The 7 Principles That Made My First £10m

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, James Blackwell here. And in today's video, I'm going to be sharing the seven principles that made me my first £10 million. Over the last decade building my businesses, I've created three seven figure companies that have scaled up and a group of companies that are eight figures in annual revenue. And I've learned a lot over that journey and yes, some of it was luck, but I really bowled down the core principles that I really thought, thought that it's really helped me shape the business to where they are now. And I've spent those 10 years navigating the ups and downs of entrepreneurship and to scale those companies to make my first £10 million, I really distilled everything down into these seven core principles. So these aren't just ideas, these are actual frameworks that you can take away from this video and start to implement into your entrepreneurial journey. So principle number one, relentless execution always beats perfect ideas. So I've always said, and I've learned this from previous mentors, that there's no perfect plan and the best way to do anything in business is just to take action. So you are always rewarded for the action that you take, not just the theory and waiting for everything to be perfect. So the most important thing was when I started and launched my recruitment agency, for example, that was 10 years ago, I didn't work wait for perfect conditions. I basically took a 10,000 pound credit card, I think I had a 10,000 pound loan just to keep me secure and it was creating a website on Wix. At the time I think it was £400. And I just pretty much got started with LinkedIn, recruiter license, Google, Gmail and that was pretty much it. And everything else started to take shape from there and a lot of people make mistakes of like wanting to have the fancy website, want to have the best business cards, looking at the branding, the name of the business, all of these things are not really important for you when you get started. The second principle was there are no solutions, there's only trade offs and that's with everything in business and in life as well. So stop always looking for the perfect path because both options are going to be hard regardless. So you want to choose your hard and commit fully. So when I was building my second company, the agency blueprint, I basically had a choice. So as you can see here, I'm actually back in my office in Ronald James here in Newcastle. So I'm back here visiting family for Christmas. And so I built a business in an office and this was our third office. We came onto now, but when I built my business, the Agency Blueprint, which is our education company, that is all fully remote. So at the time my lifestyle demanded that flexibility because I was moving to Dubai. Like the second year into that company, I was moving to Dubai and I was going to be traveling around the world. So I chose to go fully remote with that business. So it saved me a lot of obviously money on office costs, offered me freedom. But it also came with challenges as well because obviously managing productivity online and remote is totally different to having everyone in the office every single day. So there's always trade offs. Yeah, so there's always a big debate between remote teams and in office you have a hybrid here in this company, but in Agency Blueprint it's pretty, pretty much all remote. We have some employees that pop into this office now and again, but that's the same with anything in business. And you've just got to know that there's always going to be a trade off. There's no perfect scenario in anything in business. But you've just got to be 100% committed on that vision. And that brings me into principle three, crystal clear vision. So you need to know exactly who you are serving and why. So when I started my Agency Blueprint program, I knew that as a business owner and recruitment agency owner, we were struggling at the start to scale with hiring the right type of talent, but also like winning clients. So I knew that by creating that program I was going to help other agency owners become unstuck by winning more clients, systemizing the business, creating automation in the business and now AI and then building a remote team. Because I knew that most agency owners wanted to get to 100k a year and then want to get to a million a year. And they are very scared to hire employees. And the way that we could eliminate that was making sure the business had strong foundations, the right type of systems in place, but then also offering a service which is remoteassistance AI which places remote assistance into their business so they can scale without having to have the big high costs on employees. And that was one of the key things in my vision. So you want to write a vivid description for your ideal customer. What are their pain points and how can you solve them? And what you'll tend to find is once you get the first one or two and then you really deliver on that service, other things will start to open out. So that was the same. I did a post on this the other day on my journey was I started my agency, I scaled that up to Seven figures. I built a team, I refined the systems and I knew what I would call a blueprint in order to do that. Then it opened up me being a coach and mentor to other people and building the education program we could accelerator under the agency blueprint brand. And then we helped over 1000 agency owners scale their business through my systems that I developed that I found in the agency. And then from there we created an elite mastermind, a seven figure mastermind for people to scale up their business. And we did in person masterminds. And that helped create RemoteAssistance AI, which was my second seven figure recruitment company that actually works with other recruitment agencies that come into my program. And we place marketing VAs and operations VAs into their business. But we don't just place them, we train them up and put them in academy as well to get them results faster. And then off the back of that I spun out Kobe AI which is a video outreach tool as well. And so everything just took a different step just by me really having that clear vision at the start. And then more opportunities opened up. So that brings me on to principle number four, one of my favorites and from my old mentor Dan Pena is just effing do it. Okay? So when you're faced with tough decisions, stop overthinking. You've just got to take action. Because procrastination is a big killer, especially for entrepreneurs. Overthinking things all of the time. Whether you're wrong or right, just never be in doubt. So at any point you've always got to just take action and go for it. Okay? Because there's always going to be hesitation and you just got to put your full energy into things. So when making the decision making, focus on taking action. So normally within your gut instincts, if you're really tuned in and you tune into the energy, frequency and everything else, a lot of the times you will make the right decision. You won't always make the right decision, but it's much better just to make a decision because then if you like make the wrong decision, you can pull back and say I was wrong with that, I'm going to move forward in a different direction. So by the time you've done that, if you were just still deliberating and trying to think a theory all the time and research, you took no action. And procrastination is a big biggest killer. That brings me on to principle number five, first principles thinking. Okay, so one of the key things is to you want to learn from other people. So I've learned from tons of Mentors, okay, first principles thinking. I heard that term from Sam Ovens, one of my old, old mentors in a mastermind. And then I started reading books on first principles and boiling things down to the foundations and understanding the core problem and breaking it down, like I said, into the key fundamentals. So you want to make sure that you do that in your business because you want to solve the root problem. So you don't want to just mimic what's already been done. So there'll be other people that have got similar ideas to you or similar businesses. But you need to look within yourself and create the first principles, understanding yourself. Because there's a lot of people out there in the market that are just copying off other people and piggybacking. And that's when things break down because the fundamentals, they don't understand. It's very important to understand first principles thinking. Principle number six is linear versus exponential, okay? So most people take what you call like linear actions expecting exponential results, okay? And unfortunately it doesn't work that way. So for example, when scaling my education company, it was like, okay, so say for instance, we're spending 2,3000 a day on ads. Technically it's like, well, if we spend 5k on ads or 10k on ads, will we get triple the amount of revenue coming in and triple amount of customers? And it just doesn't work like that. And that's why it's very important that you identify one exponential action you can take today. So whether it's like building a system, maybe hiring a remote assistant, implementing some AI into your business, these are the different things that can maybe create exponential results because you're not just thinking in a linear direction, okay? Business doesn't scale like that. There's got to be different factors. There's always tiny little changes that you can make in each department in your business. Whether it's in operations, marketing, sales, in each department, that will create a bigger result. It's not just, oh, if I just focus on paid ads and I just scale up the paid ads, then all of a sudden we going to triple in size. It doesn't necessarily work like that. Principle number seven, and the final principle, one of my favorites is less is more. And even as you scale even bigger past eight figures, I've noticed it's, you have so much baggage. Whether it is even in this office, for example, I'm looking, coming back in the office, I was like, all the books I've got, all of the different notebooks we created, just random stuff. Like you create so much Baggage, whether it's in your personal life and business life. And when you're scaling, you add more people. So more people creates more problems, but good problems, because you need people to scale. So you have to have other people that can help you take it to the next level. But the biggest thing is there's lots of opportunities. So I get opportunities all of the time to invest in companies, ask people to help them, different ideas of how we can bolt on other services into my group of companies, which in theory would make sense, but that would take my energy away from one area into another. And you just can't split your energy all different ways. Okay, so imagine a thousand doors are in front of you. Your job is literally to close 99 of those doors and focus on what really moves the needle. So I'm really good now at just cutting through and looking. Is this going to help my business succeed and get to my goal faster and make more money faster? And if it's not, then I'm going to cut it. Because in the early days, I chased every single opportunity. I was networking all of the time. I was going to meet as many clients as possible, connecting with as many entrepreneurs as possible. And I wasn't really focused on one core business that I saw real growth. And you want to ask yourself, what is the one thing I can focus on that will have the biggest impact? Now you ask yourself that every single day when you're working on your day plan, every single week, every single month, and most importantly, what business model you're creating. I speak to a lot of different entrepreneurs that, look, I said I've got three companies, but that was. That's took me 10 years of growth to get there. And they all complement each other, you know, so if I'm focused on one energy at the minute, and in terms of helping companies scale and build a remote team, all of my other businesses like work to complement that. Okay, so as I funnel in traffic and build my brand and we get client leads in, I know my lifetime value per customer is very high. It's on average about £18,000 to £20,000. So I know once we get one customer in our funnel and program and we help them with the service, we can help them with other complementary services. But it's very important. Less is more of the time. Even coming into 2025, it's very important for me to make sure that I'm shutting down certain things that I don't think are worth the time, energy and effort so I can focus on the thing that can take me to the next level of like nine figure growth, for example. In conclusion, obviously to recap those seven principles, you've got relentless execution beats perfect ideas. There are no solutions, only trade offs. Crystal clear vision. Make sure, especially now, you can sit down and think about that before you kick into the new year. Just do it. Just, just take action of whatever it is you're doing. Make sure you've got first principles thinking you actually understand the consequences and the reason why you're doing certain things in your business and, and understanding your customer. Linear versus exponential. Most importantly, less is more. So success, yes, has created luck as well. But there's no shortcuts. So mastering these seven principles, I hope it's going to help you shape your journey, how it shaped mine. If you'd like to leave a comment and let me know what you would like to hear from me next. I read all of the comments, I try and reply back to you as many as possible because like I said, I'm more than committed to keep uploading as much valuable content as possible on my journey myself. I'll show you a little sneak peek behind my office. I actually got this painting done many years ago now. It had like my Porsche at the time. It had Richard Branson up here. He was an entrepreneur that really shaped my vision at the start. The famous Donald Trump. What else have I got here? I've got my dog down here. Wolf of Wall Street. Yeah. So that was like just a random thing I thought show you. Obviously everyone is away from my recruitment agency for Christmas so I actually purchased this office about four or five years ago and that was basically just to help us scale. So we've got like an upstairs space that we, we rent on two other businesses. We actually had a table tennis here but we just actually got rid of it to replace it with something else because we're actually moving office again now. So. Yeah. So just thought I would share that with you. I hope you all have a fantastic rest of the week. And like I said, leave a comment below, let me know what you would like to hear from me next. And until next time, I'll speak to you soon.