5k to 25 Million | Rob’s Greatest Move as an Entrepreneur

Today I interviewed Rob Moore on how he went from 50,000 pounds of consumer debt to making over 250 million pounds in less than two decades. He shared his story of investing over six figures on courses with Think Big Education and then went on to buy that company for five grand just a year later. That company now does over £10 million a year. If you want to know the secrets of going from dead broke to multimillionaire, you need to hear Rob's story. So happy birthday. Kind of 15th anniversary of one of your company's progressive success. Now, I heard you talking about this this week, celebrating for the first time. I've not really heard you talk about this.

I don't celebrate.

Yeah.

When have you ever seen me celebrate?

Never.

No, don't celebrate.

Well, it's a first.

Where's my fucking champagne?

Oh, sorry, it's out there. It's one from the Tates. Yes. Bugatti champagne. Yeah. Well, take me back to the story then. So you were a client of what is now progressive success, but was. What was it called before?

Yeah, Think Big Education.

Think Big Education. So you went and did training with them and then eventually bought that company.

Yeah, So I didn't realize I hadn't shared this story before, but thinking about it, probably one of my greatest moves as an entrepreneur. So I've been an entrepreneur 20 years. I started as an artist, did some ebay before. Ebay was a big thing. So a bit ahead of my time. And then 18 years ago, I met my business partner and we started investing in property. And then we evolved investing in property to having a property training business because we bought like 50 dick deals in two years. You know, we were going some. And one of the things that most property investors get into is personal development. So personal development was a game changer for me. It's a broad subject, but, you know, I listened to Tony Robbins get the Edge and personal power. And that changed me from a negative guy to a positive guy, from a can't do guy to a how can I guy. You know, things like think and grow rich and Rich dad, Poor dad, the seminal works. And that was probably the biggest shift in my life, was going from negative critic, you know, to positive, enthusiastic entrepreneur. So I became a personal development junkie. It's funny how people. Oh, you're a course junkie. You spend all your money on courses. Like, that's a loser. When that person gambles and goes to watch football games and spend all their money on football games, which is even in their control and, you know, pays 120 quid a month to watch TV and those kind of people will call people who buy courses in education course junkie. So I actually love being a course junkie. I'm still a course junkie. I want to do as many courses as possible because I want to learn. The more I learn, the more I earn. I became a course junkie. I didn't even know what was one was back then there wasn't haters for being a course junkie. So I was doing all these courses. I did nlp, NLP Masters, did all these Warrior spirit and all these ra, you know, I had become powerful and one of them was called Platform and Presentation Skills. And it was a public speaking course and I really wanted to do it because I really thought public speaking could make it's maybe tens of millions now. So I was right, really wanted to do it. Problem was it was in Australia, there wasn't one coming up in the UK because this Think Big education company promoted these events all around the world. And the next one was coming in Australia, it was, wasn't one in the UK for a year. That was too slow. So my first boss at the time, I said to him, look, I'll pay for the, the speaking course, even though I was in debt, didn't have the money for the course, but I thought, I'll find a credit card, I'll find a way can you pay for my flights and accommodate accommodation? And. And to my surprise, he was like, yeah, all right. Because I think he could see that, you know, he could leverage me as a speaker and we could, we could earn money. So I flew out to Australia, did this public speaking course, game changing, game changing. Came back to the uk, went and did a few speeches, started getting quite well known actually in the sort of smaller business network. And then the owners of Think Big Education were like, you should watch Rob. Rob's killing it. He's buying loads of property, started a property training business. He's probably our best student. We need to get a case study out of this guy. So they pulled me to London, 1500 people in the room, you know, rah rah, American style event, breakthrough to success. And they got me up on the stage and I shared my story of how the courses had really helped me and maybe a good few hundred grand in front of the whole audience. And I got mobbed at the end. Anyway, I carried on about my life. Yeah, got to know all the trainers really well, became friends with one of them. And then I got word when 2008 recession kicked in, the training business was struggling. Think big Education was struggling, like many companies were. And I was like, okay, cool. And someone said, well, do you want to buy it? And I was like, well, I hadn't really thought about that. But I got tipped off because I was their best student. So anyway, I'll keep the long story really short. Negotiated a bit, figured out all the liabilities and I paid five grand for this company.

How much was it traded? You know, at its peak, how much it was making?

It had to be globally tens of millions turnover. I don't know, I don't. I never saw the old accounts, they were in a bit of a mess. But for five grand I didn't care because I, I knew that I could monetize the database 100x on that. So I paid 5 grand for the database. The business, no, no physical assets like property, but the business. But I did a deal where they had a million pound liability that a million pounds of the courses that have been paid for in the UK that they wanted me to cover. So with my business partner's help, who, as you know, is really good at, is analytical and he was like, well, I reckon we can shave that down quite a lot. We can run events in cheaper venues around the uk, we can take off a lot of the bells. This recent budget should warn you that your pension is not safe and secure and they're coming for your inheritance. Do you even know how much is in your pension or where your pension is invested? Add to this the recent inheritance tax credit grab on your pensions and the risk of a market crash. You probably didn't know this and I didn't until recently, but physical gold can be added to your pension pot. Gold is inheritance tax free and has grown 700% in the last 20 years. You probably know from my content I'm investing heavily in silver and gold and that's why I've partnered with Direct Bullion. Myself and Nigel Farage are brand ambassadors and direct bullion can help you with gold to protect and grow your pension. I buy my gold and silver from Direct Bullion and I don't earn any money on any purchases of gold or silver if you buy direct from direct bullion. So if you go to robmore.directbullion.com you can get a great price on your silver and gold and you can get the pension Gold Investing Guide completely for free. As you know, I don't do many strategic partnerships and when I do, I do them with people who are credible, who've been doing it a long time, who invest in things That I invest in too. And gold and silver's going wild. I'm investing heavily in gold and silver and I recommend you ch. Robmore.directbullion.com whistles because it was. There's quite a lot of it. Like one of the courses, the main trainer would ride in on a horse in the gala dinner. They'd have a gala dinner riding on a horse, you know, in some Balmoral stately home. So we did it in Devon and I come out, come in. So we took all the bells and whistles off, but still had the trainers, still did the great events and we turned that business around and at its peak, that business did 10 million in sales. We still have that business today. It's now called Progressive Success because we rebranded it under our own umbrella. Yeah. And it's made tens of millions of pounds and I bought it for five grand.

So you bought a company that was doing tens of millions globally. Kind of shit the bed in oa. You bought it for a bargain.

Well, the thing is, without me, they'd have gone bust, all the staff would have lost their jobs and those. All the million pound in the UK of courses that were paid for would have evaporated. So I came in, they never would have sold it to me for five grand without the million pound liability. But as you know, we have our own training facilities, so a lot of the events that were supposed to be in London that cost tens of thousands a day, we just did them in Peterborough in our training suite. So we could. We really shaved the cost down. But, yeah, I think last week on the Zoom. Or was it yesterday? Yeah, I told that story for the first time. Probably one of my best business moves.

So do you know roughly that was a million pounds in liabilities? You know, roughly what you got it down to?

Oh, but the good thing as well is, wasn't just what we got it down to, is how long it took. So a million pounds worth of courses with every course being, say, two grand. It's quite a lot of courses. But we, I think contractually we had a year to deliver them and I think we might have extended that a bit. So essentially we were able to not just reduce the cost from, say, a million to 150 grand, but also spread it out over two years. And when people came to the events, we were able to sell them other courses in the suite, upgrade them to packages. So we drew out the expense, we reduced the expense and we added on further sales and revenue and then offered them our own products and services to the database that we bought because back then buying databases was much easier than it is now. Yeah, and that's so like five grand to 25 million or 50 million would easily be a story I could, could tell in, in that journey. I'm very excited to announce a special long term partnership with Direct Bullion. People must ask me hundreds, if not thousands of times where I buy my gold and silver. How to buy gold and silver? Can you buy gold and silver in your pension? Many people know from my content. I'm a huge fan of real money. They call gold God's money. So if you'd like information on investing in gold and silver, knowing where to invest, how to invest and how to invest gold and silver into your pension, which is huge, go to robmore.directbullion.com I get my gold at under spot price. This is not an affiliate deal. I won't earn anything on any of the gold or silver you purchase. I've got a special deal where I get a good price on my gold and silver and I've also got a very special deal for you, my loyal listeners and subscribers. Spot price or better@robmore.directbullion.com if you'd like to make, manage and multiply more money and build multiple streams of recurring income, and you'd like to meet one billionaire and at least seven millionaires face to face, I recommend you join us at an upcoming moneymaker summit. The link is robmore Live Money. Now, you need to be quick because we don't run many money maker summits throughout the year and we keep relatively small numbers. 150 people, sometimes 200, sometimes less. You'll learn the strategies and tactics to get your tax bill down, your income streams up, start and scale your business, make, manage and multiply money. And if you upgrade to the VIP tickets, you'll be able to have dinner with multimillionaires, you'll be able to get champagne reception, Q and A sessions with multimillionaires. And whilst I do occasionally offer some subsidized tickets to, there's just small upgrades for these special VIP tickets. So go now at robmore Live Money.

So did it have a database when you bought the company?

Yeah.

Is that, was that the main asset you was buying essentially was the database.

I'd have bought that database for a quarter of a million pounds. I'd have bought that database for half a million pounds and I got it. And all the courses and the delivery and the cross sell up, sell opportunity for five grand. Which five grand now? I mean, I don't know what I own. That's under five grand.

You've got about 25 grand worth of McQueen Top.

Yeah. I mean, obviously in 08, five grand was maybe what 10 grand is now, but it was, yeah.

How many people were on that database?

Oh, back then? Cleaned legitimate. 100,000.

How much money could somebody make from 100,000 people? Email database.

How much money could I make? Yeah, I could make an easy 2 to 5 pound per person per year. Easy, easy. Maybe more. I mean, I can make 1 to 2 pound per person on social media, so maybe more. I mean, data's harder now. GDPR rules. You've got to constantly clean. If they don't open for 30 days reduces your ability to, to reach more people, so you have to keep it cleaned. But yeah, like if I didn't make £5 per person per year out of a good database, I'd need shooting in the face.

Do you reckon that's like your biggest boss move in business?

Buying my ex bosses. Well, let me give you context before I tell you this. Right, so I went to work for a property sourcing business in 2006. Now our boss then, that was where I met my business partner, who I'm still with today. Our boss was the kind of guy that when he was feeling good and on for me, he'd had a good day, coffee was hitting him good. He was so cool. He'd always make you excited for the future. He's always coming up with ideas. Oh, Rob, go and borrow my Porsche for the day. Those days would happen once every two weeks and all the other days he would be angry and aggressive and I remember one day he spent like 800 quid on Google Ads and he had like seven leads and he printed them out on a piece of paper and he went, there's four for you, there's three for you, four to me, three to Mark. You sell them all or you're both fucking fired. And like, in the end it was too much and he really turned Mark and I really turned us against him. Anyway, so we left in the end. We set up Progressive property. We grew that quite well. He had what looked like on the outside quite a good year or two. Got a couple of people in, bought himself an Aston Martin. It all looked good on the outside, like a lot of businesses do. We knew there'd be a load of bullshit behind the scenes. And anyway, as it turns out, he was trading insolvently, possibly worse. He ended up like running away to a European country and went bust. And I bought all of his office furniture for next to no money. It was Jasper Conran, it was Caligaris, it was all this Italian designer furniture. He must have paid 50 grand for it. And I think we bought it for 500 quid. And Mark had his office chair. Mark would reclining, enjoying it. And that was, that was quite. There was just a bit of like, you know. You were a bastard.

Yeah.

You are horrible to us. We went to court with him and beat him in court and he became very like toxic. So there was a sweetness to having all of his nice furniture. Like we, we kitted out our office with high end designer furniture that's worth 50 grand for fucking 500 quid or a grand or whatever. You know, when you go to these bankruptcy sales. So that felt like a sweet little move. Yeah, I mean I did a hundred apartment block, as you know, with my business partner. We turned a sort of fairly run down big lump in the town center to 100 apartments. That's a pretty sweet deal.

How long did that take?

Five years all in.

Jesus.

End to end with the planning just took forever. Yeah, I mean the, the cat, the council say, oh yeah, you can get planning, you get planning, it just takes forever. So they really need to change the planning laws in the uk.

Can you share the numbers on that deal?

It's worth about 20 million. It goes, it, it pops up. It pops, Blair. It's popped between 19 and 21 and a half over the years since we've had it all rented out. It's based on obviously how much of it's rented out and other variables. Commercial is a bit different from residential.

How much did you put in?

We paid 3.8 million for it. We sold the retail unit at the bottom for 3.6. So we were 200 grand in on a 20 million pound project. We did spend over 10 developing it. Yeah, but that's not a bad deal.

Yeah.

And my business partner has to take all the credit for that and we're partners but you know, he's the genius and the engineer behind that.

So you still own the 99 apartments? All of them. So you sold the retail at the bottom, but you get the rental income.

We sold four fifths of the retail at the bottom. We also sold the lease on the land.

Okay.

I think we got 10 times yearly revenue for the lease on the land. And one fifth of the bottom floor we've kept and we get 50 grand a year on that and then develop 99 apartments above it. And if there's ever five apartments empty, that's like a high void for us. Five percent is a high void. It's never really empty.

They are nice, especially for Peterborough.

And they're priced well.

Yeah.

Yeah. Wow. There you go. So a couple of things you didn't know about me. Yeah, I mean I won face of Peterborough 1999. I won a modeling competition in Peterborough. They didn't know that about me.

You what? You entered a Peterborough modeling contest?

My. Well, technically my sister entered me when I was at uni.

Right.

I didn't say no. Did my ego. Good. Yeah.

What year?

1999.

Oh, nice. I was one.

Yeah, you've aged like it didn't get me laid though.

No. Well, it's Peterborough.

Yeah. Yeah.

Just a question on the development. So that money you put in, do you guys still at this stage, do you go raise finance or do you use it from your other companies to invest in that?

Yeah, we mostly invest our own personal money or the business, the money we made in our training companies into our developments just because it costs us a lot less. Our own money is much cheaper than someone else's money. However, when we started, we borrowed Mark's dad's money, Mark's mum's money or his stepdad's money, my mum's money. This building here, which is probably worth nearly a mil now, and bear in mind Peterborough, if this was in central London, this would be worth 15mil. But we paid 500 for this and we borrowed it off Mark's stepdad. We paid him a percent a month, we paid him back after nine months. So we paid him 500 grand plus 9% and we've owned the building ever since. And it's nearly a million now. So we have borrowed money to get started because you can get into property investing with other people's money, but when you've got money, what are you going to do with it? Yeah, however, I can't say exactly because it's not done, but we are, we are putting a project together at the moment which would probably be 350 apartments and that's probably a scale where we might want or need to raise some money. Wow.

Yeah, that's just insane to me. So you bought a business for five grand. It's then done 10 million tens of millions over the years and then you reinvest those profits into a massive portfolio. As you, I think the technical term is a fuck ton each month.

Yeah, yeah, fuck ton. So we own 345, I think units, whether they're apartments or houses or blocks, multi lets. And yeah, the one where Mark, I say We, I mostly do the training business. He does the property. We've got 1350 properties that our letting agency manages as well. But yeah, I mean, the one, the one. The one property deal we're putting together now will triple the size of our 300 foot. No, it will double the size of our portfolio. So his compounding and how it works. I don't know if you've seen Warren Buffett's net worth. Age 17, 18, 25, 30, 50. Well, it's taken us 18 years to put 345 properties in our portfolio, not including the ones we sold, which we shouldn't have. And in one deal we could double it.

That's insane.

That's 45. 700.

Genuine question. Is it a motivation for you and Mark to become billionaires?

No. No, but like you said, no one's going to care at my funeral if I was a billionaire.

Yeah, but it's the game of money, right?

Yeah, but, you know, if I set a goal to be a billionaire, then maybe I'll never be happy until I am one. Then I'll get there and realize, actually, I'm a minnow billionaire. And then these. Everyone's got a bigger yacht. I actually think it's the wrong goal as well. The goal should be build a meaningful business that really changes people's lives and do meaningful work and get paid a lot of money. So would I rather have 100 million doing something meaningful or earn 3 billion having a gambling firm? I'd take the 100 million. I mean, my net worth isn't. Well, I'm not going to say, but it's not, not, not, not too far off that. It's not that, but. So I'd rather be worth 100 mil. I'm talking personal net worth. But sleep at night knowing I'm doing really good things in the world than be a billionaire owning a gambling firm? To me, that is. There's so many things wrong with society or the suicide around gambling. It just feels so wrong.

Well, we need to do an episod. Well, there's a few things you didn't know about Rob Moore, face of Progressive 99 or face of Peterborough 99.

Yeah, I mean, I've always been face of progressive, mate. Well, my company. And remember, if you don't risk anything, you risk it.

This episode was brought to you by Disruptive Media, helping bold entrepreneurs stand out through podcast, video and social content. Visit disruptivemedia.co.uk to learn more. This episode was brought to you by Disruptive Media, helping bold entrepreneurs stand out through podcasting video and social content. Visit disruptivemedia.co uk to learn more.