The Right Order To Build Wealth in 2026

So James, before we go into more about your background again today, I actually want to try something different. So imagine I'm starting, I want to be an entrepreneur, I want to start my own business. Right. What's the first thing I need to do and first thing I need to understand?

Yeah, so you need to be comfortable knowing that you're going to get a lot of rejection and failure. So you have to be quite tough in terms of mental capacity of going out there and knocking on doors, as it were, or taking rejection. You need to be good at sales. So I've mentioned this before. I think sales is the number one skill set in entrepreneurship. You have to be good at sales because whether you're selling a product or a service to somebody, or even if you're selling another human to come and work for you to do, you have to sell at some point. So I think making sure you acquire the knowledge of sales and then marketing like those two pillars are going to be very crucial. And just being disciplined and doing the work, that is the hard part. The start, which is just taking a lot of rejection, trying to win your first client or sale is going to be key.

I want to start with someone who doesn't even know what they want to do yet. So you've just given them, you know, the skills, the discipline they need to start with sales. But how do I first figure out the vehicle that I should be placing myself in?

Obviously a lot of people say follow your passion, but I don't believe that as such because I mean, I acquired most of my wealth in recruitment and I'm definitely not passionate about recruitment and it wasn't one of my passions. If it was passions, it would have been selling cars, which I started when I was younger. I think the service based industry is very key because you don't need a lot of money to get started. Trading time for money and a service with a client is going to be like the first way you would start. You don't want to be starting in E comm where you have to buy products and paid ads. You should be starting off with a simple service based business. So that's most likely an agency of some sort. Or you could be a freelancer for working for someone that is a successful entrepreneur. So if you can leverage something that is going to give them more upside and buy back some of their time, that's going to be key as well. So whether you have your own business but you can work for someone else, you can learn and study them and also make good money. Or you would start off yourself just with selling some sort of service. So obviously AI is very, very big right now. One of my education programs is all about AI. That could be key because especially if you're younger, like if you're what, under 30, 35, you should be learning AI. You know, like you can get a hold of, like the stuff that Claude's doing now with AI and other different softwares. Like, that would probably be where I would start if I was starting from scratch.

What are some of the three biggest AI tools or softwares that people should be learning and developing their skills alongside with right now?

So many tools, like even what I mentioned now might be outdated by the time this goes live. So I'm using Manus more than chatgpt and Claude now. And that's really cool because it can create images and what is that? Files, presentations. I think it's owned by Facebook. It's just another type of chatgpt, but it's a lot more honest in terms of the truth. Like, ChatGPT is like your best friend. So it just says what you want to hear a lot of the time until you drill it down and give it good prompts. Another good tool we use is Gamma. We use get Gamma AI that creates presentations, brochures, PDFs. So you could give that as like, good lead value adds to clients. I would just be looking at an older business owner that hasn't really adapted. So many businesses haven't adopted AI yet. At any point, you could just do it basic. You could help them with designs, copywriting the website, and all of that can be built with AI within a few minutes, you know.

Yeah.

So I would be not going too technical at the start because you will get beaten by some other young kid that's a proper guru at it. I would just be focusing on winning the client and providing a good service to them and leveraging AI. Not like trying to get the best AI tool and sell that. It would be just like, what is something that they're doing right now that's not automated or leveraging that? And then you could use simple tools to fulfill that. And you could just serve more clients faster and more economically.

Of all the mistakes that you've made through business, what are some of the most important mistakes that you've learned that you would tell that younger self?

I would say just focus on your client, provide a good service stake close to the money, which is the sales part. So, like making sure that you're doing good business development and you're outreaching clients all of the time. Okay. You are charging a premium service. So you're charging a premium free for premium service. So not trying to get in cheap all of the time. You could start off by saying, look, I will do this for free or a certain amount and then after that it moves in. So that's what I would say is like people get distracted with just doing things on their laptop that aren't making them money. So they need to just be obsessed with winning clients. And business at first is probably going to be the key thing because that's like their biggest high value task. Yeah.

So I want to bring it back to the previous question I had and tie this in to the two options that you kind of mentioned where you can run a service based business or another form of business or work alongside one person for instance. So how do you know, meaning them, if they are suited for business, running an agency or maybe focusing with working with one person?

In my opinion, with that will be learn from someone else first. You got acquired knowledge and skill set. So yes, there's books you can read, podcasts and everything else, but if you can work alongside someone that is successful, you will learn way more in one or two, three years than you would be trying to set up your business first. And you haven't learned from any of them. Sakes you asking me about mistakes like you're going to have to go through all of them in the hope you're going to make money. 95% of businesses fail after five years, so the chances of you succeeding are very slim. And you see a lot of entrepreneurs that, well, they call themselves entrepreneurs and obviously they want to make a go of it. But to be a successful entrepreneur where you actually are a millionaire or multimillionaire, they're few and far between. And I think there's a lot more people that could be good entrepreneurs working for someone else first and just leveraging it. Because obviously you've got the, the nomad style freelancer and everything else. But if you could work with one person and find a way you can give them leverage and help them make more money in their business and get a percentage of that or like a profit share in something or that would be like an easy way to go. And then you acquire that knowledge and some finances and then you can start your business in two or three years time not make the mistakes you would have made. And you've also had a great experience, you've made some money so you can actually start with some starting capital. That would most likely put most entrepreneurs in a way better position. I think A lot of entrepreneurs now, they're not acquiring the muscle and the skill and knowledge. Like my entrepreneurial journey started young. I was buying and selling cars when I was like 17 on the doorstep. I was selling sweets and did clean easy catalogs, am on catalogs. I did everything from a young age. And then I went into employment. So I was having jobs. I worked in Asda supermarket at the start and a bakery. Then I worked just doing office admin. Then I worked, then I. Then I started my business, a coffee shop when I was like 21 that was successful, but then it failed because the lack of capital, lack of knowledge. I just had no clue how to pay all of the overheads, the bills go, the cash and carry every day. And it was tough because I didn't have a mentor guide and I didn't have any capital. So then I worked selling cars for years. Then I worked in recruitment for five years for someone else, but started working my way up, all the way to manager. Then I was ready to start my own agency, you know, and I already had the skills of being very good at what I did. And then I was still like having to learn all aspects of business while still having the skill set that could have made the money, you know, to fund the business. Like my real entrepreneurial journey started when I was like 27, I suppose, like starting my main business that created wealth. I'm thankful for that journey because if I hadn't had all of those years of customer experience selling cars and the coffee shop failing and these things, then it wouldn't have put me in a position where I could made that agency success. Younger entrepreneurs that are getting in, they just don't, they haven't put enough hours in, you know, you can't just watch it on YouTube and figure it out. You know, it's like, not like that. You need real life experience. You need to acquire knowledge through doing, not like just learning theory. Because if that was the case, then all of the people that got doctorates or master's degree in business will be successful business owners, but they're not.

How did you manage to maybe have time for social life or relationships or other things outside of business when you were starting versus now? And how would you maybe go about it differently looking back?

It's a good question. One thing I will touch on with that, I will always just give the advice of like, what I've lived through. So I would never say, well, not well, I did this, but you do that. I have to talk about the journey that got me to the success Otherwise it wouldn't be authentic. So at the start, like one thing that swings to mind, my old mentor, dan Pena, the $50 billion man, I spent many days at his castle and it's still ingrained in me is like there's no such thing as work, life balance, none. Like if you want to acquire wealth and money, you have to sacrifice everything else. At the start I did like in my agency, I was working 60, 70 hours a week because you work on the business and you're still learning. You're trying to do personal development, you're trying to meditate, you're trying to study, you're trying to do business outreach, hire team. There's so many things. So at the start, yeah, sacrificed relationship. At the time, like that was harder. You sacrifice like stress, you sacrifice some of your health. Like it's not good. Like you have to like there was times when I would try and balance things. I remember I would get up early, like 5am in the morning, try and go to the gym, have your green smoothie, make before work and these things. So but you do get overwhelmed because it is hard to balance. You need to acquire £100,000 of dollars in your bank account first and that will help you because obviously you've got to get your emotional bank account and financial bank account. You need the emotional one very high to attract the financial one. But obviously if you finance 1 0, you can meditate, use Law of attraction as much as you want and tell yourself you're rich and successful. Put like if you literally can't like afford many things, it's going to be very hard. Whereas I feel like there's so many, there's so much opportunity now in this generation with AI, the opportunity to work online, work wherever you want, start a service based business. There's no excuses to not being able to make 100,000 for sure in the bank account. Like you should be all be able to do that the first year or the first 18 months and then once you do that it's a great feeling. That was the best feeling. And then when you hit the million, yes, it's a good feeling. And then when you hit the 5 million it's a good feeling. But when the first 100k, like it gives you this breathing room that you don't need to stress over a client paying an invoice or winning another client or anything. So that's why I would say is just as fast as humanly possible. Doesn't need to follow your passion, just find a service you can provide that you've got good margin in that. You can deliver good service and go for that. Cool.

So for the people that have maybe reached that milestone, first 100k, what am I doing with it? Where am I allocating it? What would you recommend based on what you did?

Is not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, but it is at the time, you know, so like investing it, you could obviously looking back, compound interest, put it in the stock market, 8 9% returns or whatever and that'll double in seven years. So that'll go to 200K. But if you just invest all of that money in yourself and in your business, then you could easily get a much higher roi, you know. So again speaking from my experience was I didn't start investing that money in the stock market. No, I started investing in myself. Masterminds, mentors, programs and then also in the business, like to fund a business, a human capital, hiring a more team, buying a bigger office, all of these things. So like I would say you use the 100k. You keep some for a rainy day. You might put 10 or 20k in crypto or the stock market, but then the rest of the time put some in yourself and put it in the business. Because that's the best investment is in yourself.

Right.

And in your business it's never going to be in the stock market, but you can put a little bit in and just if you put in like a little bit away every month then yes. And you just forget about it. But that's not what's going to make you rich. That's what you keep the wealth and compounding over time. But you need velocity, you need a certain amount for that to compound.

So you touched on the point of emotional bank account. Like what is that? What does that mean to you?

That's your self worth, that is your self esteem. Okay. So most people fail from lack of self esteem, being told no when they've been younger and rejection and everything else. I can't do it. So you need to really build that up. So I recommend a book, Reality Transurfing. It's a great book that by Vadim Zeland and that really helps program your mind about positivity, energy, being away from energy, vampires, all of these different things. Like the emotional bank account is making sure that you believe that you can achieve it. All things are possible to him who believe it actually got that tattooed years ago. Yeah.

And say that for another time.

Yeah, you've got to, you've got to fill that emotional bank account up. So that's your Self belief, things like meditation, praying to God, looking after that inner self of yours to build that muscle up so you can withstand rejection, you can withstand the tough moments because money is not going to save you if you haven't got that build up as well. You need that as a strong foundation.

You talked about stress and sacrificing stress, right? So meaning you need to take on more stress, correct?

Early on, yeah.

So how did you actually manage that effectively? So it wasn't becoming a detriment to the growth of your business?

Yeah, it's a good question. And I mean there's been parts like looking back that I was very stressed. I sometimes I'll look at pictures of myself year two or three in the business and I was like wow, like I look older than I do now, I feel more vibrant now. So when people say money doesn't bring happiness but it certainly brings you choice in life and that's a choice that you can, you can't buy back your health but you can buy back more freedom to be in healthy environments like my penthouse in Marbella or wherever in the sunshine when it's winter in the. All of those things will help. You have to know that it can be stressful for sure. I don't think is younger generation are stressful. Like I'm 40 now so like I feel like I didn't have the online age where I could make money online and I know everyone says oh this era is different or whatever but I honestly generally believe I would be way richer now if I was starting now than before.

Why is that?

Well, because I couldn't. You couldn't reach out to anyone when, when I first started say my coffee shop, I couldn't, no banks would give you any loans. You'd have no way you can market online. You'd have no knowledge you could get from mentors potentially for free. So none of that. And then when I started my service based business there wasn't really automation yet or AI. But then I started implementing email automation when I found it and there's just so much opportunity now like to. You've got all the knowledge there, you just need the guidance from someone that's been there, done that and acquired and you just need the tenacity. So I think I remember When I was 17, 18, I was cold calling, knocking on doors, Pomeranians, freezing cold or whatever. I don't see any, no one's doing that now. Like there's people that are moaning about. I've sent 2,000 cold emails, James. I've got no clients Replies well, of course everyone's doing that. You need to do a little bit more than that, you know, have you done video outreach? Have you tried sending them a letter of gift or book? Have you tried meeting them in person? Have you tried to meet for a coffee or go to an event to see them? Like people, People got it easy, you know, and they're not prepared. They don't, they haven't seen how bad and how hard it's been in the past. Whereas like making money online now, it is just so much easier. Also because the remote generation since 2020, people aren't working in offices as much, so they're just sat on the laptop at home or wherever. So they're not in an environment where they know how to be around other people. Like for me, like a real business owner has had an office or had people in person and had employees. Like that is like running a real business, running a solopreneur business from behind your laptop. Just sending out emails to me is like you're not really learning the business fundamentals of. I mean I've had all sorts of my office affairs in my office, people sleeping with each other, people come in the office crying, having to fire people and they're just going wild. Hiring people you thought were normal and then you find out that they've got criminal records or been in a newspaper or something and everything in between. Hiring really good, experienced people for big wages and they don't perform form. So like all of that is like real like business. Like now the younger generation can make easier 10, 20k a month online every single month from a service and hire a few offshore. We, we have a big offshore remote team in South Africa. You've got so much leverage now where you can offshore a lot of the delivery to different parts of the world for a lot higher margin and profits.

Hope you guys enjoyed that. Part one. We'll be doing another part two tomorrow. But yeah, that was really insightful for me again. So we'll see you guys back with another episode.

See you soon guys.