5 Money Mistakes That Almost Cost Me Everything

. And that's one thing I learned with the founders that are at 9 figures. Realistically, you only work 10 hours a week. You've only got so many units of time, and that time is precious. You have to just be ruthless. Hello everyone. Today we're going to be going out in the Rolls-Royce. I'm going to be talking about the 5 money mistakes I made on my way to $30 million. So come with me on the ride. So I've generated over $30 million across 3 companies. So today I'm going to break down the 5 biggest money mistakes I made along the way and what they cost me so you don't have to learn the hard way. Mistake number 1 was hiring too too fast. I've scaled to almost 50 employees, and when I look back over those hires, I made a lot of mistakes early on, and I went maybe too much with my gut, and I didn't really tie their actual compensation with the revenue they produce. So early on, you end up paying more basic salaries, and you end up having to drive like actual return on investment and capital out of those employees. So what changed for me was Obviously spotting the nuances of people just interviewing well in an interview, but actually don't have the track record of what they actually say that they've done. And secondly is like putting in a commission and compensation plan that is actually tied to revenue or actually buying back myself or the business time. And when business is going well and cash flow is coming in, founders either go one of two ways. They actually don't hire at all, and which I think is a very expensive mistake as well to grow. And then other founders will actually hire too fast and get in the temptation of maybe overhiring when they've had a good month, for example. So you've just got to make sure you've got a cash flow forecast model and a financial model to know where you are for the next 3 to 6 months runway. So I would say make sure you've got net cash reserves of around about 6 months of burn in the business, and then you want to hire. And then just making sure you're making the right hire. So when you are below that say 7 figures in your agency or business, but you're at 6 figures, you want to make sure that you are buying back your time as a founder all the time. So whether that is in operations and then sales and marketing. So I always say that as a founder, you want to be very skilled and world-class at sales and marketing, and then eventually you want to start buying back some of those processes of your time. When I look back at the most expensive bad hires that I've made, there's always been these people that are on really big salaries, but actually they are promoting themselves from a previous role in the previous company. So for example, a really good salesperson but wants to come in and be a sales manager and build out a sales team, for example, but they didn't have the actual skill set of building out a sales team. They were just actually very good at sales. And those type of things are expensive hires because it's like they're learning on the job and you're paying a big premium for that as well, because you're actually paying them a salary for that role. And they actually haven't done that role before. And it brings me back to Felix Dennis and the book How to Get Rich, where he talks about overheads walk on two legs, but also the fact that when you have an employee, you hire them on potential and you're sort of underpaying them for the talent they've got. And then they start to level up to their talent and package and salary, and then eventually you start overpaying them for past performance. So it's a bit like the same as when you hire someone very expensive, is are you just hiring them for their track record? But the fact that they're probably capped down at like what they can actually do for your business. And how I think about hiring now versus when I was just at 6 figures or early 7 figures in the early days was I did try and do a lot myself. And one thing I realize now is, especially with AI and everything that we're doing with Claude and systemizing the business and having like an offshore remote team a lot of the time, you can actually grow way faster if you have good SOPs in place and a really good business model. You should be hiring in a way of taking more stuff off your plate as a founder. So you just should be focused on more high-income generating tasks. So I have like sort of like, I would say 3 executive assistants really. Well, one like senior executive assistant, head of ops that basically runs the business and everything else. And then 2 underneath her that would do what I would call integrated tasks. So the book Attraction, Gino Wickman, it's a great book and it talks about the entrepreneur being the visionary and you need an implementer. I sort of like have 2 implementers, below my executive assistant, as well as like an ops AI person in the business. And my thing now is like, how can I just get more and more free off my calendar? I realistically only work 10 hours a week of like where I have to do meetings or things that need to be done. The rest of the time is quite free and fluid. And one thing I realized when I'm hiring now is I'm just hiring on all of the, even the higher revenue generating producing tasks now. So whether it's in marketing and sales, Those are the things that I'm looking to hire more of now. So I would definitely say like when you're an early stage founder or you're just at $20K a month, $50K a month, for example, there is things that you're still holding on to that you could really just delegate and hand off to a team member. Mistake number 2 is chasing revenue instead of profit. And I was thinking like, was there actually like a point where I was obsessed with the revenue number versus like what I actually kept in the business? It's definitely early on. I see so many founders get obsessed with either revenue or headcount, they end up not actually knowing how much profit they've made until they hear back from their accountants like a month, 2 months later. And it's actually crazy to me. And I think it's very important that you have this ethos. There's a book called Profit First. You don't even need to read the book really. It's all about paying yourself first, your employees, and then the business. And then the concept really is just to get you thinking about, let's say you do $100K in the month or $50K in the month, you need to be having 50% net margins at all times net costs. I talked about this in a previous video, like, if you're in year 1 of the business and then you're still actually not keeping like 50% profit, or at the very least like 40%, if you're in a service-based business, there is something fundamentally flawed in that business model. And I think a lot of founders early on just get tied to this like obsession of thinking like revenue is growth. But unless you're going to build a business to sell, which is very rare in a service business, early on you should just be focused on profit first. Have a daily cash engine reporting dashboard. So we built one in Claude, just tied into Google Sheets. And every single day you need to know what's the cash in the business, what's the cash out the business, and what that net margin is. And when I look at the business journey over time, yes, there were months and maybe a year or so where the profit margins were a lot worse than where they are. And that is the trick of when you're scaling a business and you're hiring employees, you're taking on bigger clients to do more fulfillment. There will be times when you're in growth stage and scaling, you sacrifice some profits for the long term. But I always make sure you have to at least maintain, like I said, 50% maintain profit margins. If you're in scale mode and you're hiring, there might be 2 or 3 months where you have sacrificed a bit of profit, but never ever— there shouldn't be a month that goes by where you don't actually make any profit. That's one thing that I always held firm on. So I think it's just a balance of like when you're scaling and hiring, making sure you can still maintain profit margins and understand that there will be cycles when it dips, but making sure that the hires you've made and the growth that you're making is for actually more profit at the end of it, whether that's in a 3-month or 6-month cycle until you get back ramped up. Mistake number 3 was not firing fast enough. So obviously the concept now is hire slow, fire fast, but you still need to hire. It's very important that you you higher. But there's always this time when you give someone more months than they should, and I, I, I was very guilty of that early on, was I was giving someone an extra month, an extra 3 months, an extra 6 months till they come good, because they're a nice person, or they've got a good attitude, or they're showing up in the office. As soon as you get that in your gut where you know they aren't going to be right for the business, you have to cut. As soon as that happens and it's in your gut and you start thinking about them, you're looking into the day plan, you're looking into what revenue numbers they've produced, and all of those things, you have to just be ruthless and cut them. When you feel that in your gut, you will know. You'll have sleepless nights, you will be stressed about them over the weekend. You're just investigating them more. Normally, when I've got a smell of that with an employee, it doesn't end well for them. Mistake number 4 is not investing back in the business soon enough. So when you've got capital to deploy, you've only got 2 options really. You take that out of the business and invest that personally into stock shares. Property or whatever, or you invest it back in the business, but that is in employee headcount. So most of the time it's either in sales and marketing department or fulfillment on the back end. So making sure that you actually are deploying that capital and actually are forward producing growth in the business. So the best way to do that is for sure hiring more remote assistants, a lot easier to compound because the costs are a lot cheaper and you can start to build on different SOPs in the department, especially with AI now and Claude. You can get a better employee for 5 times, 10 times the cost of someone in the US or the UK. So the mistake with not investing back in the business, when I look at what should I have spent money on earlier, it was definitely more ads, more into the team, and more into the systems. So when I say systems is actually systemizing departments of the business that aren't reliant on me or one person, and actually how can we put that into a simple procedure like a McDonald's franchise, for example, Michael Gerber talks about in the E-Myth, is systemizing all of these departments. So then obviously you have department heads, but underneath them, that could be a lot cheaper resource where you offshore that. If you actually had the freedom of time in your mind. So when you hire an executive assistant, for example, it's to buy back just things that you just would do for $20 an hour just because you were faster to do them. Once you have that time back, then you can think strategic on the business of like, what are the levers that I can pull and deploy the capital in. And a lot of that comes down to fear and actually not having your polaris, or the goal that you want to get to in your life in terms of realistically, like, liquid multimillionaire status. Mistake number 5 is trying to do everything alone. So I don't have business partners in my businesses. I do have my brother as a co-founder in one of my companies, a recruitment agency. But apart from that, I don't have, like, what we call a business partner. And some people say, James, has that ever held you back? In some ways it holds you back because you should in theory be able to go twice as fast. Because when there's two founders, if you're splitting the roles up where you aren't just really crossing over, then you can get more leverage. But there is a lot of risk to that because just two humans at the end of the day, you might end up going far apart in terms of what your belief system is, in terms of like where you want to take the direction of the business as well. So for me, I just didn't want that headache. I love the freedom. So obviously, I built businesses because I wanted financial freedom and no boss. When you have a business partner, you've sort of got a boss where you have to run things past them, you know. And I feel like you need to just see what type of entrepreneur you are in terms of the skill set. And I feel like my own personal entrepreneurial skill set is I can do a lot of things quite well. So I didn't really need a business partner. But then I would invest more mentors, be part of different communities, groups. So I had the right people around me anyway. To get the right advice and right support. And that's what I would tell you as a founder right now is don't try and figure out everything alone. There is definitely mentors, there are people, there are agency services of people in different departments that have worked things out that you haven't. And it's a lot easier just to pay for that time, for their time, so they can see around the corners you can't see yourself. And also just to help you focus on what you're world-class at in the business. So as you make more money,, and you keep growing. I'm just like, well, how can I pay someone $50K, $100K to just figure that out for me and just do it for me? And that's one thing I learned with the founders that are at 9 figures is they're willing to pay for that because you need to buy speed. You've only got so many units of time and that time is precious. So you are willing to pay more for that. What I would say is like the biggest thing holding you back from, let's say if you're at $50K a month right now, $20K, $50K a month to double or triple that, the main thing holding you back is most likely yourself. So that is your mindset or skillset. Of you only know what you know right now. You just need the right mentor or support in order to get you to the next level because there'll be things that that person that's already walked through that you can't see yourself. For example, we help agency founders get to 7 figures from 6 figures. And a lot of people that come into that mastermind, they learn in community, the people they're hanging around, and they absorb all of that knowledge from myself and our team. So you just need to figure out like what is the key metric that is holding you back right now. Like I said, it's probably yourself in a certain area department. And just figure out where that unlock is to either double in size of your business. What are those 2 or 3 areas that you need to learn, or you need to buy access from someone to figure out? With that being said, those were the 5 biggest mistakes that I found. If you have one yourself, make sure you comment below. And if you are looking for a remote assistant to be directly installed into your business so you can get founder freedom back, then feel free to click the link below in the comments and book in a call with either myself or one of the team.