#430: How to KICK-START Your Entrepreneurial Journey with Daniel Priestly Bestselling Author, CEO & Founder of Dent Global & Co-Founder of ScoreApp

I have this belief about mindset. I feel like there are three settings that my brain has. Setting number one is reptile mode. Setting number two is autopilot. And setting number three is visionary. And my reptile mode is the worst of me. Autopilot mode is we're just in the zone. We're doing what we're comfortable doing. We're not challenged in any way. We've done it a hundred times. And then visionary mode is this mode of like, what if, what if we did this? What if we reached out to this company? What if I knocked on the door and a great opportunity happened?

Come on this journey with me each week when you join me. We are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity, and set you up for a better tomorrow. I'm ready for my close up. Hi, and welcome back. I'm so excited for you to meet our guest this week. Daniel Priestley is a serial, truly serial entrepreneur, has built and sold several successful businesses. And we're going to get into that because this is underselling it. And he's written five books on starting and scaling businesses. He's the founder of Vent Global and accelerator and Venture studio with offices in the UK, Australia and Canada. He's the co founder of Score App, AI powered marketing software with clients in over 150 countries. He is going to make AI understandable for you. Daniel has won Entrepreneur of the Year and Scale up of the Year awards and regularly gives talks on growing businesses. He an Australian living in London with his wife and three children. Danielle, so nice to see him. Thank you for being here.

Thank you so much for having me on the podcast.

Okay, so before anyone jumps off right now, that's saying, oh, I'm not an entrepreneur. I don't need to listen to this episode because, guys, I really want you to hang with me on this one. I wish so much I had met Daniel and listened to Daniel's insights years, years, years ago. So stay tuned, stay with me and listen right now. Danielle, what do you say to my listeners that are still in corporate America that are living the more traditional? I'm 49 years old. It was very much traditional growing up. If you're in your 40s now that you go that corporate route, if we're speaking to them right now, why do they need to listen to you?

Well, a lot of the most amazing and talented people ended up in corporate and I think for many, many decades, corporate was the best place to be. You had more fun, more freedom, more flexibility, more money. You had all of that stuff happening in corporate, and that was a great place. If you were talented, why would you not end up in corporate America? It was probably the epicenter of all the best things for a long time. And the opposite was that entrepreneurs were rebels and misfits, and they were people who, you know, probably weren't going to make it. And they were probably people who couldn't get jobs and they had to come up with entrepreneurial ventures and all of that sort of stuff. So that was true for a long time, too. But in the last decade, things have really flipped. And some of the most talented and skilled people who've got the best degrees and the best experiences, and they're smart people, they're actually starting to gravitate towards small companies, small digital companies especially. And there's a bit of a revolution that's taking place. So the revolution that's happening is that the world is kind of like dividing into two. There's the traditional business model and then there's the global small business. And the global small business is this little business that can impact a lot of people's lives. It can make a lot of money. It leverages media, it leverages technology. And with a small, dynamic team, these little businesses can have so much fun, freedom, flexibility, and wealth creation that a lot of the world's smartest and most talented people are saying, hey, actually, you know what? Entrepreneurship is a great way to have a career. It's a great way to do things. And actually, on the flip side, corporate America is becoming less safe, less secure. The rewards are less prevalent. You know, so. And that's not just America. That's happening all over the world.

I'm with you on Corporate America is not secure. As anyone listening knows, I was fired from corporate America six years ago. As long as you are working for someone else, your CEO can get hit by a bus tomorrow, your supervisor can be fired. The industry that you're in can completely decline, and cuts have to happen immediately. It's not personal, but you are out of a job for. For people who are in those situations. What do you suggest they do?

Right now I've got one of my businesses called ScoreApp. I've actually got eight businesses at the moment that I'm running. One of my businesses called ScoreApp, you mentioned we have 5350 paying customers at this moment. Right. And on average, they pay about $75 to $100 each per month. So in order for me to get fired, quote, unquote, I would have to have 5,300 companies simultaneously decide that they don't want to buy from us. So what that does is it creates enormous amounts of security. I can live and work from anywhere. I have a piece of software that is adding value to five and a half thousand companies all over the world. Those companies are across 50 different industries. I would imagine they're in 150 countries. So a lot would have to go wrong for us to be in a bad place. And that's just one of my businesses. I've got another business called Book Magic. We just launched and it's an AI powered tool for people who want to write a book. And on day one, we signed up 250 clients at about $60 per month per client. So, you know, in a month or so we'll have a thousand or two thousand clients. By the end of this year will be probably 3,000 people paying 50, 60 per month. So that gives us an enormous amount of security. So essentially what I'm optimizing for is I want to be able to have fun. Freedom, flexibility, security. The other thing too, if I do a good job at my work, I can sell my company so I can work hard for five years. And then someone comes along and says, hey, we're trying to buy companies like yours. Can we buy the company for a multiple of revenue? If I work hard at a corporate American job or corporate job, I might get paid well, but that's it. I don't know, maybe I have a little bit of stock options, but nothing quite like, you know, selling a company. I've sold a couple of companies and it's pretty transformational when that happens.

So for anyone listening that is in that job right now, they're in corporate America and they understand, yes, I don't feel safe. Yes, I am concerned the same thing that happened to Heather is going to happen to me. Are there specific steps that they should take? So often people will look at me today and say, you have a big social media following. That's why you can sell things, that's why you can be successful. But I'm not there. Heather, what do you say to that person that doesn't have social media, that doesn't have a brand or. But they have succeeded in corporate and that's all they know.

If someone's thinking that it's a valid concern. You don't want to roll the dice with your livelihood. You don't want to take unnecessary risks and go into a completely different career that you're unfamiliar with. You know, when you're in corporate, you take a lot for granted. So when you pick up the phone and say, I'm from Goldman Sachs. A lot of people take the call, you know, because they know the brand. When you pick up the phone and say I'm from this unknown little boutique that you've never heard of, they're like, sorry, we're not interested. So that amazing thing that happens with corporate where you've got the brand recognition, if something goes wrong with your IT systems, there's an IT person who comes and fixes it. That's not going to happen. When you've got your own business, you are the IT person as well. You know, in many corporate jobs you're focused on the supply side of something, but someone else is focused on the demand side. They're selling it, you're delivering it, or you're selling it, but someone else is delivering it. When you're an entrepreneur, you have to think about supply and demand. So it's very, very hard to make the transition for many people. And one thing I don't want to see people doing is I don't want to see them throw away a six figure salary on the hope that they can start a business or on the whim that they could start a business. I want them to do it because it's totally makes sense. It's a completely logical decision. One step that's really, really powerful is to go from working in a large corporate to, to working in a successful small business. So for example, any business that has less than 15 employees, you're going to see absolutely everything and how it ticks in that business. You're going to have full visibility, you're going to see the revenues, the profits, you're going to see how they generate leads, how they win customers, how they do deals, how they look after people. You're going to see everything. You're going to have arm's length exposure to the founder of the business. And founders are very transparent people. They're going to just say, oh, this is what we're struggling with today, or oops, looks like we're running short on cash flow this month. We're going to have to make some sales. Founders are like that. They're just going to say, you know, this is what it is. One of the things that you can do to de risk going into your own business, go join a team of less than 15 people and rather than it being corporate or start from scratch, start with a blank sheet of paper. It's okay. I've gone from working with a company that has 30,000 employees and to a company that has 30 employees or 15 employees or three or four employees. So you're getting early stage experience. So my personal experience is that I spent two years working on a startup and that startup went from 0 to 6 million of revenue in two years. And on the day that I started we were free revenue, so we had no revenue. And then we had three of us around a kitchen table. And then by the time I finished at the end of two years, we'd gotten to 60 people and 6 million of revenue and I'd kind of been there every step of the way. So then starting my own business felt very, very normal, very natural. So that's one of the ways that I would really encourage people to de risk. Just go do six months or 12 months working in a small business. Worst case scenario, you get a unique experience working in small business and you can go back to corporate if it's not for you. So no harm, no foul. You're earning money, you're bringing value to a small business. You're gaining new insights, new experiences. There's plenty of ways you could sell that as to what went on. You know that you thought you'd try working in a small boutique. You know, you get the experience. That would be a de risking step and I'd recommend that that would be one of them.

Meet a different guest each week.

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I asked you to try to find your passion. What about for the person like me that finds themselves fired? Non compete. They have to leave the industry that they're in and they think to themselves you know what, maybe this is the sign. As you know we're talking everything happens for a reason. Maybe this is the sign I should actually go to work for myself. But like me, they have no idea other than the career that you've always had, what you would go sell, what steps can they take?

Okay, so entrepreneurship is way more predictable than most people think once you get started. And there are a set of stages that you go through. So stage one is ideation. Ideation means that you come up with 10 ideas as to what you might start a business, and you explore them through a few different lenses. So what you want to do is you want to analyze those ideas and you want to say, let's apply three criteria. So criteria one is, how passionate am I for this? Am I really juiced for it? Am I loving this? Do I have an origin story for this? Do I have a vision for the future for this? Do I have a strong sense of mission and purpose around this? So that we'll just sum that up and call that your passion. Criteria number two, does this solve a valuable problem for people who like to throw money at problems as opposed to people who throw time at problems? Does this problem often affect people who've got money to spend? That's like a key thing around the problem that we're going to solve, right? And then the third one is, how many people are there in this market and can I access them? Like, are there plenty of people out there who experience this? You know, I might come up with a solution for, you know, a very small group of people, and we say, okay, well, there's only 3,000 of these people in the whole world. How am I going to even reach these people? Right? So billionaires, right? I'm going to sell to billionaires. Okay, great, there's 3,000 of them, but how are you going to reach them? Do you have any ability to get through to those 3,000 billionaires? So what we're trying to do is triangulate some sort of a compromise. And it's always a compromise. You have to do trade off with passion, problem and payment, or, you know, market size. And you kind of have to triangulate. Like, I might say, I'm super pumped about snowboarding. I love snowboarding. But that's probably not going to be the biggest market opportunity for me. And not many people want to pay me to snowboard. So what we have to do is come up with 10 ideas and really start to apply a criteria. And that's phase one, right? So that's just like ideation. We then narrow it down to maybe three ideas. One of the first things we do is we want to conduct fast, cheap experiments. So one of the fast, cheap experiments you want to do is you want to go to someone who's already successful in business, in your network, the most successful business person you can get in front of. You say, I'm thinking of starting one of these three ideas. Which one do you think would be best and why? Or do you think there's one that's terrible idea and why? So you just want to go there. And I urge anyone listening to this, go with a really open mind. It's not negativity, it's really honest feedback that you're looking for. And if you can save yourself six months because someone feels safe to tell you about an obvious floor in your plan, that's a great thing. That's not a bad thing. That is Happy days. If someone shoots down an idea, you want them to shoot that idea down because you don't want to waste six months trying something that's not going to work. If you could have found that out in six minutes. One of the best things I love to say to people is, I'm impossible to offend. I'm excited about these ideas, but I'm really looking for critical feedback, negativity. Right? You can't be too negative, you can't offend me, can't upset me. Which ideas do you think are terrible ideas and why? Which one is do you think like? So you're just starting the conversation. If it makes it through one of those first conversations, those first couple of coffee chats, then there's a next step, which is called mvp. Minimum Viable Product. This is where what we do, we do this really clever thing that is entrepreneurial, very entrepreneurial, and people in corporate find this pretty radical. But we just immediately set up a landing page that asks people to join a waiting list. And what we do is we say, in 2024, I'm going to be launching a new approach to healthcare and it's going to solve these problems. Problem one, problem two, problem three, problem solving. And it's typically suitable for these types of people. So you're giving some vague, directionally correct information, but you're leaving mostly up to people's imagination. And you just simply say, my background is working with these types of organizations. And if you would like more information about what we're launching as it becomes available, join the waiting list for more information and we'll send you some information when it comes available. So when people click the button that says Join Waitlist, it doesn't just click their name and email, it asks them five or six questions. So it says to join the waiting list, answer the following five questions. What is your biggest frustration in relationship to xyz. Right. Problem one, problem two, problem three. What is your biggest hope or expectation that you would have if you bought a product that did this? Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. At what price point would you think this is too cheap and you would doubt that it's of any quality? At what price point would this be too expensive and you wouldn't be able to afford to pay? Right. So you're asking these questions to collect the data. You might ask, what have you tried in the past that didn't live up to your hopes? And you give them a few options there. What you're trying to do is gather the data to figure out how interested are people, how many people are interested and what are they willing to pay and what are they trying to achieve and what have they tried that didn't work. So you're just playing around with that data. So you're collecting that data and you need to collect typically a minimum of 30 expressions of interest. So 30 people on the waiting list would be bare minimum. 150 is good. And then when you get into the thousands, you're onto a winner. So phase one is just promote the waiting list and you're just out there promoting the waiting list. You're sending cold direct messages on social media. You're putting up an article or a blog on LinkedIn and directing people to that. You might join a group on Facebook that relates to this thing and say, hey, look, I'm launching a new business. If anyone's interested, join the waiting list. So you're kind of being a little bit cheeky, putting yourself out there in a few different social media type places. Maybe you can partner with a friend who can help post it on their socials. So you're just trying to see if you can get some engagement once again. If no one engages, that's actually great. That's really positive. Guess what? You don't have to do that idea. Right? It's like, thank goodness I found out really fast and really cheap this is not a winner. That's phase two.

Let's say they get a decent response on something. Because I'm thinking back to the first thing that I launched when I was fired was I wrote a book, Confidence Creator, and there was definitely a need in the marketplace to solve this problem of lack of confidence right within people. I never tested or asked the questions what you're saying, like, because if I had, it would have been I would have had to reach millions of people with that product or service at a 20 price point. Right. To make the kind of money that I wanted to drive for the business. I didn't think through all of that. I just wasn't thinking through the process and system that you're describing now. So let's say that they did get the positive feedback on one of the ideas. Now, where do they go from there so that they don't make those missteps that I made?

So the next thing we want to do is we want to try and do something called audience building. So audience building is where we don't try and sell a product. We just see if we can get people to join an audience. So there's a few key audiences that we can get people to join. A social media account is okay as an audience. However, you're very much at the whim of the algorithm. And even if you get a million people who sign up onto your Instagram account, you don't have the names and email addresses you can post on that account. But if the algorithm doesn't like that post, that's it. That sucks a little bit. A little bit better than that is something called a discussion group. So, for example, if you're going to launch your business again, let's say I was, you know, advising you at the time. I'd say go and launch a confidence discussion group. Right? So what we're going to do is we're going to set up a WhatsApp group, and it's going to be build your confidence in seven days or build your confidence discussion group. We're going to go out there and promote that and see if people will join the WhatsApp group. We're going to try and get 500 to a thousand people to just join the WhatsApp group. And we're going to post polls and we're going to post some research, and we're going to bring in some academic research about confidence. And we're going to summarize that for people. We're going to coordinate a few discussions, we're going to ask people questions about what they're struggling with. So we're going to start the discussion group on there. That's a great way. Another one is an introduction event where you basically invite people to an introduction to increased confidence at work. Come and join my Zoom event, and you see if you can get 50 to 100 people booked into a Zoom event, and you're going to present something like that. So that would be a good one. An online assessment is super powerful. So you basically say, are you ready to be more confident? Answer 12 questions to see if you can get Yourself a confidence boost. You know, people take the online assessment. So these are audience builders. They don't cost anyone any money. They're just collecting an audience. They're just building signals of interest. And what you're doing is building a little mini market for yourself. So you're not trying to sell anything just yet. You know, you're not inventing a product or any of that. You're inventing an audience. Now. It used to be, long time ago, it used to be that you create the product first and then take it to market. That was the best thinking, like early 2000s and before. The best thinking in the entrepreneurial community at the moment is audience first, then product. So that's been a big flip in the last 10 years that the audience comes before the product and then we create a product.

It's so incredibly different. And that's why I was thinking the way that I had grown up, which was put a product out and then just go sell the product. A lot of people struggle with the idea. My background was in sales and sales leadership my entire career. So I never struggled with the idea of selling. But I know one of the biggest holdbacks for people, Daniel, is they're thinking, I can't be an entrepreneur because I know at first I'm a solopreneur and I don't know how to sell. Other people can sell. How can you advise people, like, what are the best practices or tactics for someone to actually sell something or sell themselves?

So every entrepreneur has to do some sales. The problem is if you can't sell it, it's very hard to get someone else to sell it. Right. So this is one of the barriers to entrepreneurship. It's a genuine barrier because you can have one of the best salespeople in the world. And unless they are a co founder in the business and that's their side of the business, they just going to look at you and say, okay, cool, Heather, how do you sell this? Like, pick up the phone and show me how to do a sale so that I can learn from you. And you're going to go, oh, I don't do the sales. That's why you're here. And they're like, well, I need to see how you sell it. You're the founder, so it doesn't work. You've got to do some sales. The other thing too is sales is really market research. I have a friend of mine who is a billionaire. He sold one of his companies recently for 900 million, started another one, which is now worth over two and a half billion. And when he started this next company, he already had 900 million net worth. Right. Because they didn't have any, any debt. They actually sold for 900 million. And that was theirs. Right. Him and his brother, when he then went out for this next business, he set up 150 sales meetings and he sat down one to one with customers and he did 150 sales meetings and he asked them, you know, what objections have you got? What do you want, you know, what do you want to use this product for? How would you use it? What would you compare this to? So he was asking lots of questions of the customers and he was asking them, would you like to sign up? Would you like to get on a 12 month contract? All of those kind of things. And sometimes he was telling me that he would actually put the price right up and he'd say, oh yeah, it's a, there's a setup fee of $5,000. Is that going to be a problem? And he would like try, try to get the objections out of people. Now what he was doing when he was going through those sales meetings is he was getting to know his customers. He was really figuring them out rather than thinking about it as like a personal attack if they said no. He just viewed it like a scientist would with an experiment. It's like, oh, interesting. So that price doesn't work or that color doesn't work. Well, that feature doesn't work. You know that thing that I thought they'd be really interested in? No, they're not interested in it, but they're really interested in this other thing that I didn't even think of that they really want. So he went through that process of doing 150 sales meetings and then he took all that information back to his development team and then they developed based on the sales meetings. Right. So a bit of sales training. There are lots of great sales books. I always recommend a lot of role play. I know that's kind of weird and cheesy and naff.

It makes me uncomfortable. But I will tell you, I have been in it and then I've taught it for years. That is one of the best breakthrough moments for people.

Yeah, yeah. I mean if you were going to play an instrument in front of an audience, you do rehearsals. If you're in the military, you do a whole bunch of like war games, you know. So if you're doing sales, you do role play. You sit down with someone who's friendly and they pretend to be a certain type of person and you role play it out and if you do 15 role plays, you're almost hungry to go do a real sales meeting. You want to do a real sales meeting at the end of 15, 20 roleplays. So, yeah, you do need to do this. You do have to get out there. There are some other things that make it helpful. Having a slide presentation, even though that's a bit of a crutch, it's also a powerful way to kind of like, get you through a presentation. You know, a printed version that we used to call a brochure, where we basically sit down with a brochure and say, like, even a tech product, I always create brochures for my tech products because just going through the activity of mentally putting my head on a page helps me to clarify the product. And I find myself sitting down with people showing them this brochure, and I'm writing notes on the brochure. It's got screenshots, and it's got, like, diagrams and it's got description of the customer problem and all that. And then we flip the pages. I kind of like taking people through a physical brochure or emailing them a PDF in advance so that they can see what we're going to be talking about. So creating some of those sales materials can be super helpful. And it's really, really good, like, for product development, you know, like, you don't have to actually create the product. You can just create the brochure for the product. That's totally fine.

That sounds like such a wild concept to me. But you're right. For anyone listening right now that is concerned about selling, actually putting the reps and practicing in front of people you know, like and trust you, that want to help you, videotaping yourself doing it, being open to sucking at it at first, and then using those hacks like the PowerPoint presentation, like the brochure, those are great tools for when you feel really, really nervous until you don't feel nervous anymore, which ultimately you won't.

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Comfortable getting out to pitch. They've created the audience, they've got some data from the audience. What are the next steps that they take?

Yeah, so we've got an audience and we need to do a little bit of surveying the audience, like really finding out what they want. Building that brochure or the slide deck. Now we're going to go out and do some sales. And even if you're going to do a tech company like my friend who's the billionaire, you want to sit down and talk to actual customers. Even if it's tech, even if your product was cupcakes, you want to sit down and you want to sell the cupcakes face to face. You've got to be there to see their reaction. You have to see how people actually react. Even if it's a tech product, you want to bring it up on a laptop in front of them and watch them navigate the website, watch them go through the steps, help them sign up and say look, let's get you signed up, here's the laptop and try and like just hand them the website and see like if it's a website related thing, see how they interact with it. As an entrepreneur you have to put yourself in those weird situations where you're closer than ever to the customer. We think of technology as a thing that puts a distance between the customer and the seller and ultimately it ends up doing that. But the best entrepreneurs, they want to collapse that distance at the beginning. They want to be cheek to cheek with their customers. They want to really see the look in Their eyes listen to the questions, all of that sort of stuff. So this next step is like 30 to 150 sales meetings. We want to be doing sales meetings if it's a high end product. Dinner parties, lunches, private dinings, unbelievably good for sales. So you get seven, eight, nine people around a table, have a lunch, book an appointment with them, perhaps do a mini presentation, go around the table, everyone introduces themselves. When it's your turn, tell people, this is what my new business is up to. This is what we're doing. I've got some materials if you want to take some home. So you're getting yourself into the orbit of your customers. So these first four things we call this chaos. Concept, audience, offer, sales, coming up with a concept, building an audience, creating your first offer, and then getting face to face and selling it. And that's how businesses start with those first four steps. Chaos.

I love the systematic approach that you have to this. It makes it so much more easy to understand. And that's so helpful to anyone from corporate because everyone knows in corporate everything is built on systems, process and procedure. And this is incredibly helpful and enlightening. So thank you for doing it.

Okay.

One of my biggest holdbacks that I've learned the hard way has been my own self limiting beliefs and mindset. What are your thoughts on mindset for people getting into the entrepreneurial space?

Well, there's a few things I think, you know, you're the expert on this stuff. But here's what I've observed. I've observed that people tend to feel confident with things after they've done it 20 or 30 times. So like confidence is a lagging indicator, not a leading indicator. So when someone says, I'm feeling nervous about this or I'm feeling a lack of confidence about this when it comes to entrepreneurship, I always ask them, have you done it before? And they're like, no. I say, great, so just thank your brain for telling you that it's new. Right. Because that's really just what the brain is saying. This is new. Something could go wrong. We don't know everything about this. It's like, cool, thank you. I appreciate that. I already knew that actually, so I appreciate the warning system. I have this belief about mindset. I feel like there are three settings that my brain has. Setting number one is reptile mode. Setting number two is autopilot, and setting number three is visionary. And my reptile mode is the worst of me. Right. So if you get me when I'm tired, when I'm run Down. When I'm unsure of how something's going to work out. My kids were playing with this little boat in a pond, and this crazy woman comes yelling at my kids, you're not allowed to play with boats in that pond. So I was like, hey, right? So I got my backup. So that was me. I just went in reptile mode. I saw. I was like, right, you can't talk to my kids like that. So reptile mode is like fight, flight, freeze, freak out, throw tantrums, get upset, get emotional, right? So that's reptile mode. Autopilot mode is we're just in the zone. We're doing what we're comfortable doing. We're not challenged in any way. We've done it a hundred times. We're just going through the motions. Driving, texting, you know, shopping, blah, blah, blah, blah. Cooking, right? You can kind of do it while your mind's wandering on other things. And then visionary mode is this mode of like, what if. What if we did this? What if we reached out to this company? What if I knocked on the door and a great opportunity happened? What if we created this feature? What if we launched this product? What if we launched it in Alaska? What if we spoke to this influencer who's got a million followers and wants to promote it? Like, cool, we could do that. A great example of this is when they made the movie Top Gun. They were going to create the movie with just these little model jets like Star Wars. And they were playing around with these tiny little models and doing film testing. And then someone, one of the producers, said, wouldn't it be cool if we could use the Navy's actual boats and planes? And they said, what if we call, like, what if they let us. Has anyone checked? No, no one's actually checked. Okay. So somehow they get in touch with the Admiral of the Navy and they go, yeah, we actually want to make some sort of film or something to encourage people to be, like, joining the Navy. We would love to do a Hollywood blockbuster. Come and use the planes. Use the aircraft carriers. Here's the keys, right? However they do that, next thing you know, they don't have to use these models. They're actually on a real aircraft carrier, and they've got real planes to play with. But the funny thing was is that what if conversation. What if we call the Navy? What if we ask the investor for a million dollars? Right? So visionary mode is where the best of you comes out. It's that playful child. It's that part of you that recognizes the world is A very small and connected place. And good things do happen, right? So it's like that part of you. So the first thing I think about with the entrepreneurial journey is that when you step onto the entrepreneurial roller coaster, you're going to swing wildly from reptile to visionary and back to reptile and back to visionary. In your corporate career, you were mostly in autopilot. So you're just like autopiloting through the day. It's probably been a long time since you were visionary because, like, they don't let visionaries hang around corporate. And you couldn't go reptile because that gets you fired or a warning or something. So you're just in autopilot most of the time. Now you're an entrepreneur, you're rarely in autopilot. You're swinging wildly between reptile and visionary. In fact, you wake up one day and you're like, oh, what if I give a TED Talk? I'm going to give a TED Talk visionary. And then a bill comes in for $39 and you're like, oh, an unexpected bill. Right. See, I'm crashing down. So you've got to recognize that this is what we call the entrepreneurial roller coaster. First time entrepreneurs, they experience this wild swing that they weren't prepared for.

Oh, my gosh, you are so speaking to me. Because when you explain the middle one of just being an autopilot, I can remember it wasn't terrible, wasn't great. This is what you do. I used to call it golden handcuffs. And I remember standing with my hands like this, you know, I have golden handcuffs. And it was. It's not horrible. I mean, please, these are first world problems. I'm not excited to go to work every day. And for everyone listening, oh my gosh, it is horrible. Life is way too short. I would so much rather live going back and forth between the reptile and the visionary. Because for years, again in corporate, when I would have some kind of visionary moment and bubble it up, people would say, are you crazy? We can't do that. There's too many systems too many. It's not the way it used to work. You can't do that.

Right?

So let's have a meeting about it. Let's have 20 meetings about it. Let's have 35 meetings until it dies.

The idea is killed, Right? And the idea is killed, of course. Oh, you, you obviously know the people I used to work for. Okay, so here's the thing. You're living in this. How do you balance that? Because that has been one of the hardest things. For me, it can seem so scary that you're going to die. You don't know how to manage it.

Well, the best way that an entrepreneur can manage this is to keep coming back to the customer. Keep coming back to the customer's problem, right? So when you put the focus on yourself, then you swing wildly. When you orientate towards the customer problem and solving the customer's problem, it right. Sizes the ship. You're back in the game. So if I take most entrepreneurs who are freaking out, I say, tell me about your customer. What is it that they're freaking out about? Tell me what your customer's problem is, and if we can get back to the problem that you solve in the world. And one activity that I do with some of my entrepreneurs who are in a bit of freakout mode, I'll say, I want you to close your eyes. I want you to imagine that you've got this ball of energy that is golden, right? And it's in your hands, and this is represents the value that you offer. And I want you to imagine a customer who desperately needs that problem solved. And they really want this thing, and really it's going to help them. I want you to imagine a line of connection between you and that person. I want you to imagine this bouncing factor that you're sending them, this energy, they're sending you back some energy called money, right? And there's this nice bounce factor that you've solved a problem, They've received so much value that they send energy back, and you're energized, and they're energized. I want you to then float above your body, right? And I want you to imagine looking down at yourself and seeing that happening to dozens of people, seeing it happen to hundreds of people. Float above your city and see that several people in the city are getting value. And then float above your country and see lots of people in the country getting value. Float above the world, float out in space, look down and see that little line bouncing to people all over the world. Imagine that you're going to build this business that delivers this little thing of value to all these people who are living all over the world, and they're going to send you some money for it. And we zoom right out. The funniest thing is when we do that activity, we just zoom out. We connect with, I'm solving a problem for one person, then I'm solving a problem for several people, solving for people who are near me, that I'm solving for people all over the world. When we kind of just get that picture in their head, it's like a you can't help but go back to visionary. So it's like a bit of a reset.

Meet a different guest each week.

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I asked you to try to find your passion. I love that. And it's all about doing good. You're solving problems, you're making the world a better place, you're helping other people. And I love what you said. Stop making it about you. Because the minute we stop making it about ourselves, we get back to service and helping people and you can feel good about solving problems for other people. And that's the number one piece of advice I give anyone. Taking a big stage, I know you take many stages, is don't make it about you. Make it all about the audience. And when you approach it from that angle, you will always win. Serving the audience?

Yeah, you'll crush it. You'll crush on stage if you're focused on the person in the audience. Boom. Total win.

So what are the biggest missteps or mistakes that entrepreneurs make since you've worked with so many?

Probably the biggest one is we forget economics 101. So economics 101, high school economics. They say that demand and supply sets the price, that when supply is high and demand is low, prices fall and you lose money. When demand is high and supply is low, prices rise and you make money. So this is the very basics of demand and supply. And there's a phenomenon called demand and supply tension. So it's the point where the markets almost meet and kind of the buyers and the sellers have to compromise and then the transaction happens and like, the customer gets what they want at the price that they're willing to pay, et cetera. So what most people do when they think about starting a business is they think very deeply about the supply side of what they do. So if they want to be a coach, they think about coaching clients, right? Supplying coaching. If they want to be a bookkeeper, they think about doing the bookkeeping. If they want to build websites, they think about building the websites. That's all called supply side thinking, which is basically, how am I going to supply this? The great entrepreneurs don't think much about the supply side unless they've ramped up demand first. So a classic example that everyone has seen is Elon Musk's launch of cybertruck. So he stands on a stage and he says, in the future we're going to do this thing called a cybertruck. It's going to be priced at this and it's going to have these specifications. It's going to look like this crazy thing behind me. And we don't have a factory yet. We don't have any of these cybertrucks available. But you can join a waiting list to get on the cybertruck waiting list. And a million people put down a hundred dollar deposit. Now they know that a million people are not going to go ahead. They know that probably 6% of those people, but that's 60,000 cybertrucks that they can go back and sell. So what he was doing is he was ramping the demand side up and testing demand before they even thought twice about how the hell they would build these things, right? And supply side. So let's say you stand on a stage in front of 600 people and you give an amazing presentation. You say, if anyone would like to work with me one to one, I do a bit of coaching, drop me an email. You could say, play Your phone, here's a QR code and that'll take you. And you can just drop me a little message and just say, I'm interested in doing some coaching. Imagine like a whole bunch of people pull out their phone. So imagine you then call back people and you say, look, I just got to let you know that about 113 people dropped me an email. I only have capacity to like coach 12 people per year. Tell me why you think I should coach you.

They're going to be desperate to be the one included now.

Exactly. It's a total flip. So this is called ramping up demand versus supply. So the biggest mistake, the biggest mistake is just over obsessing about the supply of what you do without over, over, over obsessing about the demand for you. You got to ramp the demand up first. Everything will flow from that. If you can generate leads, you can solve all the other problems. Look at Kylie Jenner. She gets 100 million on Instagram and then she can launch anything right? In a saturated industry with hundreds of suppliers in a mature industry, she comes in with the makeup kit, she sells a billion dollars worth of them. You know, look at Ryan Reynolds. He becomes a famous Hollywood actor and then he says, now I'm doing gin. Oh, okay. Now I'm doing a payments company. Now I'm doing a telecommunications company. Now I'm doing a sporting team. And everything works from there because he has the ability to ramp demand really fast for those businesses. So keep that in mind. That demand side is way more important than supply side. Just because you can supply something doesn't mean it's going to be successful as an entrepreneur. The demand side has to be far in excess than the supply side allows for. You're so much better off constraining supply. Where you say, I can't look after many people. The other classic mistake is people like, say, oh, I can take on as many customers as like, like, we're ready for the world. We've got a digital product. Download it and it's like, okay, everything digital is free because it's unlimited supply. So people are like, they're wanting to get their stuff out to the world. You want to constrain it and say, we only have 10. We only have 100 of these. That's it, you know, so you want to keep it small and get lots of people who want that small supply.

I love the driving demand and it is such a flip versus the way we used to do it. Okay, for people who are afraid of AI, how do you leverage AI? Why Is AI positive?

AI is what's called a general purpose technology. Electricity is a general purpose technology. The Internet's a general purpose technology. Combustion engines, gps, social media, these are all general purpose technologies. And basically what they do is they impact everything. So these are technologies that when they're released on the world, they impact every industry at every level. So there's a world before electricity and then there's the world after electricity. There's like a line in the sand. So AI is a really, really significant general purpose technology that's going to impact every industry at every level. And it represents the big threat and also the big opportunity. So if you're entrepreneurial, you recognize that everything is going to be impacted by AI, and you can just pick a thing and add AI to it. And there's a business in that, there's certainly a set of products in that. If you're fearful, you just go, oh, AI is going to do this. And I guess I should just go watch Netflix.

All right.

There's nothing I can do. The truth is, AI is going to disrupt everyone. It's going to impact people at a very personal level. So AI has two superpowers. Superpower number one is the power to distract, the power to rob you of attention, the power to get you to over consume. So when you set AI against users or consumers, and the AI's job is to get you to watch more, listen to more, buy more, scroll more, then AI will always win because it beats the best chess players at chess. So it's going to beat normal humans at keeping you engaged. So TikTok's a great example. Once you're on TikTok, it's very easy to spend two hours scrolling, right? You might have intended to spend 10 minutes, boom, I got you for three hours. So that's the AI succeeding. So it learns how to do that. So its first superpower is this over consumption? Superpower that turns people into consumers at a level that they didn't intend to. The second superpower is over creation. So over creation means that an AI powered little team of four people can actually behave like a team of 40 people. You can get four smart people in a room and if AI is there with them, they're all going to have superpowers. They're going to draft emails, marketing campaigns, they're going to create products, they're going to ask the AI what would be the gold, silver, bronze version of this product? Create a customer avatar, ask that customer avatar what their biggest fears are. Address those fears with a product offering. How would this look, if it was software, how would it look like if it was a consumer product? What if it was a package of multiple products that already exist combined with, like, a packaged up, you know, affiliate program? Write the page, create the landing page, create some images, create a brief for a person on upwork to design and code. So four people, like, in a room with some good house music, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. We're smashing it out. Hot of coffee house music, AI. We're making businesses so four people can do what 40 people used to be able to do. So the world's going to divide into two. There's going to be the creators and the consumers. And the creators are going to just, like, crush, like, absolutely crush it. We're going to disrupt things and impact things, and we're going to create movements and communities, and it's all going to be like, wow, this is like having magic wand. This is just awesome. And then the consumers are going to get caught in this downward spiral of like, oh, I'm just. I haven't left the house in three days, and I've been watching every Netflix show that's come out, and I've got all these Amazon packages arriving, and I don't even remember ordering them. Right. So we got to be really careful about AI. You got to be on the creating side. You must use AI to create, not consume.

Oh, my gosh. No. You're so right. Since we're already out of an hour, I'm gonna have to have you back on, Daniel, because you. The insights that you have, not only did I need them six years ago, I still need them today. So we've got to have you back on for another interview. But since I'm letting you go right now, can you share with everybody your new book, how they can get a hold of you, how they can work with you? Because everybody wants access to your knowledge, systems and processes.

So the new book is the revised edition of Entrepreneur Revolution. So this is a book that I wrote in 2012, and it basically predicted everything we've seen. So it said there's going to be a digital revolution. There's going to be global small businesses popping up. Small teams are going to outperform corporates, we're going to have disruption, we're going to have technological breakthroughs, and I named them all in the original book. Then I said, here's how to respond. Here's how to be an entrepreneur and think like an entrepreneur, and here's what you should do, and here's how to build a team, and here's how to create a product ecosystem and all that sort of stuff. So I put it in a book 12 years ago. But then after AI came out, my publisher said, we got to revise the book. You got to go through and rewrite it. So I started and I realized, oh, wait a second, there's a lot of updates I can do. I can predict for it again. So Entrepreneur Revolution basically is how to develop your entrepreneurial mindset and start a business that works. And it's one of a series of books. So there's Entrepreneur Revolution, then Key Person of Influence is about building Brand Over Subscribed is running really creative campaigns that get people wanting your product. And then 24 assets is about building a digital platform so your business can scale globally. And then how to Raise Entrepreneurial Kids is a book for parents. So all these books that I've been throwing out into the market, so they're all available, and then people can connect with me on LinkedIn or Instagram, whichever they prefer.

Danielle, thank you so much for the work that you're doing supporting people like me and helping us achieve our goals and dreams. Guys, go get the book. I'm going to link it to the show notes below. Connect with Daniel. Danielle, thank you so much for being here today.

Thanks for having me.

All right, guys, until next week, keep creating your confidence. You know I will be. I decided to change that dynamic. I couldn't be more excited for what you're going to hear. Start learning and growing. Inevitably something will happen. No one succeeds alone.

You don't stop and look around once in a while. You could miss it.

Come on this journey with me.