In this candid vlog, James Blackwell drives around London while sharing the hard‑earned lessons he’s learned scaling service‑based companies. He argues that a founder’s calendar is a direct health check: a balanced mix of delivery work, project work, and team meetings signals a scalable business, while excessive delivery indicates over‑reliance on the founder. He stresses the importance of calculating an hourly rate to monitor efficiency and to push for higher margins. Building a sales team is presented as the toughest but most critical growth lever, with ongoing maintenance as a perpetual challenge. Continuous personal development is framed as non‑negotiable; founders must stay relentless, take bigger risks, and avoid stagnation. Extreme accountability is championed – any problem in the business ultimately reflects the founder’s design choices. Blackwell warns of the loneliness of entrepreneurship and underscores the need for a supportive peer environment, citing the energizing effect of surrounding oneself with other successful founders. He differentiates vanity revenue from sanity profit, insisting that sustainable businesses maintain high profit margins (50‑70% for service firms) and generate cash‑flowing assets that are not founder‑dependent. Finally, he ties profit to lifestyle freedom, encouraging reinvestment to keep money “moving” while preserving margins. The video ends with a call for viewers to share their own brutal truths.
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Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Sunny day here in London, my favorite city in the world. So today we're going to be recording about the brutal hard truths about business. So you're going to come on a ride with me here in the car. I'm going to drive around London and we're going to get into it. The first thing about your business is your calendar will tell you the truth. Now, so when I look at business founders and I see what their activity is every single week, what their calendar looks like and what they're working on, I can normally get a very good gauge on the health of their business. So what I would say would be a good business is it's a mix of delivery. So it might be 20% delivery on certain aspects in the business, especially if I'm talking about mainly service-based businesses here, and the rest of the time will either be working on projects on the business or team meetings. So the rest of the time shouldn't be doing tasks that you know a team member should be able to do. And the hourly rate of a task. So I've talked about in previous videos working out your hourly rate, very easy to work that out in terms of the revenue your business generates versus the amount of hours that you work in the business. Always trying to increase that. So when I look at founders that have just got a full-on calendar and it's just a mix of every single department imaginable in their business and a lot of delivery, which means it's very reliant on them, then I can get a good gauge on the health of their business. Okay, now if a business founder is a lot on sales still, I wouldn't say it's a real bad thing because it's a high revenue generating task. So if they're still generating a good amount of money with that, say half a million a year in terms of sales or more, then the health of the business is still good, but it obviously is depending on them. But then obviously their next task is just building out a sales team. And I say just, that's probably one of the hardest things in a business, building out the sales team and getting that really dialed in and consistent is tough because I've had great sales teams and great culture. Then we've fired a few people, drop off all the time. So not just building it, it's the actual maintaining it year after year is the tough part. The fulfillment side on the back end is way easier depending on sort of what business you're in, but the majority of them, it's a lot easier than at the front end on the sales. One of the truths is the founder always has to grow. You cannot stay where you are as a founder. It's so crucial. And I've been guilty of this sometimes where there's been seasons, maybe for a few months, where I haven't grown as much because I've made money, I've been in a good life, just enjoying life, and that's important as well. But you've always got to keep growing. Like, now my team's inspired again because I want to take things to the next level again, rehiring and growing the business. That's just really important as an entrepreneur founder. You've got to lead from the front and you've always got to keep growing. So a lot of my friends that are even at a higher net worth than me, one of them's like a 9-figure founder now and he's younger than me. Watching him grow and like just really take off was just because he's just relentless, you know, and he's just always working on himself and growing, taking bigger risks, bigger leaps, pushing himself outside his comfort zone all of the time. And I think as a founder, you've got to make sure you're doing that. And you'll know in yourself if you've stopped doing that. And I think once you get to that certain level, like I said, once you've got a million, 2 million, and 3, 4, 5 million liquid, you're in a game then, okay? So you don't have to stress as much. And then from there, just all about playing the game of business, enjoying it. So like I see the seasons now, I'm investing in building out a bigger team and on on the front end on the sales, doing more content, spending more money on marketing and ads. I see that as just in the game, that I'm putting a certain amount of money in and I get a certain amount of return out. And that's how you see business, like, as you grow up to certain levels. But you've always got to keep growing yourself. Like, if you're not growing yourself, at some point that business is going to stagnate, then competitors are going to start to take over. The next truth is, as a founder, you've got to take extreme accountability. So anything that happens in your business, it is your fault. Okay, so whether some— a team member does something wrong, something breaks, you needed to guide them, you needed to mentor them, you needed to set the expectations. So just being brutal with yourself, if like anything that happens that goes wrong in the business, it is fundamentally by your design. And that's the same when you're building and scaling up your business. You need to make sure that you design the business model correctly in order to live the life you want to live. Okay, so because if you just make it all about revenue or growth, then you might be unhappy because you might not have the freedom that you want. And if you make it all about just freedom, then you're probably not going to make the revenue you want or the profit you want because you're just not going to be in the business enough, like, to get the results that you want, basically. So just making sure that you are accountable as the founder, that you're brutally honest with yourself, that everything is your fault. Another brutal truth is it's a lonely road as an entrepreneur, so you need to be prepared in order to have those alone times. And it does get very lonely, which is why I always say it's important to hang around other people. So I've noticed over the last few months, because I've been away from a lot of my friends, say in Dubai, in Marbella, London— normally I have a lot of friends that are here, but not this time of the year. So I've just been really spending time alone, or maybe with one or two friends. And one thing I realized was being not around that energy of other successful multi-millionaire founders all of the time, it actually does have an impact on you, you know, because you just sat there alone or working and you're not really just in that— just the environment, it's just so crucial. And I talk about environment so, so many times. Environment in terms of being around good weather, inspiring people, is like so important. The energy— the— we talk about it in Reality Transurfing, one of my favorite books. And you've got different pendulums and the different energy fields and the quantum fields. I just look back over the last few months of growth, and obviously my relationship with God has been coming full circle, and I'm just very thankful for that. And spending more time in scripture and church, and then also making sure you spend time with good friends. Like, it's so important, the environment, to be around them. So one of the things, I'm going to Bali. I've got a few good friends from Dubai that are going to be spending time there as well. So just being around them, you know, working, having good ideas together, talking around business, just having that energy of other people, it rubs off on you, you know. So like, even when you get wealthy, to maintain that standard, yes, you have a lot of self-discipline, But that only gets you so far, that will only last a few months. You have to be around other successful people all the time. You have to make the effort. So making sure you constantly are having a good peer group is, is crucially important. Being around the right people. Now, some people are different. Like for me, I don't like giving my energy out a lot of the time. So I'm not like one to just always be out there and networking and everything else. Like I don't do that as much now. But with the core friends that I've got that I've built over these, for sure, the last 5 years or so, it's crucial that you, you make time to be around the right people. Another hard truth you always hear: revenue is vanity, profit is sanity. So you see so many founders claiming all of this revenue level amount of money, but it's just like, how much money do they actually keep? Yes, revenue is good, but if you're not keeping it at the end of the day and it's not maintaining profit margins, then what is the point? I say this with service-based businesses in particular. I mean, you see with e-com companies as well, claim they've made millions and millions. Most e-com founders will take home 10%. Off the revenue that they claim they do, because they're only running normally 20%, maybe 30% profit margins. The ones I've seen are mainly 20% profit margins. So making sure that you realize as a founder that at the end of the day, it's how much money you actually keep. You've got to be making profit from the first year for sure. Like ideally day 1, day 30 in, in the business, like your business should be making profit unless you're a tech founder and you're building enterprise-level value or you're going for an exit. So like if you're in business and you are generating, I don't know, let's say a million, 2 £1 million, £3 million EBITDA, then you might sacrifice some of that EBITDA for aggressive growth strategies, so then you can get the revenue numbers up, so then private equity like to look at you, or you might be doing a trade sale, and that's when you're looking for an exit. But if you're not looking for an exit in your business anytime soon, then the revenue numbers just do not matter. It's just all about the profit, because then the profit is going to be the fuel, one, to give you the life that you want to create, so then you can be in nice environments, hang around the right people. All of these things will give you So then you can level up yourself to then level up the business again. And then it's what we call like this flywheel effect. If the more money you make, the more you can spend money as energy, as we talk about in Reality Transurfing, you've got to keep the money moving, got to keep the money moving, can't keep it stagnant. And then obviously you invest it more, then you get more revenue, but then again, you maintain more profit margins. So making sure that you're just not obsessed with the revenue number, it's the end of it. It's how much profit you make. All of my companies that I've built have all maintained profit margins, which I'm proud of, of above 50%. And I really think for a service-based business, you've got to be around 50 or 70%. 50%, that's, that's how it should be. Obviously, if it's a higher profit margin, that means it's just because you're giving more of your time. If it's a low profit margin, it should only be because that you're not doing any of the delivery in the business. And I always say, like, when you build a 7-figure company— I've built 3 7-figure companies that are all not dependent on me, so all of the revenue that's produced is pretty much not by me. So then doing that whilst maintaining above 50% profit margins without much of your time That is a skill in itself. And that's when you've got the holy grail of what we call a cash-flowing producing asset. Having a business that produces cash flow every single month without your effort into the business all the time. Yes, you still need to manage or work on the business, but not like you having to drive it every single day to generate the sales. And that's the sweet spot with the profit is making sure that you can maintain good profit margins, not just revenue, good profit margins. And without as many units of hours of time inputted per week from you as the founder. So those are some of the brutally honest truths that I've seen in my business journey so far. Would love to hear yours. Again, drop a comment below, let me know what yours are and what you'd like to see in the next video, and I will catch you soon.
