We're Scaling Ali Abdaal’s Business to $10 Million (Here’s How)

I've been trying to figure out what metrics that matter in our business. If we could measure number of lives changed, that would be sick.

As you reach certain levels, you just switch and you make your audience the hero.

You are not the hero, you are the guide. Meet the biggest productivity expert on the internet.

So today you want to talk about scaling your business?

Yes. He has changed millions of lives. We did $5.5 million revenue last year. I would love for us to go towards $10 million. This is today. It's sort of like we've got the Ali Abdaal company and this is future. You can almost think of it as like a solar system. You have these planets that are around you. I'd love to get these businesses to a point where the business is the entity that's providing the value. Golden eggs, goose. Our YouTube videos are golden eggs, but I'm the goose. So me having a nice time and enjoying this process is really important for the long-term sustainability of our business.

This is something that I'm trying to learn. All the time. Move fast and break things versus go slow to go fast. Because you have the solar system approach, you could kingmake on a new business much faster than anyone else.

Oh, that's a really good point.

I can shine the sun on this thing and look at that.

I feel like I've got my money's worth for bringing a podcast. Great.

Ollie, welcome to the very first episode in the studio.

Thanks for having me. This is one of my favorite podcasts these days, 'cause it's like so applicable to the struggles that I'm going through.

That's the goal.

Yeah.

When I'm recording episodes, my target audience is very specifically you, Mark Manson, Bonnie Christine. There's like just a very short list. And that's who I think about of like, would this be useful for Ollie? Probably one of the most popular episodes I've ever done as a guest on someone's show is the episode that we did together in your studio in London. And that's one that like continually I get all kinds of things on, so.

That was a cool episode, yeah. That was a good one.

I think the writing 1,000 words a day is what everyone's hung up on.

Yeah.

How's your writing?

I still haven't managed it. I did it for about—

I haven't since then.

So I did it for about a month after that episode. Okay.

That's 30,000 words.

I have all my Ulysses screenshots and stuff. And I had to like make, you know, there'd be days where I was like, okay, I've only got 500 words. So let me put in, you know, captions for my Instagram. Yeah, that counts. And then I'd just do a load of captions and then I wouldn't do any more captions for a few weeks. But I managed to hit like 1,200 words again on the same word count tracker on the flight over here.

Oh, nice.

It's all happening. I love it.

So today you want to talk about scaling your business.

Yes.

And we're going to try out this studio. We can get up and diagram some stuff there if we want. What's the problem that you want to tackle first?

Good question. Where do we want to start? So we did like $5.5 million revenue last year, and I would love for us to go towards $10 million. Probably not by the end of this year, but maybe by the end of next year. I still feel kind of weird about having like revenue goals, 'cause I've spoken to different people about this. Some people are like, oh, revenue goals are good because then you can work back from it. Other people are like, revenue goals are bad because it's not a good north star to have 'cause there's like a zillion ways to make money. And actually you should really think about like the service and the impact and stuff. So like on a broad level, what are your thoughts on revenue goals?

I like them. I think it just provides clarity. 'Cause if you're saying, hey, I'm trying to build a valuable business, And then your team is like, cool, how are you measuring that? Or we're just trying to have a big impact. And you're like, all right, on 1 person? On 10,000 people? At what scale? And so I like specificity in numbers all across the board because it leads to shared context. It's like when I was very first negotiating my first salary for a job, I had no idea what a good salary was. I'd freelanced, and so I could think in terms of hourly rates and what was good. I just had no idea. And so it was actually someone saying like, here's a book on salary negotiation. Like, here's what you should expect. Here's market rates. And so I think that that shared context is really, really important. And so I set revenue goals because I think that it just gives that clarity and shared context.

Nice.

Now there's something in if you only optimize for that, like the order of the metrics really matters. It's like for ConvertKit, We have two main metrics that we care about. The first is helping creators earn $1 billion through ConvertKit Commerce. And then the second is getting to $100 million in annual revenue.

Nice.

And I think it's really important the order that those are in.

Yeah.

Because if I said our most important goal is $100 million in annual revenue, the creators winning may or may not happen within that. But if we get really good at helping creators make money, and we get to the point where it's like, okay, we've paid creators $1 billion, then I'm pretty confident that a byproduct of that will be our own goals.

That's interesting. So I've been going back and forth about this for years to try and figure out like what are the metrics that matter in our business? And some people would say, well, is it monthly views? Is it like, you know, like Lewis Howes' thing in School of Greatness is serving 100 million people a month. That's like, you know, that's nice, that works.

Yeah, it's a good catchphrase.

But then like views, all of the downsides associated with views.

Is it subscribers?

Well, no, because subscribers go up but views don't necessarily go up. Is it email subscribers? Well, no. Eventually I landed on like, it would be sick if we could measure number of lives changed. Yeah, that would be sick. And so at one point we were thinking about like, okay, what would it take to do that? Like, to have some sort of form where every now and then we're like, hey, has Ali Abdaal changed your life? If so, fill out this survey and let us know. And then there's things like that.

Have you actually tried to implement that?

We haven't tried. It's been an idea in the back of my mind for about a year, and just the— all of the Oh, but like it's hard to measure and stuff has just gotten in the way of me actually making it happen.

Yeah, 'cause you would never measure the full impact that you had. At best you'd measure 5% maybe, I don't know. It's a made up number, right? But like people who implemented a change that they attribute back to you who actually fill out the form is going to be relatively low. I think what's interesting with metrics is whether you're tracking an absolute number or a trend, So for example, a common question people will ask is like, oh, what's your NPS score? So net promoter score for this product. And they want to compare like, oh, your business has a 74 and my business has an 83, you know, and we're assuming that one business is better than the other. But that's a metric that you should not compare across businesses because it's not apples to apples, but it's very good for comparing your own trend because then you're pulling from a similar sample size. Customer base, product style, and all of that. So I would think of like lives impacted as a metric that's not really useful in the absolute number in the abstract. You know, you impact 50 million lives a month and Lewis impacts 100, right? It doesn't make sense to compare within that. But it could really make sense to compare a trend against your own data over time.

That could be fun.

Who knows if it's the right metric or not, But if we pick that metric and optimize for it, what happens? So I'm curious for you, what would be the downstream effects if that was the metric you're optimizing for? Is really people filling out this form telling you whether or not—

We would be spamming that form in a lot of places. That would be the natural consequence of trying to optimize for that specific metric.

Okay, and then what would happen down from there, do you think?

Well, we'd get people to fill out the form, which would be nice. We would increment a counter on a, I don't know, website somewhere, a bare metrics version of like, yeah, exactly.

Lives impacted. You'd make a neat YouTube video about it.

Yep. And we would then have to keep on mentioning the form and it would have to become part of the ritual of the company where like every quarter we're like, hey, by the way, we've got this form. Eventually people might get sick of it or feel weird about it.

You'd have to find a way to bring it up that's natural and a good fit.

So if people fill out the form and give us some details of what specific change they made in their lives, we could be like, oh, okay, that's interesting. We can maybe talk more about that sort of stuff. So it would help inform idea generation for some of our content. Bit of a flywheel type thing potentially. But realistically, we can get that data way easier through asking the audience, what would you like to see a video on?

And so— Maybe, those are two very different questions, right? 'Cause I would like Ollie to provide this content for me because I think that will impact my life. That's basically what you're asking when you're like, hey, what should we make content about? It's a very different thing when you're asking, hey, what changed your life? And it's like, oh, it was actually this. And I'd love it if you talked about that more. Right? You're getting feedback from me as the viewer, but in two totally different ways. And one is going to be like the very conscious, active brain, you know, of like, oh, I was trying to learn this new tool and I'd love it if you did something like that. Like it's very recent, it's urgent, it's timely, and it's probably shallow. And the what changed your life, what, impact did it have, I bet it's on a much longer time horizon. And I bet it comes much more subconscious and much deeper than, hey, could you do a video on this software product that we just wanted to learn last week?

Yeah, that's a good point.

I think if you pursue the metric, it would be really interesting. Sometimes when you optimize for a metric, the downstream implications or side effects are kind of boring. You're like, all right, that fizzles out at this point. And it's like, it'd be neat to know, but That's like a one-time pulse test that we'd want to do. But I think if you truly pursued this metric and the stories and the content that came from it, you'd get to some really, really interesting things. Because it's just a thread that you could keep on pulling. And then you could understand much more about how did it impact someone's life? You might have had one video that touched on a portion of it, and then you realize that sparked something that then got them to implement these other life changes. And you're like, oh, I can make more videos about those other life changes.

Like I've stopped becoming relatable to most people. So me talking about this sort of stuff, let's help scale from 7 to 8 figures. It's like, it's not relevant to most, like 99.99% of people in my audience. But being able to hear, whoa, that's Johnny who's 22 years old and here's how he applied this advice and here's how he was able to quit his job and start his business. For normal people, that is way more relatable and interesting and potentially even impactful than hearing me just say, here's how you should do X, Y, Z.

You have to switch at different levels. If you decide to keep serving the same audience, then at some point you have to switch from using your story to connect and relate to your readers or viewers, and you switch to using their stories. And it's a transition that everyone at scale has to make. I did it. I still use my story in certain ways. Like the keynote I gave earlier today, I used my story, but I used a very early part of it. And so it's just a natural thing. And I think what, like one of our rules at ConvertKit is we want to make creators the heroes of our brand. So if you walk down this hallway in our studio out here, you know, it's a bunch of giant photos of creators on the platform. And so I think you do the same thing where as you reach certain levels, you just switch and you make your audience the hero rather than yourself.

Yeah. I recently listened to the audiobook for Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller. And one of the things that really struck with me was like, You are not the hero, you are the guide. And I was like, that's it. Yep.

Classic Joseph Campbell, Hero's Journey.

Back in the day, I was the hero. And now when we're drafting up a sales page, it sort of feels weird for me to say, oh, by the way, I'm Ollie. Like 7 years ago, I decided to start a YouTube channel and then blah, blah, blah. Back when YouTube was a different platform in like 2017, here is what I— and way more interesting to say, hey, yeah, by the way, I'm Ollie. I've been making YouTube videos for ages and I teach people how to do this. For example, this person who in 2023 started a YouTube channel and within a year was able to change their life. Or that person. Who decided ultimately after making 6 months of videos that she didn't wanna be a YouTuber, but ended up getting a job in the creative industries, which is what she always wanted. And that changed her life. So a YouTube channel can change your life. And that's way more interesting for me than to just be like, by the way, I used to be a doctor in case you didn't know, kind of thing.

[Speaker] Yeah, and I think that if you get clear on the fact that you're in the business of transformations, then you can really optimize for that. And so what you create transformations and you tell the stories of the transformations that you created. that you played a role in, right? You're just the guide. Yeah, of course. It's their journey, their work to actually do. But like, that's a level of clarity that you can bring to your organization.

Yeah, that's really cool. And it's interesting hearing stuff like, 'cause that really connects where I'm like, holy shit, that's a good insight. But for someone that's like, if I'd heard this 3 years ago, I'd have been like, what the hell are these guys talking like? It's so abstract.

Like, come on, you're in the business of transformations.

What? It's like, why is that a useful insight? But right now I'm like, Oh, that connects on so many levels. I get it. Yes, we're in the business of transformation. It makes so much sense. It makes sense across that product and that product and that product. It's like that can change the way we do customer success with that and that. And like, I knew we weren't collecting as many case studies as we should because we're in the business of transformation. Yeah.

That's good.

Thank you.

And so that's how you measure it.

I feel like I've got my money's worth from being on the podcast. Great.

Great. There's a few like key insights that have to change at different stages of your business.

Yep.

One that you and I have both gone through is early on you get all of your success by saying yes. And then later on you have to say no. And should we draw this out? Okay.

We can do before and after. Ooh, I like it.

We have to handwrite.

Okay, so before you were like, you're saying yes to everything.

Yeah, you have to say yes. I'm gonna write it not as eloquently.

Yeah.

After, you have to say no.

Yep.

And the hard thing is you got so much success by saying yes continually. Yep. And then now you have to totally switch that habit. Yeah, that's good. Okay, so I think the next thing is before it's about your story, right? That's how we sell. That's how we do so many things. After, it's their story.

Have you done this before or are we just spitballing this?

We're just spitballing.

Because this is cool. I feel like this is going to be— this is good shit.

Yeah, we're just making it on the fly. Yeah.

I remember like your stuff in Authority back in 2015 when I first discovered your stuff was about like, hey, I'm Nathan Barry, I did this stuff, I'm going to teach you, right? How to do this stuff. But now it's like, I mean, I suspect a lot of customers of ConvertKit may not know who you are.

Right.

Which is cool.

Yeah. And I mean, that's happened a lot. Yeah.

So one idea that I think about a lot is how in the early days, often business is about serving the self, but at some point it stops becoming like once you've made enough money, you're like, who cares anymore? It becomes, it really does become about serving others. Yeah. And like, People say that, oh, but like even when you're starting, you should think about value and stuff. But really people start a business because they want to be able to quit their job.

They're trying to create their own transformation.

And then there's how it's promotion.

Story and transformation are similar. Yeah. But they go, they go hand in hand in different ways.

I was thinking sort of hero to guide. Oh yeah.

Yeah.

That's the thing we talked about.

Man, this is so efficient with both of us writing.

That's good. Yeah.

We don't have to edit all these little jokes out.

Oh, move fast and break things. Go slow to go fast.

Yes. Yes.

That sort of speaks for itself.

But yeah, these are all examples of basically what got you here won't get you there. Yes. And they're habits that are so hard to let go of because you're like, this worked. This is something that I'm trying to learn. All the time. And so as I'm over here, I'm like, obviously we should move fast and break things. Yeah. It's like, I don't know about that. What's an example of like this pivot that you're making in your business?

Yeah. So when it comes to creating new products, so move fast and break things, we have an idea, let's create a YouTube course. Angus, come over to my house, Post-it notes, within 3 days the landing page is up, we're collecting sales and we'll build the ship as we sell tickets for the ship. Oh shit, we've got 350 people in this community. Let's just make it up as we go along and patch up everything with duct tape. Now it's more like, okay, we actually have a reputation. We don't want to screw things up. We can pretty much guarantee that we're like, we know we're good at driving leads. This is not, it's not going to be a surprise. So let's design for what it would look like if 500 people were actually in this cohort. What I find as well is with a small team or with just me in the early stages, it's very easy to change direction. Here it's very hard to change direction. And also people feel bad about it and then people feel unstable and uncertain and like, I just spent 6 months working on thing X and now we're scrapping thing X. And I'm like, yeah, gonna break things, right? And they're like, no, I feel so demotivated that we just scrapped my work for the last 6 months. I'm just like, oh, if we'd just taken a little bit more time to figure out what the right thing to work on actually was. This was actually, ooh, this was maybe about efficiency and this is about effectiveness. Yeah. This is about doing things right, whereas this is really about what are the right things to do in the first place. I like that.

Let's put down, I guess it'd be just you and then team, because there's a lot of things that go into that.

Yeah.

So one thing you're talking about is I guess you operate on a different time horizon. It's kind of in, right, move fast and break things versus go slow to go fast.

Yeah. Maybe this is sort of on the level of weeks versus years. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, that's nice. Yeah, one thing I do often think about now is what does the 20-year version of this look like? Whereas what I thought back in the day was like, how do I get the video out this week to get the sponsor deadline this week?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. Right. So you would sit down and say, okay, I'm going to make a plan for the whole arc of my YouTube channel over the next 3 months, right?

Yeah.

All this or over the whole year.

Yeah. In a way, this was do more and this is do less.

It's true. Yeah. Which ties into saying yes and no.

Yeah.

But yeah, I think we should write it down. Well, so in that, something that I talk about on the show is building strip malls versus skyscrapers. And so early on you're testing different things. Did this work? Did this work?

And all of that.

And the tendency that people have is they say, okay, so if I got to $3 million in revenue or say $1 million in revenue with 3 things, then if I want to get to $2 million, I should add 3 more things. And the truth is you should find one of them that works and build a skyscraper.

Yep.

And so that's the do less.

That's so true. A lesson that I've really learned is, I guess relates to this, is the power of focus. And when you focus on just one thing. Whereas I think in the early days when you don't really know what's gonna work, you try a bunch of different things, throw spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. And this one is more like quadruple down on what's working. That sort of idea.

Yeah, it's interesting because if you take the advice, right, everyone says to focus. And so if you're over here and you're like, oh, I focus, the likelihood of focusing on the wrong thing is extreme. Yeah, right. Like I have this thread that I did on X where it goes through my first 10 products and it was like product 8 that actually made a bit of money, product 9 that made enough money that you could like pay rent off of it and product 10 that became ConvertKit. I think it's the experiment versus double down. Nice.

Yeah. I feel like when I was here in this mode, I was thinking quite bottom up.

Okay.

Whereas here I'm thinking quite top down.

Okay. Explain bottom up.

So bottom up as in what did I do last month and therefore what can I do next month? This is where do I wanna be 3 years from now and therefore what's my 2024 goal?

How to work backwards from there.

How to work backwards from like the longer term future. Whereas this one is like you're in experimentation mode doing more. It's like, oh, that video from 2 weeks ago, that worked really well. So let's do another one. Let's do more. Yeah, let's do more of that thing. It was like, really building from my existing base where if someone had asked me, what's your mission, vision, values 7 years ago, I'd have been like, what are you talking about? Right now people ask me what's mission, vision, values? And I'm like, oh, what a good question. I haven't thought about that in 3 weeks. Let me, let's think about it again. You know, that kind of thing.

Well, so it's even in your forecasting, right? Because you're saying like, if I did $100,000 in revenue, then here's what I plan to get to, $150,000 in revenue.

Yeah.

It's how do we go from here to here?

Yeah.

Versus casting this vision along with future. Bottom-up, top-down. It's how you think of it.

Yeah, well, this is sort of work backwards and this is sort of move forwards or something to that effect.

Yeah.

Move forwards versus work backwards.

Where I was thinking is how do you know how to move between these? It's easier in hindsight, right? As we've got teams and all of that. But if someone's listening and they're at that 2 or 3 people on their team, $400,000 or $500,000 in annual revenue. You know, like, are they fully over here? What habits do you need to take from here? How do you bridge that gap?

I had a good chat with Ryan Dice a couple weeks ago, and he had a fairly simple framework. His view was that, like, sort of for a new product, you're sort of in this mode. I mean, I'm sort of retrofitting what he said onto this model, but for a new product, you're onto this mode. Then when you get to about $30K a month with that product, so about $300K a year, you then give it a chance to be a quote, proper business. And you give it a head of growth and head of product. And then once you get to $1 million a year with that particular product line, it then needs a general manager. And now you're squarely in like legit business territory where you now think about playbooks and SOPs and blah, blah, blah. And I thought that was interesting. It's like, you know what I mean? All models are flawed, but that as a model I think works. Up to $300K for a single product line is like, very much this territory. Beyond a million is probably more this territory. And somewhere in the middle, messy middle is like the transition between the two. And crucially, it's like, this is sort of startup energy. This is sort of big company energy. And so a lot of big companies will try and make smaller teams of like 2 or 3 people, little squad to go and operate in this startup mode and take something from 0 to 1 so that the team can scale it from 1 to 100.

So I wonder, maybe let's write it down, like up to, Is it $300K per product? Yeah.

Seems reasonable. So this would be maybe like $1 million.

But the business line is interesting because it does change, right? There are things that we've launched at ConvertKit that very much follow to move fast and break things. This podcast studio is something that we got the keys to 30 days ago.

No way.

We did a full remodel.

That's cool.

Paint, new acoustic glass, Everything else. And that was entirely move fast and break things. Yeah. Like, Hayley on our team had, like, UPS was showing up to her house like 5 times a day.

And it's fine because it's a self-contained project. But you wouldn't do that for something that's affecting all the creators on your platform.

No, not at all.

Like a rebrand, let's say. Yeah, exactly.

That's been a long thought-out process. I still don't know how, like, where you find that line. We've got some general guidelines. And it's not like someone's going to come up at exactly $500K in annual revenue for that product and then be like, oh, I'm going to switch. But what are the things that you'd want to maybe change first? I think actually it's kind of in order, right? Of saying yes versus no is probably one of the first things. You're not going to say no to everything, but you're going to start to be a lot more selective.

Yes. Your story to their story is like at this point, like, I mean, if you're doing $300K, you're definitely starting to get like case studies and testimonials and stories of transformation for any product. So you can't get $300K a year without—

Without that.

Impacting people in some way.

Unless your story is really good and you happen to like have good distribution early on. But otherwise—

Otherwise, yeah. In the process of that, you go from being the hero to being the guide because you're the one who's facilitating those transformations. I think at some point you start realizing the value of goals. But it's like early on, it's like, who cares if you've got a goal of $10 million? It's like, it's so easy to make money on a spreadsheet, but it's hard to make money in real life.

Oh yeah. I mean, part of it is that spreadsheets start to become more accurate because, you know, we're like, I'm gonna do this. And the number of times you're like, uh.

Yeah, forecasting actually starts to be reasonable. Yeah, it's based on something. At the point where you start hiring people, it's like you move towards this approach, well, By virtue of the fact that you now have a team, you then in a way, you need more clarity. You kind of need to go slow to go fast. A team slows you down. In the end, you get more leverage from having a team. Having a team means that you're probably thinking on the timescale of years because they probably want some job security.

I don't know why they want that.

No, exactly. It's like everyone should be an entrepreneur.

Yeah.

I'm just kidding. Because you have a team and now you're like, you know, let's focus on things that are working because we need revenue. It's like you actually end up doubling down on what's working. Right. And you end up then realizing that, oh, actually it's way— it's really hard to do a lot of things because of the overhead tax and the communication tax associated with each new thing you take on. So you end up realizing you have to do less.

Is there something—

Yeah.

Like communicating really well is so important over here. I don't know what—

It's less important over there. Yeah.

It's not poor communication over here. But it, I'm trying to think of it, it's in your time spent. There's some dynamic there. Yeah.

This is a lot about courage and this is a lot about clarity.

Ooh, you even got the alliteration.

I was like, yeah, I was like, oh, there's something there. Yeah. I like it. This is, you know what, I'm gonna put myself out there. I'm gonna stick my neck out. I'm gonna do the thing. Yeah. This is, okay, well the thing's working. So now everyone on the team just really needs clarity on where I wanna go. and where the business is going.

And that's where that doubling down and doing less is so important.

Yeah.

Because again, we've ingrained habits over here that served us so well and will cause so much pain if you keep using them at this stage.

Yes, exactly. This is almost like grind mode. And then this is sort of like sustain mode. Over here is when most people get interviewed on podcasts, where they start opining about work-life balance.

Yeah, exactly.

Whereas if you interviewed people at this stage, if you ask them what they did in the early stages, like, no one's— Yeah, like work-life balance is not a priority.

Yeah, I would say probably 9 out of 10 success stories that I hear of someone talking about work-life balance or, you know, I just like to take it easy and just focus on only the right things. Those all came from people who were in grind mode.

Yeah.

And then now.

Yeah.

And that's why, like, knowing what phase someone's in relative to you is so important. For which advice to take.

Yeah, because it's the law of equal and opposite advice. The law of equal and opposite advice is that for a certain person, the exact opposite advice will be relevant to another person. So if someone is just starting off a business, you should say yes to everything. If someone's you, you should say no to everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Burn the midnight oil, right? Make sure you take a vacation every month. Bias to action, bias towards thinking.

Right.

Focus on how to get revenue right now. Focus on how to sort of sustain revenue forever.

'Cause then it becomes about, you know, here you're trying to make something work and here you're trying to say, how do I show up consistently for a long time?

Yeah.

Oh, this is about compounding. I don't know what this is about.

Yeah. Increment, increment versus compound. This is like, oh, increment. Yes, I got another subscriber.

Oh yes.

Another video. Oh, I've got one. Golden eggs. Goose.

Okay.

Stephen Covey talks about this in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Your goose is your production capacity and your golden eggs are the production. The way we think about it in our business is our YouTube videos are the golden eggs. But me and like, I am the goose, right? And so me having a nice time and enjoying the process and being fed and being happy is really important for the long-term sustainability of our business. Because the YouTube videos that I produce are the golden eggs. And so the team kind of knows that like we need to take care of the goose. If Ali doesn't feel like filming a video, we don't, we shouldn't force him to film the video for the sake of a sponsor deadline. Even if it is ConvertKit sponsoring the video, it's like we can always push the deadline back because Ali being happy with the business is actually really important for it to be sustainable. Whereas here it's more like, oh shit, I've got half an hour before my night shift starts. Let me just crank out a video. Because I need to get the golden eggs out.

Yeah, that makes sense. There's an economist who writes the blog Marginal Revolution.

Tyler Cowen?

Tyler Cowen. There you go. The question he asks is, what's the production function of you as an individual? And it basically points to that. What's the golden goose? What's the factory? What is the machine that creates these things? And so yeah, we're really going from the one-off thing to Yeah, exactly. The flywheel, the system, the factory, any of those things that—

Yeah, there's something like systems are important here. Systems are not that important there.

No, they're not.

It's almost like execute and systemize.

I think it's probably scattered versus flywheel. Yeah, let's just throw in there scattered versus flywheel.

Nice.

And we'll end on that.

Nice. We made a good list. This is solid. Yeah, this was completely unintentional, but why not?

That's how it But I'm pretty proud of it.

I like it. I think it's good.

Look how it looks in the shot too.

Oh, that looks nice. That looks very classy.

We even have our slightly different, you know, our gold versus silver markers. I like it.

And the gold goes quite nicely with this as well.

Yeah, exactly. Spawn, not—

All we need is a copy of Feel Good Productivity in the background. Yeah.

Did you not bring a copy with you? No, I did not. I'm sorry. I apologize. I didn't pre-stock this video.

It's all good. We could have like—

Yeah, we just went down a really fun rabbit hole. Which people are gonna love.

Let's talk about this whole like mini holdco thing I've been thinking about. So if I draw another— Oh yeah, so I had a good chat with Ryan Dice and also Andrew Wilkinson who runs Tiny. Sort of this idea of having a holding company with multiple profitable businesses seems kind of cool. Yeah. Okay, so let's do before and after. So this is today. And this is future, question mark. So today it's sort of like we've got the Ali Abdaal company and then within that we have a content team and we have a kind of commercial team.

Okay.

And within our commercial team we have sales and marketing, S&M, lol. Uh, CS, customer success, ops. We have our two products. There's our YouTube course, which has three products in it, Foundations, Academy, and Accelerator. And this is our Productivity Lab. A mistake that we made is that we hosted, like all of this stuff is hosted in the same Circle workspace, which has now become highly confusing for our customers because they're like, wait, I signed up for YouTuber Academy, but it says Productivity Lab. I signed up for Productivity Lab, but like there's a YouTuber thing. What the fuck's going on? I unsubscribed from certain emails and I'm not getting the customer emails and it's just, oh, we didn't, Oh, okay, yeah, so we can't actually email you about the thing 'cause you actually hit the unsubscribe and not the manage preferences button, which you should have pressed, you know? And we had like dozens of people do it.

They did the one trying to hide the unsubscribe link.

Yeah.

I'm doing it to serve you. Yeah, exactly. If you wanna unsubscribe, click the button.

It's in white text, but like, yeah. What Ryan said, what was interesting, he was like, you can almost think of it as like a solar system where you, Ollie, the individual, are like the sun in the middle of the solar system. And you have these sort of planets that are around you. One planet is, let's say, Ali Media, which is your content arm that you're never gonna be able to sell because it's a content arm. Then you have your YouTuber Academy Limited as its own mini business. And then you have your Productivity Lab Limited as its own mini business. And then over time you can do kind of the different companies and eventually you get a sort of holdco where the Ali Abdaal International Holdco, all of these report profits up. And then for some of these, you know, for like a software play, maybe I'll only have 20% equity, but for this, maybe it'll be like 100%. And maybe for this, we bring on an external CEO and maybe it's there for 80%. Ali Media will obviously stay at 100%. This thing could be 30%. And you build these sort of mini businesses or businesses around the son of Ali Abdaal who is able to sort of shine light onto all of these different businesses. But then ideally, if you think about your YouTuber Academy, your YouTuber Academy, once it gets beyond a certain point, like let's say 1 million plus, it should have its own head of growth. Right. And its own head of product. And the job of the head of growth then is to find lead generation sources outside of Ali Abdaal Media.

Right.

And the job of the head of growth of Productivity Lab is to find ways to get leads Again, outside of only making YouTube video about it. And here you're kind of instead of, you know, this might be operating at 60% margins because what these companies, if they're using paid acquisitions, might be 30%. And that's actually totally fine. And you can then incentivize people with like equity or phantom equity. And eventually what you're doing is you're building this thing where then X number of years from now, if vidIQ decides to, or if Kit decides to buy the YouTuber Academy because it's trying to get into YouTube, you can now sell this, whereas you wouldn't really be able to sell it if it's sort of within this and it's all within the same CRM, it's all within the same website. And like this sort of separation of businesses into a holdco, you know, it's going to be more expensive initially because you'll need a separate head of growth, separate head of growth. You're going to have to file quadruple the number of accounts. So your accounting bill is going to go up. But in the long term, this leads to more wealth and sustainable asset creation that can then be sold. And yeah, maybe you have like a sort of the HR company that's like, you centralize certain services like legal, finance, HR, admin, maybe media buying, maybe video editing if all these require video editing, but everything else is decentralized. What's your take on the solar system model versus the hierarchical workshop in a single company?

Yeah, I like it. What I'm thinking about though is the types of companies that live within this. Like these are very similar companies in very similar ventures right now. And so what I want to know is, where do they go from here? Right? Like, I mean, they're similar enough that they're smashed into one at the moment. And so knowing where you're trying to go from there long term really dictates it.

Right?

Is there— where does this cap out? Does it cap out at $3 million a year in revenue? $20 million a year? Yeah. What would have to be true for this business to make $25 million a year in revenue?

Yeah, I think, well, sort of instinctively, I think this caps out at about $10 million in revenue. I think this probably caps out at maybe like $20 based on what I know of other companies in the space. This, let's say, is a software arm. And so this could be a $100 mil valuation or something, this sort of idea. And so then if this sells, maybe it sells for like, I don't know, 3x multiple or whatever. And if this sells, then well, maybe it's, I don't know, $10 million revenue, but like sells for $100 million exit. That's sort of how I'm thinking, if that makes sense.

Yeah, I think that makes sense.

The company caps out at a few million because like there's a limit to how much money you can make with sponsors and brand deals and it's directly tied to me. Yeah.

You're right that there's this like step function level of complexity and you decide to cross that bridge and then, you know, the number of tax returns and the other things, you know, like email marketing gets more complicated. I really like the idea of each one needing to drive its own leads beyond a certain point. You're like, "Hey, I'm going to promote you to this level." But then going back to our other ideas, right? You need to get to, as they start to make these shifts, right? This business goes from telling individual, like your story to getting really good at transformation. You know what's interesting? Dan Martell is someone who's gone through this. A lot. He sold several businesses in the software space. And then his SaaS academy coaching business, he scaled to a little over $10 million a year, $10 to $15 million maybe. And then he recently left it entirely. And so he's gotten to the point where I think he still promotes it from his content media. But he's not the engine behind it. He's not providing the coaching. No one's signing up because of his name. Yeah, he's fully abstracted that.

Yeah. Yeah. That's where I'd like to get to with YouTuber Academy and Productivity Lab and now basically any venture that we do. Right. Because I think for me, the thing that right now I'm like, I want to be making videos and writing books forever. Yeah, but I don't want to be necessarily promoting a YouTube course and productivity membership forever. And so like, very happy to promote those things in the short term, but I'd love to get these businesses to a point where The business is the entity that's providing the value to transform the lives of the students or the customers. And the fact that I'm associated with it is just part of the backstory. I think Michael Hyatt did a good job of this with his Full Focus Planner. So that business does like— Good job. Yeah, like incredible. It's like so many people use that planner but have no idea who Michael Hyatt is.

That's a great place to be.

Yeah.

I actually wrote about Michael in the Billion Dollar Creator essay that I originally wrote. As an example of he built so much around his personal brand, you know, this was 4 or 5 years ago. And you know, saying like, hey, he's gonna be capped because of that personal brand. And afterwards he sent me an email and he was like, hey, you're spot on. This is exactly like, I noticed the same thing like 18 months ago. And so here's everything that I've done to, you know, to basically build Full Focus Planner into a much bigger business. Now his daughter is the CEO of it. She scaled it amazingly.

That to me feels like, you know, when I'm in my 50s, I'd quite like to just be paid a few million bucks a year to coach people. And some of them would be my own companies and some of them would be other companies. It's just kind of fun. People rock up to my house, we have a coaching session.

There's a great entrepreneur that I've had on the show, Matt Schnuck.

Oh yeah, he's a friend of mine.

Yeah, he loves coaching. He's a student of all the best coaching practices and everything else. And what he's realized is that a better business model is not to be paid as a coach. It's to have a whole bunch of companies and coach those leaders where you own all the equity, right? Or substantial amounts of equity. But that makes me wonder, are you optimizing more for cash flow or enterprise value?

I am not sure. So I was talking to Andrew about this. He said screw enterprise value, optimize for cash flow. Right. Right, well, what Ryan said is, No one gets rich off of cash flow. They get rich off of exits. To me, I feel like philosophically I vibe more with cash flow. A big exit is not really going to change anything for me. I like doing this stuff. The cash flow is just kind of nice. But hey, I wouldn't say no to big exits. So, I don't know, what do you reckon?

Well, so Andrew says focus on cash flow, not enterprise value, but he aggressively uses cash flow to purchase enterprise value. Andrew loves cash flow, right? And he is setting up all his businesses to cash flow up. It's the Berkshire Hathaway model, and they want all that cash flow. But it's not because they're living lavish lives. They're using that cash flow to just buy more stuff, buy more things that have enterprise value. They might say, hey, we're using that cash flow to buy more things that drive cash flow. But it's a different—

But I guess for Andrew, what he says is that his goal is to buy and hold forever. Rather than to exit in the same way, like, you know, Warren Buffett's thing. And I think I vibe with that philosophy, but then I've drunk the Basecamp Kool-Aid for 10 years, so that's all about cash flow rather than enterprise value.

Yeah, I am as well, though they walk that line well. But I think what's interesting about creator businesses in particular is this ability to scale enterprise value quickly on something that is not necessarily the core business.

Yep.

Because you have the solar system approach, You can basically kingmake on a new business much faster than anyone else. And it might be a business that you love. It might also be something that was a fun idea you wanted to exist in the world and you're happy selling it. Ryan Reynolds is doing this all the time where he's like, all right, I can shine the sun on this thing. And look at that. And you know what? I love the business, but you give me enough hundreds of millions and I'll sell it.

Yeah. I think if there's a, like, I was talking to my brother about this. So he runs a SaaS. I was asking him, you know, would you ever sell? And he was like, well, if the price was right, then yeah, of course I would. But if the price is not right, then I wouldn't, because I'm happy either way. I was like, oh, that's kind of a nice way to think about this. If someone wants to come in and buy the YouTuber Academy and they're gonna do a good job with it, like if you wanted to buy it, I'd be like, sure. If the price is right. If not, that's totally cool. I like the idea of continuing to run it. Yeah.

But I think, you know, I asked the question that has, you know, an either/or. You're optimizing for cash flow or enterprise value. And it's helpful to know if someone's like, oh, enterprise value because I want to exit, you know, all of this. Yeah. But it's not a, like, two ends of the spectrum.

Yeah.

You know, like most things in life that were like, you can be high growth or profitable.

Yeah.

I was like, well, no, we actually have growth and profitability as two separate axes.

Yeah.

Yeah, you can graph it all around from there. So in your case, you can have both.

Yeah.

But knowing that you might want to sell it, you want the option to sell it, definitely defines how you build the business.

Yes. Plus, I also think sort of building to sell will level me up in business more so than not trying to do that because you have to just be more disciplined with the way you do everything. Yeah. If you're actually genuinely building to potentially sell. And so even if you never sell, it's like it's still a better-run business in theory.

What I think is build a business that people would absolutely love to buy and then never sell it.

Yeah, that's nice. Yeah, I like that approach.

And so, I mean, that's the approach that I've taken with ConvertKit. You know, we have a sales team that can sell without needing to pull me into a call or me to tee up a relationship or something like that.

Yeah.

Right. Because that's the exact same thing you're trying to do here.

Yes, exactly.

And then it just makes for a way better business.

Yeah.

So I mean, I love this model. I think it's Absolutely right. I don't have strong opinions on how you structure the HR, legal, or when you make those things. I would just take this further and say, okay, this to me feels like the drawing of 12 months from now. Yeah, sounds about right.

Yeah, 12 to 24.

And so we start to think about, okay, what's the 5-year and 10-year? And then what else is in there? Like, what's an idea of something that would be really cool to do, but is so far out there that You can't actually consider it right now.

Yeah. I mean, I'd love to have a space like this. It's way bigger. That's sort of like a coworking space meets library meets coffee shop meets production studio in a place where I decide I'm living because I'm a bit unstable right now, where, you know, anyone who's ever been a student of ours can rock up and we do events and that physical premises, WeWork, single location business is something I'd love to do further down the line. Just not right now.

When you're ready to do it, we can co-lodge it together. And because I want these studios all over all over the world.

Oh, nice. Yeah, that'd be super cool. Yeah.

But yeah, so something like that.

Something like that.

I mean, that's, yeah, in my opinion, not a good business.

Yeah. It would be more like a hobby. Yeah. Hopefully at least breaks even.

Yeah.

I mean, that's my thing with these studios.

Someone's like, how do you make it break even or make money or all of that? And they're trying to figure out like what you charge per hour and all that. It's like, no, no, no. Step 1, have a giant subscription software company.

Yeah, exactly.

Step 2, burn a relatively small amount of money on this cool thing that you want to do.

[Speaker] Yeah, that's kind of how I'm thinking about that. Another thing I'd really love to do is in the same way that ClickFunnels is the software to implement the thing that he teaches, which is funnels. I would love to build the like productivity software that implements stuff around like visioning and goal setting and time tracking and like, and not like the next Notion, but just a very like, this product will help you figure out what you wanna do with your life, turn it into goals, make sure you're on track with those goals so that everything that I teach on my personal development side and the media side then has like a tool that allows people to implement it in a nice way. And that's an idea that we're exploring with my business partner. And we've got these two software ideas that are in progress and maybe they'll be the third. Stuff like that would be really cool.

Yeah.

We're also toying with the idea of like, hey, if we're generating enough cash flow in this, Can we just reach out to the people who run, I don't know, Things 3, the to-do app, and be like, you guys have been doing this for 15 years. Do you want to sell it to us? We'll keep running it. We think it's really nice. Again, the Andrew Wilkinson approach. Yeah.

And bringing Andrew into it, it reminds me a lot of what James Clear and Andrew have done together with Atoms. It's basically like James's methodology, that should be an app.

That's really cool. I like the idea of doing stuff like that and just sort of playing this general infinite game of I'm always gonna wanna teach, that's my jam. But like the game of entrepreneurship is kind of cool and like building businesses and buying businesses sometime, like launching cool products and maybe shining the light on them initially and then letting them have their own teams and coaching those teams. That just seems like a fun thing to do to pass the time.

Hey, actually one quick thing. What are the skills that you think you most need to learn in order to execute on this?

Oh, that's a really good point. The biggest one that comes to mind is management by metrics. Okay, like really getting a handle on like, these are the growth levers, these are the growth engines, the fulfillment engines of these different businesses. Here's what it looks like mapped out. Therefore, these are the metrics that matter, and therefore being able to find the right people to work to those metrics, hold them to account sufficiently. Yeah, yeah, all of that stuff is a skill that I currently suck at and would love to improve at.

Yeah, my biggest struggle in that is giving someone clear direction and metrics and then leaving them alone to let them succeed or fail.

And they will.

I'm like, oh, but if you did it this way, it could be better. And you like, you never actually, they might've gotten to that same thing on their own.

Yeah, there's a friend of mine, Dan Priestley, who says that it's a lot less stressful owning 8 businesses than owning 1 business. Because if you own 1 business, you wanna get involved. If you own 8, you're like, oh, I'll just get the weekly report. And I'm chill. And then if the GM needs me, they'll call me in to do a sesh. And if they don't need me, I'm just looking at the numbers week to week, running my little empire from my Google Sheets, and I can spend all my time with my kids. Right.

That kind of thing. Well, and the thing is, you said week to week, which is just a simple statement, but it would need to be quarter to quarter, right? Because you got to change, going back to earlier, you got to change the time horizon you're operating on. Because week to week, the numbers might do all kinds of stuff. Yeah. But yeah, I think those are good skills. Something that I've done is I've listed out the skills that I need, and then I'm just aware of that. Because then, going back to earlier, right? Things we say yes to everything, we say no to almost everything. Well, when you're deciding, well, hold on, is this something I should say yes to? I'm now in the habit of like, no, no, no, no. Maybe yes. Okay, I look at my list of skills that I'm trying to learn. Does this thing that I'm tempted to say yes to help me learn a skill that I know is gonna be vital for this next phase, I might say yes to you.

That's fantastic. I've never thought of it in that way, but I'm gonna steal that idea.

That's good. Who do I need to become in order to execute this vision?

Yeah. Off the top of your head, what would you say are other skills that I might, 'cause this is sort of an unknown unknown. Yeah. Sort of a bit of a black box where I'm like, okay, well yeah, the management, the scorecards thing, the metrics thing. But is there anything else that comes to mind?

I don't know how to ask this exactly, but like, your understanding of P&L and balance sheet and what makes financial growth engines in a company? Do you feel like you understand it well or? It's hard to know. Yeah, it's hard to know. I'm actually a 6 out of 10 on that. You know, there's no way to—

Yeah, when he said that, I think I'm like, I think I understand it well enough for what our current business is. And if you gave me the P&L of, I don't know, Procter Gamble, I'd be like, what the hell is going on? Probably.

I think what would be interesting is to go to a bunch of our mutual friends and say, hey, would you— it can be totally sanitized or whatever else, but just take me behind the scenes of the financial operations of your companies. Because then you're going to notice things like, hold on, how is your operating margin, you know, 50% on this business? I thought that style of business could never get above this. What things have you done there? And so you find people who will be transparent about those things. Nice. And then I think Actually, one of the last episodes we did on this show with Barrett Brooks, we talked a lot about firing. And that is such a hard thing. Really hiring and firing and performance management and accountability. But it's just, I'm someone who will build the same team, and if you're trying hard and loyal to the business and all of that, we're going all the way together. And it's just, there's gonna be a point that's gonna really hold you back, especially, right? You hire someone to be the GM of this business. They grow it 10% when you know it could have grown 50% over that time period.

And I'd be like, oh, but they're such a nice person. They've got a good heart. Yeah.

And so realizing that you're actually holding them back in their career growth. Yeah. You're probably not giving them the feedback that they need. Like they really need that sink or swim, especially at that like executive level.

Yeah. I think another thing that I'd know I want to learn more is, as you mentioned this, is how to be a better coach. Because I sort of do it somewhat instinctively, but I know that there are coaching methodologies and stuff and there's a way to improve at that skill. Because in this future, I am like the coach to a bunch of these different businesses. And of course they have their own coaches and stuff, but I'd like to learn how to be a better one of those.

Yeah, I think the simplest thing— I say simplest and hardest— is to just stop giving advice and giving opinions. And so when someone on your team comes to me, this is what I struggle with, but I'm really trying to work on, is when someone says, hey, I've got this problem, what should we do? Especially when the answer seems obvious to me.

Yeah.

I'm like, oh, you should do this. No, do not do that. What you do is say, "Oh, that's fascinating. What do you think we should do about it?" Nice. And you just leave it at that. And Dan Martell actually has a version of this that he calls the 1-3-1 rule. And it's basically that his rule is you have to come up with one clearly stated problem. Someone's like, "Oh, we're struggling with growth." That's not a clearly stated problem. Like, get it very clearly stated. You know, over the last 3 months, we were unable to grow our organic traffic. You know, all this.

Okay.

What are your 3 solutions that you're considering for this? And then what is your one recommendation?

That's good.

And then you just got guided through someone and like solving their own problem.

That's great.

Because that's the mistake that I make where I'm like, here's this, you know, one of our channels is broken. We have a product problem or whatever else. I'm just like, oh, here's the answer. And then let me go back up here. And the person's like, oh, thank you. And they get this idea that like, oh, Nathan has the answers and I don't. Yeah. And what you really want them to do is, I either have the answers or I can get the answers by going and talking to the problem with the right people.

How do you balance that between sort of you being like the visionary of the business? Like, I think about this in the context of, let's say with our YouTuber Academy, we've got one of our team members who is in charge of like the $100,000 product. Now I am sort of the visionary of the business right now and I have some pretty reasonable ideas, I think, about like how we can change the offer for that product. But I don't want to give those to her. I want her to come up with what she thinks we should do. But then also sometimes the team will push back and be like, I get what you're trying to do, but like we actually need your direction on this. Like how do you balance that sort of?

Yeah, I think of it in terms of altitude and time. If you're setting the vision for the entire company or, you know, a long time horizon, you should absolutely do that. Like paint a future state. Yeah. And so you're saying this is where we're trying to go. This is the experience that I want creators to have as they go through it. And then to make sure to stay at a high enough altitude. So we're not getting into the copy on the sales page. We might talk about the feeling that we want someone to have as they buy the product and first sign up in this future state. The number of skills that you have to actively not use. You know, like I'm good at designing presentations and I spent way too much time designing presentations. And you're like, what are you doing? This is very low value. But like I spent a decade as a designer. So yeah.

I mean, I just got a demo of ClickFunnels and I'm like, I'm like, oh, on the flight, how am I going to tinker with line height and letter spacing? Because Padding and the right amount of white space is the difference between it looking bad and it looking good. And it's like, I should resist that urge. Yeah.

And so I think it's sitting down and helping someone really understand the problem and your experience around it, but not implementing the solution.

Question for you. So how do you manage your time? I guess for me and my calendar, it's like, okay, Wednesdays are filming days. Tuesdays are team meetings. I kind of like having, and Thursdays are sort of for course stuff that are live sessions and podcasts and things. Monday and Friday are sort of empty. But I also wanna make the time to coach my team. And so, how do you fit in that time to coach your team while also doing the podcast, the personal brand, the whatever, the being CEO of a big business?

Poorly. Okay.

Yeah.

My time is a mess. 'Cause I end up building towards specific events, whether it's a board meeting or a conference with hundreds of creators coming to town or whatever else. And I end up working towards that rather than having like this operating at a higher altitude. So the things that I do is I don't take any meetings on Tuesdays and Fridays, and that's a company-wide thing. I'll happily jump on a call to jam through, like work on a specific topic, but there's no scheduled meetings. And then I also really emphasize the check-ins with my leadership team and resist the urge to get involved in things at a deeper level. That was really hard, um, because I've had a bunch of time that I haven't had a full leadership team. Like I was the VP of product for ConvertKit for the last 7 months. And, uh, we just hired in someone named Katie. She's amazing. And now I can meet with her and stay out of the details. So I think the trick is having enough consistency so that you can, or enough stability so that you can build that consistency, which if you have turnover in your leadership team, that's really hard.

And what do the check-ins with your leadership team look like?

Yeah, so we do, there's a broad weekly revenue meeting that I go to. And that's just, I'm mostly a fly on the wall, but I'll jump in with questions and all of that. So it's the teams talking about their growth channels, performance week over week, any of that accountability. 'Cause even though we operate on a longer time horizon, we know that we can make an impact in short cycles. And so we, there are numbers that we measure weekly. And then after that, I'm on a longer 90-minute call with my executives. And so then we're diving into the problems ahead of us, you know, anything with the rebrand announcement that we want to work through, setting strategy, those kinds of things. So those are the two most important meetings of the week. And then the other thing is with Kara, who runs all of the marketing for my personal brand, is being able to, what I want to get to is an hour a week with her. It's been more sporadic as we've, been all around, but she has this ability. Like we just sit down and the first thing she asks is like, hey, what interesting things are going on? You know, any lessons learned? She has like 3 or 4 prompts that she'll ask me and I'll be like, I don't have anything. Oh yeah, yeah, there was that thing. And before I know it, we've mapped out content for like 3 different newsletters and different ideas because of the questions that she's asked.

Nice.

And, And then she's also mining the podcast episodes and the content that we're doing and say, hey, these were interesting moments. I think we could write more about this. Do you have more to say? At the 57-minute mark on the conversation with Ollie, you said this. It was a passing comment, but do you have more thoughts about that? And I'm like, yeah, absolutely. And I'll dive into it. And then she'll say, okay, that is, oh, that belongs in the Flywheels course, or that's a great newsletter issue. Or hey, let's do a full podcast episode on that topic.

That's a really good idea, because as you're saying that, I was thinking like, um, one of my team members, uh, she's, she's our, our sort of head of, head of the content team, and so she manages like our YouTube person, our social media person, website person, etc. But I don't really meet with her, and I just should once a week for an hour to just talk about these sorts of ideas, because then that sort of that fodder then can potentially feed into YouTube videos or social media posts or like email newsletters and the whole shebang.

Yeah, all of those things. 'Cause it ends up being this flywheel where you get someone who's very aware of everything you're producing, right? The podcasts that you're going on as a guest, all of that stuff. And then asking you pointed questions about it. 'Cause the number of throwaway comments that you make or like ideas that pop in your head, but they're half formed, Then turns out like a week later you're like, oh, if prompted, you're like, yeah, I actually have way more to say about that. I think we made a good episode.

I think so.

The inaugural episode in the new studio. Also, this shot just looks so good. I know.

I'm just like, every time I look at it, I'm like, holy.

Nice. Well, maybe as a way of wrapping up, I'm curious what some of your takeaways are and what you plan to put into action. Okay, nice.

Okay, so what are the action steps? Number 1, talk to Inez to do this content chat one-on-one.

Yeah, we'll name it something better.

Yeah, you know, the content chat, the weekly CC or whatever. I think that's an easy one, but that's very recent CFX. We literally just talked about it. I think like what I'm taking from the solar system thing is that sketching this out and hearing your take on it is making me feel much more confident with it because this is the future I wanna work towards. And so even like last night I was thinking, you know, should productivitylab.com be the landing page or should it be aliabdaal.com/productivitylab? And it should obviously be productivitylab.com. Yeah.

Like those things become clear.

But this really answers it. Whereas here it's like, well, I mean, it's like, no, it should definitely be productivitylab.com.

So you're talking about the skills that you need to learn for the next phase.

Yes. So I think I need to write down my list of skills. That would be a good thing to journal on, on the flight home. And I'm gonna start getting coaching with Barrett about stuff and also Daryl about stuff. They're both fantastic. Both will be interesting. Two new coaches from this event. I think this stuff is all sort of happening already. If I can nail this coaching, figure out specifically what skills to work on, have the weekly one-on-ones with Inez, and just sort of know that this is the future that we're working towards. I think that will automatically take care of a lot of, a lot of this.

I think you're right. The one thing that I want you to do in addition to that is to put it on a timeline. So we know, like there's an order of operations in this. And so you start to say like, let's go 5 years out. And we're like, all right, we're going to achieve this solar system model at a basic level, 18 months or 2 years out, and here's the steps. So maybe across the bottom of the timeline are the skills you need to pick up and what sequence you think you need to learn them. And then across the top is how you're going to, you know, what order you're going to put this in. You know, HR might not be the first thing that you strategize. The first thing might be just stripping out the the two Circle accounts, right? And separating those memberships. And so just put it in sequence and then your team can follow along. 'Cause going back to the idea of clarity, you can now paint a picture of this is where we're going and here's the order I think it should happen, but what do you think? And then you can give them ownership in executing that plan, you know, and the timing that it happens. 'Cause they might say like, oh no, actually let's do this in the other order for that reason.

And how granular should I be with the timeline? Monthly, quarterly, weekly?

I'd say quarterly.

Okay.

Yeah.

That makes sense.

I mean, just going to, there's a business that all the, or there's a reason that all publicly traded companies operate on a quarterly cycle. It's just because it's often enough that you can make meaningful changes, but spaced out enough or long-term enough that you have to stay at a higher altitude.

Yep. No, that's pretty good. I think also what this conversation is revealing to me, especially on that skills point, is that I could just message people like Andrew and just be like, hey, can you just screen share me, like, what does it look like when you're managing all these different companies? And I'll probably be like, oh, okay, that's just filled in a big unknown unknown that I didn't even realize was there.

And so speaking to people and like someone like Ryan Dice, who has like 17 of these businesses around his personal brand, When you can put it out there and say, hey, these are the 5 skills that I'm most interested in learning in this order, who can help me with that? And if you like post that on X, there's, you know, you'll get a whole bunch of people who are like, this book was really helpful or blah, blah, blah. But then you'll get someone, you know, an Andrew or someone like that who's like, yeah, happy to show you how I handle this at this massive scale. And you're like, I had no idea you were even in my audience. You know?

That kind of thing. Yeah. That would be cool.

That's great.

'Cause it's like, I feel like over the last few years, my team has always been saying, "Ali, we need more clarity from you on where we're going." And I've always been like, "But like, what more clarity do you need? I mean, we're making videos and doing courses. Like, how hard can it be?" But like, just having this is like, "Oh, okay, this feels like a very nice sort of medium-term future to work towards." Yeah, and so basically paint an end state and then have a timeline towards that end state and hold it loosely. Uh-huh.

That'll give so much clarity. And then you just find yourself referring back to it all the time. Cause someone's like, why are we doing this?

Yeah.

Oh, because this is where we're trying to get.

Yeah. This is the solar system FigJam file or whatever. This is, yeah. And FigJam is perfect for it because you can, yeah, move things around and stuff. Oh yeah. Love that. Thanks, man.

Awesome.

Good session.

Thanks for coming on.

You're welcome. It was great. Yeah.

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