The ego trap behind your £10 tasks 🪤 Gary Das

My early warning signs were driving home anxious, frustrated, almost blaming other— blaming them and the team rather than taking personal accountability for their behaviors, their habits, their day-to-day. So I think if you're externalizing everything and putting it onto others, actually, if you're a business owner, then it is your responsibility. Either you haven't put the right process in place or you haven't put the right system in place. I used to tell people what I wanted them to do. Instead, what I do now is I say, look, this is the problem I've got, Daniel. How do we fix it? So instead of giving them the answers, I get them to try and come up with the solutions, and then we funnel it down and we work on it. Would you like to solve it? Okay, what do you need from me to make that happen? If you believe that you're gonna fail, you will fail. Even though people might think you're stupid, even though people might think you're mad, you have to 100% back yourself and not allow any glimmer of doubt in. Otherwise, you won't succeed.

This week's Millennial Master is Gary Das, entrepreneur, mortgage expert, and founder of ActiveCRM. Gary built a 7-figure mortgage business with a team of 15. Revenue was up, the business looked successful, and yet he realized he's built a machine that depended entirely on him. So he did something most founders would struggle to do. He shut it down and rebuilt from the ground up, this time with systems, delegation, and a brand that could grow without burning him out. In this episode, we talk about why founders often become the biggest bottleneck in their own company, the 10-pound task rule that frees up your time fast, and how better leads, better systems, and better training change everything.

Gary, welcome to Millennial Masters. Where are you joining us from today?

I am currently in very rainy, unsunny Essex.

Well, just like the rest of the UK, I guess. So we can quickly brush past that. And I'm going to ask you, Gary, when did you clock that doing well was making you miserable? And what did you do afterwards? And how did you change your week and your month?

So I first clocked it in, well, probably 2012, when I was back to work 3 days after my first daughter was born. And that was because of the trap that I'd created myself and the big dependent business that I had on myself. I've been a mortgage broker for 20 years. Started in 2004. We got hit by— I went self-employed in 2006. And I was doing bad credit mortgages, which disappeared on, you know, 2009 time after the credit crunch. So I diversified and did life insurance and basically spent 10 years making mistakes. I was the first in, I was the last out. I did no marketing for 10 years. I bought all my leads, names, and numbers. I thought working harder, hustling, grinding, doing more activity would lead to more success. And it didn't. By the time I got to 2015, I'd had my most profitable year ever with a team of 15 people and 7 figures. But I absolutely hated the business because it was just all revolved around me. My ego meant that I recruited people with far less experience than I had because I wanted to train everybody the Gary Das way.

And yeah, it did carry your name, I guess.

Yeah, the, uh, it was one of those that in hindsight, you know, what I know now in the last 10 years, you know, since 2016, it's just there's, there's different ways in which you can do it. And ironically, The less you do, the more you seem to achieve.

And we're gonna talk about that in a bit.

Sounds good.

So when you realize that it was making you miserable, what did you change? What was the reset and the first decision you made that actually changed things? Cuz did you wake up with inspiration the next day and be like, okay, I'm gonna change everything. Was there like a book that inspired you? Did you, was there a, a podcast? What was it?

Yeah. So Tony Robbins was the person. So in having had my most profitable year ever, so there's two catalysts. In the April I had my most profitable year ever. It was the ideal time at that point with two daughters at that stage for us to move into the next house because the third one we knew was going to be not too far down the line. And I went to my bank and my bank said, you can't move, Gary, because you've left all the profit in the business and we only use salary and dividends. And needless to say, having been—

Don't I know it.

Yeah.

Yeah. Having been out of mortgages for 7 years, I phoned 180 lenders in 3 days and found this whole opportunity of moving into, you know, working with self-employed people. So I got a mortgage offer in July. We moved into this house that I'm in now in October. And I said to my team of 15, you've all got 3 months to find new jobs because I'm starting all over again as a self-employed mortgage expert, having done One Mortgage. What I'd been looking into, because I was—

that was—

you found a new niche, basically.

Correct. Yeah. I found a new new niche and an excuse to get back to mortgages. But I'd also been looking into at the early part of that year, like, why do I hate my business? Why do I feel so trapped? Why have I made all of this money and feel kind of emotionally drained, as it were? And that was when I found Tony Robbins and essentially realized that I was the problem. I was the bottleneck. The business had almost outgrown me. I hadn't grown with the business as an individual and as a person in my mindset and my behaviors and my habits.. And that's what again transformed and changed in January 2016 when I did start all over again.

And what did you think you had to be responsible for back then? There was naturally the staff you had, and you said you had 15 staff, and you framed it like you found a reason to move into a new direction. Did you feel stuck then before that?

Yeah, I felt, I felt really trapped, you know, £20,000 a month on low-quality life insurance leads. It was, if we weren't selling, You know, if I wasn't constantly filling up the bucket, then there'll be no profit dripping out of the bottom of that bucket. There was lots of competition coming in and I didn't know how to manage people. I hadn't done any development around managing people. You know, I'd always been a high performer.

At that point, you were in your early 30s. So everybody who started their business, so to speak, in their 20s, they had to learn along the way for that period.

Exactly. And yeah, I'd always been in roles where, you know, I've always been a good salesperson. So my, receiving of management was very much Gary doing a great job, keep hitting your targets. You know, that was as good as my management ever got. So I was very militant with the team because I was quite militant with myself. That's how I've been, I suppose, successful in some ways. But yes, it's just part and parcel of the journey. Now I would never change any of it because I wouldn't be where I am if I hadn't have done it.

You know, you mentioned one behavior which I recognized in, in my previous business life as well, which was you filling up the bucket at the end of the month because that's what it had to be it had your name on it, it was in the end your responsibility. Was that the main behavior that created revenue while quietly wrecking you?

I was certainly—

because that responsibility is there.

Yes. I was certainly still putting figures on the board in 2015, even though I had a team of, you know, what, 8 salespeople at the time, 8 life insurance advisors. But I still carried that attitude of no one can do it as good as me. You know, and what I realize now is I didn't actually give them much effort in terms of lots of ongoing consistent training. I didn't, you know, develop them as individuals in their roles as well as I could or should have done. And that again, you know, everything was one of those, well, if you can't do it, I'll do it. And that's not the right mindset to build a business.

And if somebody listening right now suspects they're in the same loop, what's like an early warning sign to look out for?

Ooh, good question. My early warning signs were very much driving home anxious, frustrated, uh, almost blaming other, blaming them and the team rather than taking personal accountability for their behaviors, their habits, their day to day. So I think if you're externalizing everything and putting it onto others, actually, if you're a business owner, then it is your responsibility either you haven't put the right process in place, or you haven't put the right system in place. And, you know, if you have a good process, you have a good system, then you can bring people in that manage the system and deliver the process. You know, if you've seen— have you seen The Founder, the documentary about McDonald's?

Is it a documentary or film?

Oh, yeah, film, film, kind of. It's a film slash documentary, if we go— it's definitely not documentary biopic style. Yeah, that's it. But you know, that's how they built McDonald's because it's just a perfect repeatable process. So I think if you haven't got that, and everything depends on you, and if you couldn't take a week off without looking at your mobile or without looking at your email, then that gives you an idea of what's the thing that you need to get rid of most to give you back your lifestyle and your freedom.

Let's go straight into that. Because what was the list of things you cut first? Like trying to keep it real and practical? Was it like tasks, meetings, clients, lead resources, what did you cut first? Yeah, staff, obviously.

Yeah. So 2016, after telling everybody to go and find new jobs at the end of 2015, I kept my PA because we had a really good working relationship. You know, I hadn't done mortgages for 7 years. She hadn't done mortgages at all because she was from an insurance business that I had. We just went gung-ho together. So the first thing everybody should get rid of is what I call the £10 tasks. Initially, you wear all the hats when you start a business, you know, and you do have to go through a hustle and a grind period of working all the hours and doing all the marketing and the sales and the admin and the finances, everything, all of it. But then you sit there and go, well, okay, let's get rid of some of the finance side. Let's get rid of the bookkeeping. Let's get rid of the invoicing. Let's get rid of the reconciliation. You know, you've got tech now with Xero and you can get a bookkeeper for £10, £15, £25 an hour. You know, you get rid of all of that side. Then you start to think, okay, what doesn't make money? So it might be in a mortgage sense, the processing of the application. It might be chasing the clients to get the bank statements or the details coming in. It might be answering the phone or booking appointments, which a lot of businesses have to do. So you start to bring somebody in, maybe even on a lesser hour period of time. You know, there are, in my experience, lots of mums who have had fantastic six-figure jobs in London, who have had children, want to get back to work because they like working, but just don't want the 9 till 5 hours. But their 10 till 2 hours or 10 till 2:30 hours, they'll be so much more productive than someone who's a, you know, 20 grand a year early startup, uh, newly admin— new administrator. Um, so that would be the second thing is just delegating then all the admin style, the admin processes. So you're only really dealing with how do I get new clients and how do I convert new clients?

So at the beginning when you had to cut quite a bit.

Yes.

Which cut felt risky, but then it turned out to be obvious.

Because in my 2016, I didn't do any social media at all. So I went on a gung-ho social media journey. So I posted every day for 6 months on Facebook. I started doing videos in the June of 2016. I started doing 30 lives in 30 days to get over my fear of video in the November of 2016. So the first thing I cut was I realized my value is being in that video. No one else could replace me in that video or in that piece of content, but how do I get it in front of more people? So fearfully, I recruited a social media apprentice. It was at the time just to do that initial editing, just to, you know, take a post from Facebook, put it on LinkedIn or take a video, edit it and put it on YouTube or even a Facebook Live at the time, you know, download the Facebook Live, edit it, put it on YouTube. And that felt a huge risk because, you know, I had no experience of bringing that person in. I hadn't edited much content. I wasn't really sure if that would potentially work. And it actually did because the average mortgage advisor in their first year does about £60,000 in turnover banked income.

Mm-hmm.

Lauren, myself, and Izzy did £325,000 because we were attracting the right type of clients. I was omnipresent everywhere, and it just meant that we got so many inquiries. It just really truly worked.

And was there anything that you kept doing longer that you should have because it fed your ego?

Good question. Was there anything I did longer that I should have got rid of because it fed my ego? I think ironically, sales.

Okay. Tell me, because we're going to go into this one next.

Yeah. Yeah. I think sales because we all come from an environment. Now, if you, if you're, if you're, if you've gone self-employed, there's nothing better than putting some numbers on a board and doing the deal. You know, but what I've realized now, my team of advisors is sort of 13 advisors as an example. If you've ever seen any of the Rocky movies, in all of those fights, he's punching and beating somebody up, and then all of a sudden, the guy who he beats becomes his trainer. And then in the last Rocky film, Rocky becomes the trainer of the young guy. And actually, in the journey of kind of business, you have to learn to take more appreciation for showing people a better way and for teaching other people the skills that you have, which I didn't do any of that in my first 10 years. So my ego kept me attached to sales because I liked putting the money on the board. But what I realized was actually if I trained 5 people, I could do more marketing and more brand and get 5 times the amount of leads in. And then I would see 5 times the amount of results by making them better as humans and individuals, you know.

And looking at your videos on social, your LinkedIn posts, low-quality leads are your bugbear. And you've spoken about spending serious money on low-quality leads. What makes a low-quality lead and what did you change to improve them?

So it's a, it's an industry thing for me where you can buy names, numbers, and email addresses like Money Supermarket where people go. You can buy a name and a number from those. You've got companies out there that will.

And I don't think many people know that.

Do not. Interesting. So like Checker Trader might be an example in the trades industry. There's, there's various companies that will, and what I realized for 10 years was I was paying marketing companies to get me leads. And all they were interested in was getting me leads because that's how they got paid and they justified their existence. They weren't bothered whether they answered the phone and became an appointment. They weren't bothered about whether they actually became a client. And you might have a 1 in 10 conversion off of the back of that. Flip the script from that perspective to working with referrals and recommendations. That's a high-quality inquiry because if you've done a job for somebody and you've done it fantastically well, and then they recommend you to somebody else, you know, those recommendations, those referrals, in contrast, will probably convert at maybe 70, 80, maybe even 90%, maybe even 100% over a period.

And I know Caroline, mine can hear it because I kind of like, I was the first one in the chain and then everybody around was like, Who did you use? And then everybody went to her.

Yeah.

And it's, it's the, what you, what I realized within that 2016 year on social media is not everybody's ready to buy now. You know, we're in, we're in an environment now where trust is at an all-time low because good old AI has come and, you know, made it possible for any old person to make a video. And my wife's on the other side of the spectrum to me. She hates social media. She's a bit of a voyeur. But her brain is very much, well, that's fake, that's fake, that's not real.

But she's also a millennial. We lived in both eras, pre-social media, pre-smartphone, and after.

Yes. So what I came to realise and stumbled upon in 2016 was actually the funnel, so to speak, of there's people who are thinking about buying a house or thinking they want to lose weight or thinking that they want this product or service or they have a problem. They don't just make an instant decision now. There's so many different touch points to take them from unaware of the problem right the way through to them wanting to buy and solve that problem. So I just realized to attract better quality clients, you need to build a brand. You need to be content marketing. You need to be showing a little bit of yourself as an individual, not just talking about your products and services because people buy people and the best leads that you can get or the best inquiries you can get are when you meet someone in person, when you have a networking event, when you get that referral and that recommendation. So if you utilize all these free tools that we have now with social media and email marketing and funnels and landing pages and just utilize those tools to build a list and nurture those inquiries, you might get someone to speak to now, but most people are probably ready to buy in 6 months to 2 years' time.

Because like you said, with your second or third house, it was somewhere from June to, or July to October.

That's it.

Almost 4 months. And just a little word of warning, and please correct me if I'm wrong, a big player in this process with the delays tend to be the solicitors, not the mortgage brokers. I think you'll agree with me.

100%. I'll agree with you in that case. We're in the process of moving now and we saw the house we wanted May. Uh, so 2025, May, we had, we were able to sell our house in the October. We were ready as well as everybody else in the chain was in the December. We're now February at the time of recording and, you know, we're still not in the new house yet. And it's just all the legal side. That's an absolute nightmare for people.

And there's always like a little path or a little something that they find around the house that needs to be sorted. I don't know. I live in a very old house. So there's like shared spaces, et cetera. I'm sure you've been through that one as well. Always. So let's go back to the leads and—

Yes.

They're important. They keep the business afloat.

Exactly.

Whether it's a lead for your SaaS product or whether it's a lead for your mortgage brokerage.

Yep.

Walk me through your lead handling process when it's working well, kind of like what's the speed to lead, follow-ups. Who owns that lead and who looks after it and where does it fit in the CRM? And maybe you can advise as well, please, CRM, because when you start with it, you're kind of like end up with the same and you can do a mistake and start with something that's too complex and then it will bring a lot of problems later on. So I'll pass this on to you because I know it's your specialty.

Yeah, so as a result of that, you know, all of my energy, all my effort, I won a couple of awards in our industry in 2019. And what happened was my industry started asking me for help. In 2019, I started teaching— would probably be the best word for it— other mortgage advisors how to do social media, how to—

Jason Gray style.

Yeah, exactly. Just started teaching other people in my industry how to do stuff. We obviously had a pandemic and I did some online coaching. I became a qualified coach and I did some online coaching. I ran masterminds for a couple of years where we used to get 30 people in a room every month for 2 years. But in the last 18 months, I've really created a hybrid model now. So we work with currently 65 mortgage broker businesses. They range from £10,000 up to £100,000 per month. And it's all about, you know, my brokerage has run on 1 hour of my time over the last 2 years because we've got a team of 19 in there now. I set the strategy, my ops manager delivers on the strategy, and then the team deliver the outcomes. When I talk to people about this, you know, the second book I wrote during the course of pandemic was The Lead Generation Guide. Uh, so my big thing for this to answer the question, but I wanted to give the context for your audience first, is you want to have a way in which when you're producing content, you want to have somewhere you can take them. So the first thing I prefer is a landing page. Uh, the technology that I've developed is called ActiveCRM. It does work for any industry, but we've got over 100 businesses that use it in financial services. Most marketers will tell you to get first name, last name, phone number, email address. That's great from a lead number perspective, but if you add 2, 3, 4, 5 questions to that, that creates a higher intent, so a better quality lead, but it also means you can ask more questions. So what type of business are you in? What's your income? Are you purchasing this with a business partner? You know, you can ask questions related. That will enable you after you've got that detail to then nurture them with more specific messaging, the nurturing them with email marketing. But what you want to have from a speed to lead perspective, you know, is as soon as that lead lands in the inbox, whether it's— I like 3 things. I like an ebook or a guide or something that people can read.

I then like a lead magnet.

Yeah.

Yes.

Correct. Well, these are all 3 lead magnets, but I like them to work in tangent because people like something they can read. And something they can look at or something they can kind of engage and get an understanding of. And then like having a second one, which is effectively some kind of quiz, some kind of scorecard, you know, Daniel Priestley has the quiz within or has the scorecard within ActiveCRM. We have a quiz functionality and that then enables them to say, okay, based on my problem and my solution, how am I doing? You know, where's, where's my issue? And then the third one is a video sales letter. So it's just about taking that information and saying, displaying it in 3 different ways. In my experience, if you get somebody to do all 3 of those, they buy from you.

So the other 2 are pretty clear.

Yes.

Tell me just a little bit more about the video sales letter. I think I've seen them, for example, in newsletters as well. People put a little intro video, like even say your YouTube channel has like a promo video that you can do and personalize. And funnily enough, that was, that for me, it was the first one that I've done solo with an intro and it feels like so cringe and possibly a lot of people will have that. Yeah.

So it's typically taking, you know, either 10 minutes, Jason Greystone obviously did one fantastically well for 2 hours.

Yeah.

They can be 10 minutes, they can be 2 hours. But the idea is, is have a core hook that's going to get them, you know, get the attention. Linked to the pain that they're playing or the solution that they're seeking. Have an intro so that you can meet them where they're at and say, so they're listening to it and going, oh my God, this guy knows me, or this girl knows me. This is for me. And then break it down into 3 steps or 3 key phases or 3 problems, 3 solutions, and then just have a call to action at the end, which gives them an opportunity to book a call or take a quiz or something like that. When those 3 things work really well, you hit the read, the watch, and the do, which are the main 3 things that people like to interact with. And after each one, you know, speed to lead, you want to have an email, you want to have an SMS, you want to have a WhatsApp, whatever your audience prefers. And then you can start to, you know, utilize tags in CRM system or automations in the CRM system to—

some of them are so complex. It's like a whole SAP implementation just to have a CRM and Try and track a couple of emails in your head.

So the key thing is, is, is if you were to build a house, it would take you months. You know, you start with an architectural design of a house and then you lay the foundations and then you build the externals and then you put the internals in and then you go and do all the fixtures and fittings and it takes a year, 2 years, however long. It's the same when it comes to building out these things into your business. If you look at the end and say, my God, I need 3 lead magnets, one's a video, one's a quiz, one's this, I need emails, I need that. It's all a layering process. You know, I had none of this stuff in 2016. I just read a lot of Russell Brunson books and built, you know, built my own first version. And every year, if you ticked off one of those things each year, by the end of 3 years, you've got 3 things in place that are going to bring you better quality clients. So it's the journey, not the destination.

Gary, I wanted to ask you again, getting those leads. A lot of people think organic leads, but as I've written and quoted many branding and marketing experts at a global level for the newsletter part of Millennial Masters—

Yes.

The organic reach is almost dead if you don't use a certain format, style, which can change pretty much every quarter when somebody tinkers with the algorithm just to make something new. So in the end, you still end up to pay because there is very little competition left between the social media giants.

So we run ads once a month, typically, only to our most engaged audience. So pretty much everything that we do is from an organic standpoint, or what I like to think of organic as it's an investment of time versus an investment of money. So I think if you can, every social media channel wants to keep you on that specific channel. They don't want you, you know, sharing.

Go anywhere. Yeah.

No, they don't want you going anywhere else. It's an attention era that we're in. And the beauty of algorithms now is the content that you create, the hooks that you put on the screen, the captions that you have, the language that you use, the algorithm.

Yeah.

No, but the algorithms now will go and find those ideal clients for you. But we are moving more and more with more content being created into a pay-to-play era. So even boosting your content to get it in front of people is, is, you know, does speed up the, uh, the side, but I'm still a huge fan of in-person, like get yourself to events. I think if you can get, get yourself to events, meet people in a human sense, instead of giving them a business card, get them on your social media where they can then see you more consistently. Have conversations in the DMs. It's more proactive. But if someone's liking your content, engaging with your content, if someone's following you, just send them a nice little happy message and start a relationship and a conversation. That is more controllable than spending a budget.

So what would you say founders get wrong about marketing when they get tired? Because they try to play this game and kind of like do the cat and mouse and run around their tail to do whatever the new algorithm or the new marketing guru on the internet tells you— I'm not naming names, because everybody tends to follow the same recommendations to a certain point. What do you observe that they get wrong?

Wanting to get the now buyers all the time. That's right. Wanting to get the now buyers all the time. That was my issue for 10 years.

You know, you want to sort of like click and then like buy and that's it. No, nothing else.

Exactly that. Exactly that. As soon as the lead comes in, I've got to convert them. I've got to make money. Of course, want that, but the real money is in the follow-up. The real money is in the people that are gonna buy in 6, 12, 18, 24 months' time. So really building that community, building that list, nurturing those relationships. And actually something I think that'll be relevant for your audience based on what you said, I think we've moved into a phase now with social media or with organic, mm-hmm, whereby actually too highly edited, too highly scripted, is becoming too inauthentic. If you look at The Rock or Kevin Hart or James Smith, as a few people in fitness, or, you know, that I kind of follow and watch quite a lot.

Rogan.

Joe Rogan. They just grab their phone and just talk to it and don't overthink it. Mel Robbins is fantastic at this as well.

You know, she just, That one feels a bit more produced, but yeah, they're like in a, yeah, more a studio that doesn't look like somebody's garage.

Yeah. And it looks like they've got their phone kind of just down here, you know, just talking to it rather than it all set up. They leave in the fumble of the words. I was watching a James Smith YouTube video the other day and he was like talking to his editor in the video, basically saying, hey, look, I know I just messed that up, but leave it in if you want. I'm not really bothered. And then it went back to the episode. And it was like, just be more human, be more authentic. The great thing about podcasts is, you know, you can keep everything in and you don't have to remove stuff and it comes across in a more natural, authentic way, which I think is why more people are watching long-form content now because you can build a relationship so much quicker.

And for those who wouldn't have heard it, I had a couple of coughs earlier and I edited them, but Gary just mentioned them. So you know that there is still a light touch of editing in the background there.

You have a very eloquent cough, Daniel, but I don't think we all need to have our eardrums damaged with that.

Absolutely. So we're brushing past that now. So then you started developing new systems to scale your business. You went back to 2 or 1.5. What was the first hire that brought back your time? Because then you had to refocus everything onto what you built.

Yeah.

So it's always going to be the PA. I think everybody should go and get one person to support them, you know, deliver out all the £10 tasks. I would also, in the recruitment process, I tell my clients in the, in the training and consulting side now, it's like, don't go and get yourself an administrator. Don't go and get yourself a client success person. You know, while you might want that client success role seems a bit, yeah.

Anyway. Yeah.

You know, while you might want that role, if you go and get and advertise for a personal assistant, you will get somebody who is highly productive and also is rather than reactive, more proactive. They'll be inclined to want to take things from you, you know, rather than wanting to, for you to spoon-feed them all the time. You know, my good friend Emma Mills runs a PA company. I think you've had her on here before.

Emma has also been on the podcast.

Yes.

Emma's, Emma's awesome. I'll link the episode with that as well.

Yeah, Emma's absolutely awesome. You know, she runs a fantastic company in Manchester called MyPA, and you can go and outsource your PA services to get your phone calls answered, to get your invoicing done. You don't need to go and—

And she said she starts with the inbox and the hundreds, if not thousands of emails that you have to deal as a founder, because you basically have what technically is called the catch-all email.

Exactly. So you tidy up your inbox and then you can start to delegate other things out. And it's, that's just getting back time. From lower value stuff that anybody can do is just the biggest, biggest thing you need to learn to do in business.

So the first hire, if they don't have one, is a PA that they would need, whether it's through a contractor or through directly.

Correct.

So then how do you decide when a task needs a system and when it needs a person to do it? Because I think that can also be tricky. And sometimes, at least in the past, they were mixed in my head.

So say that again. How do you decide when a task needs a system to be done? Gotcha.

You know, maybe like an AI agent that we can certainly touch into that, at least in 2026, or when it needs like the human touch and is a person to do it.

Yeah. So it's really important that the tasks you're getting rid of maintain that personal relationships with individuals. So There are lots of things that you can automate and you can now put through CRM systems. You know, we have text messages that go out, we have reminders, we have emails to get people to show up for appointments. We have some emails within the automations that might introduce another member of the team, but I think it's always worth having a template that you might have within a piece of technology, but then someone edits that template before it goes out to make it more human, to have that interaction. People are skeptical now, like you said, about the inbox. People are more skeptical about what's going into their inbox. They're more—

you can easily sink half a day in there. I was away for a couple of weeks and I came, even though I was scanning over things, and it's like a solo business as it stands, 1,478 emails.

Wow, that's a lot of emails. A lot of emails.

They quickly add up. And, you know, even just a simple filter would keep those tidy.

Yeah. So I think it's just really important to think if, if something went wrong with this process, because that's what you're doing, you're taking a process, and you're giving it to a piece of tech or a piece of team. So it's either going—

Yeah, I called it a system, but you call it a process. Yeah.

Yeah.

So you take a process and you then either give it to a piece of tech, a system, or you give it to a member of the team. I always believe that if that is going to, if it went wrong, would it hinder your Google reviews? If it went wrong and it hindered your Google reviews, then that may be something you want a human to take care of and hold on to a little bit longer. You know, AI can still make mistakes. If it was going to be something that was going to hugely, if it's something consistently that you're repeating and having to do, you know, then there are opportunities to use technology. A simple example would be calendar booking. If you're back and forth with somebody on WhatsApp trying to get them booked into your calendar, say, what, let me give you this link and it will automatically book you in. As you start to get busier and as you get a bigger business and maybe you've got more people and more demand on your time. Then you might say, well, actually, I'm not going to use that link anymore. I'm going to give it to a PA who's going to control my life a little bit more and help to organize things that little bit easier. So, you know, tech is probably the cheapest solution initially, and then team would go to thereafter.

And what's your minimum bar for saying this process is ready to delegate now from you as a founder to another member of staff or through a system?

The key thing is documenting it first. So you need to, you need to document it out and have almost like a, the recipe. Someone should be able to pick that up and actually document it down and keep clear note of it. So that's the minimum first point. One of the best things you can do is create a spreadsheet whereby on that spreadsheet you have 5 columns, Monday to Friday. And then you create 30-minute increments from 8 o'clock in the morning until 8 o'clock at night, for example. And then just track yourself over the course of a week and put into there all the things that are, you know, you're doing. One, it'll be quite eye-opening to see where you're wasting time.

Two, observing yourself when you're, when you're in the, like, sick of it, you don't think about that one.

Yeah, but it's, it's one of the best things you can do because you can do, once you've done it, You've got a full look at what your week looks like. You can go, right, first thing, what do I actually love on this spreadsheet? And what do I actually hate and detest doing? Like, what have I procrastinated over? What have I not enjoyed? And you can mark those as a little red, green, and amber, for example. You know, that gives you an idea of, okay, you know, do I need to do this task? Do I need to delegate this one or do I need to delete it? Second thing you could do is actually, you know, look at it and go, well, Does this raise my energy or does this drain my energy? Now, if it's draining your energy, there's someone else who's going to absolutely thrive on that side of it. I know numbers, data, accounts, that drains a hell of a lot of people's energy. So get it done.

Thankfully, it's only like once or twice a year, depending how you do your accounts. Because if it would be that, if that would be a monthly task, then I think many more founders would sport my haircut.

Or mine going gray.

I've got that in the bid as well.

So, you know, it's, it's one of those that if you do that as an itemized thing, it will give you an idea of the key things that you can actually get rid of. And you could say, okay, amazing. If I actually got rid of all of these things, I can create myself another hour a day, another 10 hours per week. And then you can say, okay, which one of these, if you create a little bit of a list, can I give to team or tech? And slowly but surely, you can start to create more capacity and you can either use that capacity to go and drive new leads, a new brand, a new appointment, or maybe go to the gym a little bit more, go and have a walk, go on a date night, go and watch sports day. You know, as long as you don't go and spend all of it on your lifestyle, you need to cover the cost of what you're paying out in tech or team, you know, but you can start to remove yourself slowly but surely.

And I'm going to start throwing a curveball here, Gary. This wasn't in, in my original list of questions. Which, by the way, if anybody wonders, Gary didn't see, didn't get to see them. But I had a previous guest recently at the beginning of the year, actually, and she had a copywriting agency. And in the end, she replaced all her staff with AI as she saw that there is, there are certain tasks or certain things that AI can do better with better prompting and simpler prompting from herself rather than allowing somebody with, in a way, no interest to grow in learning how to use AI better to improve their work and then passing it as their own. Although we're not going to go into the discussion about who owns what, if you directed the AI to do something, that's a whole different kettle of fish. We could be here for two podcasts and we wouldn't finish with that. So the curveball comes now. Are any of these processes that you're mentioning now, or that you've been going through your business, that now you're starting to think, actually, now I don't need a human. I need a human just to oversee certain things, and I can have AI doing certain things.

Most definitely.

Or is it a bit more delicate in this industry?

Yeah, it's definitely more delicate in the financial services industry, for sure. You know, we've got AI web chat. If someone lands on our website, then there is an AI human that will, you know, an AI that will interact with you on the website and then convert you to having a conversation or create a task for the team.

Mm-hmm.

So there's that initiation, but through a lot of our journey, we're speaking to insurers, mortgage lenders, we're speaking to solicitors, you know, so that is general communication and conversation that typically happens via sending an email or making a phone call. Certainly in the training side and in the consulting business where I've got 6 people currently, you know, we are getting rid of a hell of a lot of tasks and a hell of a lot of activities. So, you know, reporting, reporting has all been AI'd and built into dashboards using AI to pull data from one system. Build it into another system. Our telephone has transcripts off of the back of the transcripts. It goes into AI, puts it in a much better template in a much better order and creates tasks and activities off of the back of it as to what to do next and how best to manage it. Content creation, YouTube titles, podcast descriptions, you know, the people who win with AI are just the ones.

LinkedIn posts.

Yeah, correct. So yeah, I think everybody should be using AI to save time and get more done, but AI is just an enabler really. It will just speed things up.

And you said that training people remains one of the key parts. And I'm curious from your perspective, what did you learn about training people that surprised you versus the traditional business wisdom or impression that you had? In pre-2016, pre-that reset?

Nobody works for you. They work for themselves. So I didn't realize that in my first 10 years. They're there because they want to make their money. They want to go on their holidays. They want to, you know, have their lifestyle and everything else. And I always wanted to train people in the early days to make them better at their job, to make me more money. What I now realize is actually if you help people to grow, you know, I mentioned earlier, I didn't grow. So therefore my business didn't grow, you know, almost a business outgrew me because I didn't level up as a leader or a delegator or a manager or anything at all, even as a marketer or a salesperson.

That your role changes as well as you, as you bring people in.

So, so in the last 2 years, last 10 years, it's been very much a case of, well, if I help my team to grow as human beings, to become better in their own personal lives, to level themselves up. You know, when we're kids, I've got 4 of them under 13, they're constantly learning. They're constantly taking in information. We go from laying flat on our backs to then crawling, to then walking, to then running, to then gaining knowledge about subjects. And my kids come home from school and then tell me about the things that they've been learning that day. You know, they're so excited by being able to pass on that knowledge. And that's really what I've come to realize with my team is just saying to them, you know, what do you want from the next 12 months? Right. This is what we need to do in order to be able to get you there from that perspective. That's going to raise your salary. But in order to do that, you need to upskill in these areas. You need to develop in those areas.

I want to say, how do you spot a canned response when it comes to that?

How do I what?

Sorry? Spot a canned response that's like too standard or too generic. That's, that's just meant to answer to the boss.

Yeah, I think, I think you just have to ask why, why, why is the biggest, biggest question. I think equally now, I used to tell people what I wanted them to do. Instead, what I do now is I say, look, this is the problem I've got, Daniel. How do we fix it? So instead of giving them the answers, I get them to try and come up with the solutions and then we funnel it down and we work on it. And then, okay, what do you need in order to be able to come, you know, would you like to solve it? Okay, what do you need from me to make that happen? And then looking to enhance them and develop them to better improve them.

But they still come to you, say, for the validation of the solution they propose, but they come to you with a solution rather than a problem. And I use that saying a lot of the time, and I think it can frustrate a lot of people. How did you overcome that? Because the first 3 times of saying it, it can also kind of like seem rude. They can take it personally versus no, this is to help you grow and develop your skills.

Yeah, I think that comes back to the culture and your values and your recruitment process. Like I had none of that in the first 10 years. We were almost a boiler room or a Wolf of Wall Street kind of culture in my first 10 years.

Remember, there were loads of other things that were happening in that film, not just the phone calls.

Mum's the word, I'm saying nothing. But, you know, I think it's more about knowing your values, knowing what your mission is, what you're looking to achieve, and reinforcing that and making people live by them. You know, I recently went out to early January, I went and spent 2 days with Alex Hormozi's team. So I went to their scaling workshop in Vegas.

And okay, let's share with people a little bit how that, how that—

yeah, so it's, I went there, flew out to Vegas, you know, 9-hour flight. You went in, I was in the room, classroom for 2 days. I would say 80% was information I'd heard before, but repackaged in a different way. 20% was kind of new. But I was really—

you can't reinvent the wheel when it comes to selling.

And scaling businesses is a process. It's a system. It's a methodology. And they were just walking you through their interpretation of that methodology and that principles that they put into place. But the question that I asked everybody, all, so we got the opportunity on day 2 to sit down with the head of marketing, head of sales, head of culture, head of brand, head of product, head of delivery, you know, so we had, I think it was 6 or 7 masterminds. My first question was always, why are you here? And the answer was always, we don't need the money. We're all successful. You know, I've done this, I've done that. I've built this, I've built that. I've got X number of properties, whatever. I'm here because of Alex and Leyla. That was always the answer number one. And the secondary point was I believe in the mission and I align to the values. Like they're so bought into the destination and the outcome and the goal of what is it, making business education available to everybody, I think, or something like that is their mission. But they were just all in on that journey to go on that together. What reinforced my understanding over the last 10 years is you need to have a bigger vision than your team is, you know, than your team have got. It needs to be something outside of your revenue and your profit. And you need to get people to align to that and give them their specific part of that machine. That is the bit that they can grow and develop and control and come up with the solutions to the problems in that area that help them to develop and grow to, you know, achieve those. And if someone doesn't want to, then maybe they're not right for your culture and you have to get rid of them and get somebody else.

I agree. And I was just thinking about how much of a control freak you can become. During that period as well, trying to, in a way, monitor, say, the output or the quality, overall quality control, which comes back at you, even though directly you give them the freedom to do a range of things. In a way, you can like supervise it quietly or look at some of the key indicators that show you that the business is getting healthier, which brings me to the question of when you are scaling and systemizing your business through that, which indicators people should really look at versus say just the, um, monthly revenue, which is still one of the most important ones.

Yeah.

But you can still have revenue, which appears a lot at the beginning of the month, but by the end of the month, and this was something very recently in one of the popular articles I've had on Millennial Masses newsletter, If your pricing isn't right, you can sell everything and overreach your targets, but it's still not enough money in the business.

Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's just really important to get people to have clear objectives for the role that they're doing. And often you see too many of them. You know, you get someone doing 10 things, it just leads to headless chickens and causes confusion. I did that in my first 10 years, trying to be cheap. Whereas actually, you know, hire experts. Yeah. Get them to do 3 or 5 things, do them fantastically well.

And would you recommend fractional for that? Obviously back then fractional wasn't really a thing.

No, definitely not.

It's much more of, I would say, a development post-pandemic, maybe.

Yeah, fractional.

I'm sure it existed before as a concept, but in terms of hearing about entrepreneurs using it and tapping into those pool of talent is a much newer development.

Typically what I see with fractional though is they're not someone who implements or does, there's someone who oversees and supports. So depending on the phase of business you're at, you know, you might need an implementer, someone who can actually do the specific task or action. So knowing if you've got a team of people, that's a good opportunity to bring a fractional in because they can, you know, in marketing, You might have a social media person, an email marketing person, an app person, an SEO person, and that's 4 people. Well, you might be trying to deal with all of those 4. Well, you might go, well, actually, let's bring a fractional person in because they can drive the strategy and they can help guide those 4 people on the direction. That fractional is going to be better than me, you know, fractional CMO as chief marketing officer. But certainly it depends on the phase of business you're at because you need doers in the early phases and you still need doers. It's just whether you want to manage the doers or not.

And I'm going to ask you as well, because at least 3 other people came to mind who said that some of the early hires and those doers, when the business evolves, it's not necessarily that they get left behind, but there's no particular role left for them because they are in a way so multi-disciplined across different parts of the business. And then you want to bring more specialists into that particular niche. How did you deal with that?

Allow them to choose their specialism or move them into management. So it really—

that frees up more of your time.

Correct. Correct.

Yeah.

You, you know, they level up, they begin to manage. I've just gone through this process. We had, I had a social media manager who did everything on the, you know, socials. And then behind him, he had an editor and we were running our podcast. We were running our YouTube. We were running our social media. All of our short-form content, all of our written posts, you know, all went through Kiefer, my social media manager. And then he had somebody who did all the editing and the recording behind the scenes. We've now sat there and had a conversation with him, and he was like, I think we can do better if my whole job is social, Instagram, Meta. And then when Monty moved on to another job, you know, we got somebody who's just purely for YouTube and podcast. That's the decision that we've done. And I'm pretty confident already, you know, Keith has got more energy. He's more lit up. He's more excited by socials. I've just done a recording session this morning, recorded 3 podcast episodes and 3 YouTube videos for the channel. And, you know, he's more energized.

I've done 2 most in one day. So you're doing—

Yeah, yeah. 3, 3 this morning, 4 now with you.

Plus, yeah, yeah. There we go.

So, you know, that's, um, that again, I think You can transition people, but you have to get them, they have to be bought into the journey. And you can't tell them where they want to go. You almost have to allow them to choose if you want them to double down in one specific area.

And is there like, still a part of the business right now in this current format that still triggers the old version of you that wants to take control of everything? Ooh, is there? Because if there's nothing that triggers you, I want to ask how you got there. So either way, We're still having this question through.

So having the 3 businesses now, I've certainly come to realize that you can only give true focus to one thing at a time. It's impossible to—

so whatever Elon says is not true.

I think when you get to a certain size, I think if you've got a big team, you know, Daniel Ionescu's got what, 8, 9 companies. But if you're in the early phases, it's fine as you, if you can go and buy one or if you build one, it runs autonomously, and then you move on to the second. My mistake was 19. I started running two side by side. So I also have a bit more love for one than I do other. I think.

And you declared it by the sound of it.

Yeah. Yeah. And you know, my CRM, my coaching and consulting has done absolutely brilliantly over the last 18 months because that's where my attention, my focus has gone.

Mm-hmm.

In my brokerage though, I kind of abdicated it to a degree because my attention was over here on, on the thing that I really love and enjoy more so, whereas now my attention's back onto the brokerage and where a bit of old Gary has come out probably this year is in seeing processes and systems that I had trained and taught people on a year ago or two years ago, not being followed and not being executed. To the high standards that I do have. But I'm also very fortunate that I observed this. I knew this was coming last year. So my sales and operations manager joined 10 days ago, and it's now his problem to dive in and fix and bridge the gap between me and them. So as you begin to elevate yourself, you know, you need to recruit people towards your weaknesses and bring in people that are very, very specific. So that would be what I'd say. It was my own doing. It was my own abdication that caused me to revert back to me. But I've also used it to my advantage because I sent a full detailed report of some issues that I found on Tuesday. I played bad guy to my team. Morale was really down from what I've understood. But in doing that, it allowed Rob, the new sales and ops guy, to go in as good cop. And build morale back up and create big accountability, you know, build him as a new person. He's only been in the business, everybody else has been in it for 2+ years, you know, build him up in his role that he's there to help support. And I think going forward now, if you recruit people correctly and you give them autonomy over the outcomes, I don't think that will happen again.

And Will Paulston also was, was one that with delegation, like All the guests' names now start ringing bells when you, when you mentioned this. Gary, I'm wondering then, looking back, what was the hardest part in reinventing or in a way pivoting your business?

Getting rid of a six-figure profit business, having just moved home to start all over again in 2016.

So that was also the ego part.

It was just, it was the hardest, it was the hardest part from, you know, I had a successful business that I hated. But we'd just doubled our mortgage. We'd just moved into a new house. And it was, I had to put myself first, you know, and my mental health first, shall we say, to go all over again.

So the hardest part was, you know, taking that big risk, but because you fought for 10 years to build a stable business so you don't feel like things depend from one week to another, one month to another, and then you had to do it all over again, but with even more overheads, with, with even a bigger risk, a big family by that point.

By 2 kids and bigger mortgage. And I had to make it work because equally, you know, we wanted to move home and it was that scenario of, we've now, I've made all of those challenges and all of those efforts having not done a mortgage for 7 years, you know, to give my life or my wife the lifestyle that she wants, the kids better schools, because that was a big consideration. The school that we wanted was near this house that we're in. And you know, there's me going, I've got no income really. I've gotta start all over again and try and pay for this now.

Yeah.

But I think it's really important for anyone listening to this, you know, a boxer doesn't walk into a ring thinking they're gonna lose the fight. If you believe that you are gonna fail, you will fail. So even though people might think you're stupid, even though people might think you're mad, you have to 100% back yourself and not allow any glimmer of doubt in. Otherwise, you won't succeed. You know, you've just got to, you've got to burn your boats, as Tony Robbins says, and just go for it. All in, balls to the wall.

And that's a perfect ending thought for this episode, Gary. I love it. How you're going to do it, you still got to do it in your head and not let that self-doubt go. Everybody I've asked about it and everybody who mentioned it, don't have a particular method. Unless you repeat it in your head, it won't happen. And it's not about manifesting or anything else like that in the, in the woo-woo territory, because you need to believe in yourself. So I'm glad to hear that you've come to the same conclusion as well.

Definitely.

Thank you so much for sharing your journey and your learnings so far. And I'm looking forward to see what you're going to be building next.

And thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to come on, share with your audience. I hope you've all found it valuable. And yeah, you're a really good interview, Daniel. It's been a pleasure.

Thank you. And then of course, it'll be in the show notes, links to Gary's books, his podcasts, and everything else.

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