously companies and years and what have you, but I had one who was a magician, which I want because they've got to be creative. They come up with the campaigns, the ideas, the new ways of generating revenue and talking to the marketplace. But it was a magician lover, not a magician warrior. Which means when they went into the meetings with the media buyers, they wouldn't push back, right? The media buyer would say, oh, here's the results, whatever. And because they were like, okay, well, all right, they wouldn't ask the tough questions, they wouldn't hold people accountable. That was a challenge. If I have a marketing direct right now, I want a magician warrior because they have to have that. If I'm got an integrator, I need a heavy sovereign based energy, organizational based energy. I don't want a huge amount of magician in that. I'm magician enough as the visionary. So hiring on levels of consciousness first, archetypes fit second. And the skill set should just be price of admission into the interview. Makes sense.

Absolutely. I love that application. I did a lot of work with the king warrior, magician, lover book and a lot of men's work around that and group work. And I had not really applied it to business. There are other models of personality types. The Myers Briggs, there's the eagle, peacock, owl, dove one. And they're similar ideas. But it's being that you know that conscious about and aware about the type of person you need in the role. And then what you said was your first question. The bottom line is their level of consciousness I think is so important. So there's two things I'd like to touch on with the time we have left. I just want to talk about the importance of operational excellence in scaling a company. And then after that I want to talk about this integration of as a leader, scaling a company and scaling ourselves our own personal growth. But could you touch on the need for operational excellence and what that really means in terms of building a company that's truly scalable?

Systems are there for a reason. Systems again will only get you to the next level. I'm okay with people breaking the system if it's down to the system that can't handle what we're doing. What I'm not up for is the people breaking because they're not fitting into how the system should work. So operational excellence has its role. It has its role kind of at the point where the system is doing everything it should. In other words, you're retiring the variable of the person and things aren't working. Not because the system isn't working. Things. Things aren't working because the person isn't applying levels of best practice or excellence. Because then what's the point in having the system? But operational excellence is great in kind of established businesses. But if you're growing and scaling, you're trying to break the system so you know where to expand to. That's interesting philosophy, right? But you know, the team wants to be excellent in their application of trying to push the limits of the systems. And then you just need to know when something goes wrong, which side of that fence you're looking to repair. And I think culture has a massive part of that. You know, at the end of the day, we are human. We are going to make mistakes. You're never going to have a marriage where both people are not going to argue at some point. That's why I say the master skill of relationships is not avoiding breakdown. You buy any relationship book, a high relationship coach, go to a relationship counselor, they all talk the same, with the greatest of respect, you know, delusional crap, which is here's all the tools and techniques for learning how to avoid breakdown. You're not going to avoid breakdown. You're talking with two different people starring in two different movies with two different value structure growing at two different trajectories, right? Trying to operate within the same sphere with different levels, one's hangry, one's hormonal ones. The master skill of relationships is not avoiding breakdown, although tools should be put into place to minimize that. The master skill is in repairing breakdown once it's happened. You can see people that spent years avoiding breakdown only to have one and not know, have the techniques on coming back together. And therefore you've, you have irreparable damage because they haven't got the skills on how to restore connection right after it's been withdrawn. Now you apply that to business in the context of the question you asked. And it's not about, yeah, avoiding human error. It's about being able to build somebody back up, recognize why they went down look at how you can mitigate that and put it back on track. And if it's human error consistently, because the nature of the human isn't there, train or replace. If it's the system, that the human's okay, but the system's letting you down. Upgrade or improve the system. So that's how I do it. When it comes to operational excellence, people are not going to be excellent all the time. The only person that believes in that delusion most of the time are the founders because they think that everybody in the business should see the business the way they do. And of course, then they get frustrated when you don't. Right. If people saw the business the way you do, they'd be running their own business.

There's some really, really important distinctions there. Thank you so much, Peter. I think what I'd like to finish off with is, you know, again, this principle, what got us from A to B is not going to get us to B to C and D and beyond. And if we aspire to 10x our business, and most entrepreneurs probably do, we have to 10x ourselves along the way. And so how do we balance this, you know, the daunting prospect of building and scaling a company with working on ourselves and the personal development? I know your whole career has been about the integration of personal development, entrepreneurial success. And so I wonder how you balance those. And also in the context that ultimately, while we may be building wealth, we may be building towards an exit, but we're also building a legacy. And so. And I think that has a lot to do with that intersection of our personal growth, our level of consciousness, and the business success. So I wonder if you could talk about how owners can navigate those and not try to do one at the expense of the other, but really find a way to integrate them successfully.

Great. Final question. And this is where emotional maturity really comes back in. Because if we talk about leaving a legacy, most people's interpretation of that is that, oh, I need to leave something for my kids, I need to leave a mark on the community, I need to have something that transcends my lifetime and all that kind of stuff, you know, And a lot of that, in all fairness, is either ego or the need to avoid the fear of not being enough. There's no finish line with that. My take on legacy, and I teach this to my key students as one of the pinnacles of their graduation. Out of our main program, we have a program called the Elite Mentorship Forum. It's a six month personal leadership program and it's gold standard. It's won many awards. 3,000 five star reviews on Trustpilot. And I didn't even know how powerful it was until people started going through it. It's one of those. But the culminating graduating module is about leaving a legacy. And the mind shift and the emotional upgrade and levels of consciousness upgrade people have gone through over the six months of that program make it quite easy for them to get what I'm about to share. So I'm hoping people can hear this from the level I want to share. Your legacy is not down to your business. It's not down to how much money you leave for your kids. It's not down to how many libraries have got your name on or how much money you give to the hospital's cancer wing in memory of your mother, or it's none of that that can satisfy low levels of you trying to fill a gap a lot of the time within yourself to prove to the world that you're finally good enough to have graduated whatever internal benchmark you set yourself up. A true legacy is not what you leave. It's who you become. Nelson Mandela didn't build any schools in Africa, but as a result of who he was, many schools in Africa got built. And when people get that, they can get off this. I need to be able to have a plaque erected on a wall with blah, blah, or I want to be remembered for. No, who you become is far more of a legacy than what you'll be remembered by, than some building or some what have you. And again, who you become will be or be directly correlated to the impact you make. Yeah. Who cares if you fed a million homeless people, if at the end of the day you were an asshole, Right? Who cares that, you know, you donated $10 million to the endowment of the university? If you go home and you're abusing your partner, Right? That's not a legacy, that's a facade. But if you look at the people that really shaped history, your Mandelas, your Mother Teresa's, your Martin Luther King, they didn't have to build a big edifying business. Their vehicle was something else. But if they had built a business, how do you think, or what culture do you think the business would be of Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela? Right? It would be who they are expressed now through the vehicle of business, not some edifice that they're hoping to have a gold plaque on the wall for. That's all I can say.

Kind of comes full circle to where we began. Again, I love that quote. That money is just a Leading a lagging indicator of the value we're bringing. And you could also say it's a lagging indicator of who we're becoming.

Probably say that some people are so poor all they have is money.

Yeah, yeah. And it also reminds me that I think there's a famous Maya Angelou quote, I hope I have it right, that people won't remember you for what you did, but they will remember you for how you made them feel, which is another way of who you were, who you were being. I know. I just have one last little question. You know, you've built a lot of your businesses have to do with personal development and health and well being and so forth. And so maybe integrating that is possibly less challenging. You may, you know, you talked about Tony Rollins before. He's built his whole enterprise empire, if you will, around personal evolution, personal development. So. And his own himself as the guinea pig for everything he's learned to do and shared with others. But, but if somebody's like, you know, selling widgets or whatever, I don't mean to make like of that, but their business is not about personal development. You know, the challenge of, you know, doing both those things so that you are growing, as your business is growing, you're growing in emotional maturity as you referenced it.

Yeah. I mean your business will be correlated to the passion you have for it. Again, skill sets are required. It's always a learning curve. If you're trying to avoid failure, it's like trying to avoid rejection. But you want to be married. Right. You're going to have to get through some nose. Yeah. It's when you realize that what is it that I love about what I do? And sometimes you got to get creative. Why am I rowing the Atlantic? Not because I'm passionate about putting my body through two months of physical extremes. Right. Because I want to test myself to see where I'm at mentally. Physically, you can train for anything. 90 year old people run marathons. So yeah, your body will adapt, but mentally, that's a whole different game. And so I want to go see that. I want to be able to inspire other people as to what's possible and want to raise a lot of money for mental health. But ultimately I'm passionate about pushing that edge to see how do I show up when it comes to a month into the race, I'm in the middle of the Atlantic. The nearest human is in the International Space Station. The nearest lands five miles underneath me. I've not eaten for 24 hours because the swells are at like five meters. Bigger than the boat. And it's two o' clock in the morning, I'm exhausted and I've got to go out in a raging sea and row backwards in the dark for my two hours with salt blisters on my hands and my ass. That's when I want to find out. I want to know who am I in that moment? Because I'm back being comfortable now financially, business wise and I've got an amazing life and yeah, I want to go test myself. So my passion for that is what's taking me through the world's toughest event. Will I get through the other side? There's no guarantees. I'm probably going to have three weeks in and yeah, wish that Uber chopper would come get me, right? But I'm passionate about wanting to find out what are the business owners passionate about wanting to do with their businesses, to find out who they are, as to how many lives they can touch, as to how they can express their creativity, as to who, who they can develop in their company so that they can be better. Not just employees, better people, better parents, better members of their community. When you wake up like that in a morning, right, you're on track. Regardless of whether you're selling widgets, services, you're in the game. And that's my invitation to entrepreneurs out there. Don't make it about how much money can I make? That's you're going to chase your tail forever. You're going to wake up reaching for your sales score and lying awake at night worried if you can make payroll. No. Have the privilege of living in a country and an economy where we can get creative and go and use that as a vehicle and benefit ourselves and humanity at the same time. Boom. That's why we're here. And that is the integration of personal responsibility, personal growth, personal leadership and business. Wow.

I know we have a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs in our audience and my message would be listen to Peter and what's your role? And hopefully go start that business. That's going to be, that's going to be your challenge. So thank you so much, Peter. This has been incredibly illuminating and inspiring and I can't wait to hear about your role and how's it go? I'll look forward to following you on the app and so forth. And where can people find out more about your work? Because if people want to really master the game of both entrepreneurial mastery and personal development, which are not separate to begin with, one way is to get involved in some of your programs. So where do people find out about your work.

Yeah petersage.com I'm on. I'm across all the social and YouTube. I give as much free content as I can for people that are struggling. We've got an entry program, Ultimate Self Mastery which is a year long do it yourself program where I work with you for a year on program to really improve. That's just one for the third year running top 10 personal growth programs in the world. It's entry level, it's a few hundred bucks, it's super cheap for what it is. Or if you really want to up your game then the Elite Mentorship Forum is the gold standard in personal leadership and transformation and lasting change. If you want that level of emotional maturity and raising your own level of consciousness, that is a game changer. And you'll find all the information on my website. I've got six 700 trainers around the world that are qualified to facilitate that for you and I'm just blessed that I get to do every day what I love to do.

Wow. Petersage.com please check that out. Thank you so much Peter. Again been inspiring and illuminating. I'm really grateful you were able to be part of this.

Always a privilege to be able to come and share with you and your tribe, my friend.

Be well and have a great row. Thank you for joining me on the Radical Responsibility podcast. Remember, real change happens when we commit to our growth, face our challenges with compassion and stay open to transformation. If you found this episode helpful, I encourage you to subscribe and help us spread the message of healing and personal empowerment. Stay grounded, stay present and stay true to you. Take care.

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