Secrets For Building A Thriving Business - Daniel Priestley

Daniel Priestley is an entrepreneur, speaker, and author. We’ve seen more change in business over the last 10 years than in the 50 before it. From the rise of artificial intelligence to a total cultural reset. how do you adapt to the current landscape, and what timeless truths still drive lasting success? Expect to learn about the current state of the UK, what Daniel learned about his discussion with Gary’s Economics, the process for taking your business form $0 to $1M per month, how to get from $0 to $10k per month first, how to charge more for you business and how to sell it, where Daniel finds his source of happiness, which aspects of your business you should outsource to AI and much more… - 0:00 Why Entrepreneurs Are Leaving the UK 04:07 Daniel’s Debate With Gary Stevenson 22:23 Employment Vs Ownership 31:34 Going From Idea to Business 38:11 Best & Worst Businesses to Start 41:28 Go From 0 to 10K a Month 46:12 Developing a Team of Staff 57:09 The Difference Between 10K/Month & 100K/Month 1:11:21 What Aspects of a Business Should AI Do? 1:13:23 How to Know When to Increase a Price 1:20:54 Knowing When to Let Someone Go 1:25:48 Selling Your Business 1:36:21 Making the Running of Your Business Fun 1:42:39 Starting a Family as a Business Founder 1:45:46 Building a Resilient Mindset 1:56:55 How Technology is Changing the Business Landscape 2:03:39 Where to Find Daniel - Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom⁠ Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D, and more from AG1 at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get up to $350 off the Pod 5 at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, it's interesting that some people coming out of the UK have sort of disproportionate results, especially given how poor the sort of entrepreneurial spirit is in the UK.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  They tend to leave. Look at this, you, Jay Shetty, there's now, well, Ali Abdaal, there's now Stephen Bartlett. Yeah, what's going on?

• 0:24Chris Williamson?

  What do you make of the state of the UK at the moment?

• 0:28Speaker 01

  They're making every mistake. The UK should be so fundamentally strong in terms of it's a great time zone, it's got an incredible background, amazing institutions, English speaking, fast internet. Like, there's so many great things about the UK, natural borders, like it's an island, great farming and farmland, you know, it's a very fertile place. And through policy decisions, everything is in collapse at the moment, everything's in decline. They're overtaxing people, so people are leaving. Only 1% of people pay 30% of the taxes, so that basically if a small group of people leave, it has a devastating impact on the finances.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  They've just done this terrible thing to farmers and now farmers that have been farming for generations are getting out of their farm businesses. Yeah, I mean, it's just really sad because like when I arrived 20 years ago in London from Australia, London was the best place in the world. Like, it was the place to be. It was the most entrepreneurial place in the world and all the money was there, all the talent was there, all the fun was there. I mean, London is still fundamentally a great place. And it's just like, yeah, they're just ruining it.

• 1:42Chris Williamson?

  How much of this is top down versus bottom up? Because the culture in the UK, the approach that people have to risk their preparedness to kind of break free from the trodden path, that also seems to contribute as well.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  The issue with the UK is that if you're super ambitious outside of London, you go to London. And if you're super ambitious, you go to the world. Like the UK, you've got to remember, the UK took over the whole world. So some of the most ambitious people throughout the last couple of hundred years, you know, they started families in Australia, in Singapore, in, you know, parts of Africa, in parts of, well, in the USA. So, you know, the British, the British, I don't think have any fundamental flaws. It's just that the ambitious people tend to either go to London or leave. And there is a bit of class warfare, but, you know, the Brits punch above their weight so well. I was just sitting next to a race car driver on the plane and he drives a McLaren.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  And he was talking about like all these incredible car companies coming out of the UK that everyone wants. It's like Rolls Royce and McLaren and Aston Martin and Bentley and Range Rover and all of this. And it's like, oh yeah, that's right. We do, we do really good stuff.

• 2:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's a weird one, dude. You know, I, I don't like always sort of crapping on the UK, seeming as if I'm some guy that got on the last lifeboat off the Titanic. And that's not the case necessarily, but I don't know. The, the future doesn't seem to be particularly bright for people that are entrepreneurially minded.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  It's all policy driven, so it could change. You know, it's not, it's not like there's some fundamental thing that makes, like, for example, China has fundamental problems. Fundamental problem with China is that it has 14 different borders on the land and sea. So if it wants to go in any direction, it's basically bumping into its neighbors. It also imports 40% of its calories. So if the world goes to custard, it doesn't have the capacity to actually feed its own people without imports, exports flowing freely. So that makes it a fundamentally difficult country to run. The UK doesn't have any of these fundamental geopolitical issues. It's just like literally sitting around shooting itself in the foot.

• 3:55Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah, I.

• 3:59Chris Williamson?

  I wonder what the sort of near term future has in store and whether or not policies are going to move in one direction or another. What were your reflections after your discussion with Gary on Stephen's show? What have you sort of come to realise after that?

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Main reflection is that people are really hurting and that's real. I don't particularly get along with Gary. I don't like his solution. I don't like his way of, you know, putting his solution on to the world. You know, his whole thing about just tax the rich. If, you know, I'm always extremely sceptical of simple answers to complex problems. And, you know, it's already playing out. I mean, it's not even theory. It's playing out that the rich are leaving. And I, my big thing was, hey, I agree with you on the problem. Like, I really agree with you on the problem, but your solution is going to damage the country even more. You're going to literally make the people leave who we need to stay. And, but what have I taken from it? The pain is real.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  A lot of people at the moment are incredibly upset about the fact that you can't get a house. You, if you work a good job and you're a good person who follows the rules, you tend to get punished for it, or you certainly don't get ahead. It feels like the, the services that we depend upon are breaking down. It feels like, um, uh, just the basics of having a fun, enjoyable life have gone away. A lot of people feel very lonely. Um, you know, relationship formation, having families, having kids, all of that sort of stuff. For whatever reason, the world that we've now created is disrupting all of the kind of natural things that we used to do.

• 5:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the UK, I think, struggles. The weather's not fantastic for most of the year.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  And by the way, we're now going to make it dimmer. I don't know if you've seen this in the news. The UK government, for whatever reason, have decided to spend

• 5:43Chris Williamson?

  Cloud seeding?

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Fifty million on cloud seeding and they've decided that they need to make it darker.

• 5:49Chris Williamson?

  That's the one, that's the one thing that the UK needs more of, rain.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:53Chris Williamson?

  Rain is not, there's insufficient.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  They, they've, they've just spent 20 billion on solar panels. And now they're going to put more clouds in the air and it's like.

• 6:00Chris Williamson?

  What's the justification for this?

• 6:02Speaker 01

  They're just, they're high. I just think they're smoking.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  That's, that's.

• 6:09Chris Williamson?

  That's the only logical explanation.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  That's the only.

• 6:11Chris Williamson?

  Arana.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're just, there's something's going on.

• 6:14Chris Williamson?

  So strange. And you know, the first time I even knew that we could geoengineer clouds was Dubai.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 6:21Chris Williamson?

  When I was in Dubai, I didn't.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  When they accidentally did a little too much.

• 6:23Chris Williamson?

  Uh, well, they did it sort of gently and then, yeah, they can, I guess you can.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  There was that massive flood and it was like, oh, sorry guys.

• 6:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, push the button. That was us.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  We left it on too long.

• 6:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, crazy. Um, but the idea of doing that in the UK seems absolutely wild to me. But yeah, you know, weather's not particularly fantastic. There isn't just that many exciting things to do from a lifestyle perspective. So if you are someone that's managed to reach a bit of escape velocity.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 6:48Chris Williamson?

  With having some disposable income, but where do you put it? I'm gonna get a bigger TV to watch more Netflix, you know, there just isn't the same level of adventure and it's a small country. There's not that much going on.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I like the proximity, you know, I, I snowboard. So, you know, it's great to just duck over to the Alps and go snowboarding. Um, you know, it's great to go down south of France or Spain, um, you know, head down to one of the islands. Uh, you know, so I love the proximity to, to Europe and European culture.

• 7:17Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  Um, London still is a great city, you know, there's a lot, there's, there's obviously parts of London that are terrible, that's terrible. But it's like, ultimately it's a pretty amazing city.

• 7:26Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think Gary's message is resonating so much at the moment? Well, it seems to be very popular online. He's getting lots of plays.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Because people can't get ahead. So like, if you want to get into like, like, so here's my thesis. My thesis is this, the industrial revolution lasted a couple of hundred years. And we had this rise of the industrial revolution through the eighteen hundreds. Then we had like the peak industrial revolution through the nineteen hundreds. And then we invented digital. Uh, we invented two things. We invented finance and digital technology. And with those two inventions, we just completely have crashed the industrial revolution system. And we have a new system that's in ascension, which is the digital system. And what's now happening? Is that you have people like myself who have digital businesses and living the best life ever. I can live and work from anywhere. I've got technology. I can, you know, run

• 8:16Speaker 01

  a pretty fun and affluent life. I would not trade places for any other time in history. This is like the best time ever because I'm surfing the wave of this digital ascension. And then you've got people who followed the rules, went to school, went to university. They became skilled labour and now they're trying to sell skilled labour into the workforce and that doesn't pay off and you can't get a house and you can't start a family and everything's overcrowded and, you know, nothing works. So the industrial revolution system, the moment that we are in time right now is the industrial revolution system is in decline and the digital revolution is in ascension. And some people, or a lot of people, eighty, ninety percent of people are on this downward spiral and a small

• 8:59Speaker 01

  group of people are on this upward spiral. And we're just living through a time of transition. This is not the first time this happened. In the late seventeen hundreds, we invented the steam engines and in the UK, right? Silicon Valley of seventeen hundreds was York. So we invented steam engines and we invented pumps and we invented tractors and plows and all this sort of stuff and factories. And we created the factory production method. And there was this time of about fifty years from the late seventeen hundreds to the early eighteen hundreds, where huge numbers of people were displaced from their jobs. Charles Dickens writes about kids on the streets, Oliver Twist, there's the tale

• 9:44Speaker 01

  of two cities, revolution, French Revolution comes along. So essentially, this industrial technology, you had eighty, ninety percent of people who were living and working on farmland and had agricultural related jobs, and then machines came along and did those agricultural jobs. They got massively displaced. They went to the cities, they bred and they were like described like rats. In the UK, they put them on boats and sent them to Australia. This is where I'm from. And they end up trying to like, you know, get rid of people out of the country. There's too many people and they're not productive and we need to get rid of them. So a lot of people were displaced because of technology and it took fifty years.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  They call it the Engels pause, fifty years for the economy to start to sync back up again, like two generations. Basically, you have the industrialists and all those working in factories and running factories and running technology and they're making tons of money. They become wildly successful. And then the people, the peasants who are displaced and they, you know, abject poverty and outbreak of disease and all this sort of stuff. But it took fifty years to start normalizing that again.

• 10:59Chris Williamson?

  So structurally, the changing nature of work is creating inequality?

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, my belief is that this is all tech driven. It's technology driven. Everything we're seeing in the world right now is a mismatch of the world we were brought up for in the schooling system and the technology that we now have available. And essentially, we were prepared for a world that no longer exists. Our world got disrupted by technology. I mean, to use an example that we could all relate to, if there was a hundred of us out on a field, plowing a field, and we expected to take a month, and then two guys rock up with the tractor and they plowed in two days. And now we wonder, well, what does ninety-eight of us do? Like, what are we, what are we gonna do? So we can see it in the past because it's so clear, but we're not as clear because it's happening to us now.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  But what's happening is, you know, the value of jobs is, is going through the floor because of technology. Technology automates things where you don't have to do the job, but it also simplifies things where anyone can do the job.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  It outsources things where people can do the job from anywhere. So those three superpowers of technology means that an individual who like used to have a pretty good, decent job and it was valuable in the economy, if that job is now simple or outsourcable or replaceable.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  You know, that person is devalued and it's due to no fault of their own. They're not a bad person. It's just that that in the economy is not very valuable anymore.

• 12:29Chris Williamson?

  And a message talking about how this is unfair, this is a game of inequality is going to resonate because it does reflect what's happening sort of structurally.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and the game is, well, hey, these people have got all the, all the money. We just need to take it, take it back off them. But the flaw in that thinking is that we live in a world where you can live and work from anywhere. So this digital technology that is causing this problem also gives extreme mobility. You, you could run this from anywhere in the world and you do run it from anywhere in the world. If for some reason the UK, the US said, hey, we're not having podcasters anymore, or we're taxing podcasters 80%.

• 13:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, my nightmare.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Right? Well, you'd be like, oh, that's an inconvenience, but I'm going to just go to Dubai or go to Switzerland or go to Italy or, you know, go somewhere else. And it would be inconvenient, but like mildly inconvenient. It's not, it's not wildly inconvenient. It's not like picking up a factory and putting it somewhere else. Everything's virtual. One of my companies is a tech company. We have 35 full-time employees and we have no office. Like we've never had an office. Everyone works from all over the world. We're a wildly successful company, one of the fastest growing in the UK. And yeah, we don't, we don't have physical offices. You know, we can literally just pick up and rehome the business anywhere.

• 13:46Chris Williamson?

  So if you push people too much, you're going to get brain drain. The talent is going to go elsewhere. It's going to go to Bali. It's going to go to Thailand. It's going to go to Italy, which has got, Portugal had tons and tons of incentives.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Portugal and Italy does now. So Italy, you can pay, I think a flat tax of 200,000 euros.

• 14:06Chris Williamson?

  And that's it.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  You're done for tax. So if you are, if you're the type of person earning a million a year, 200 grand, pretty good deal. Especially if your current country is charging you, you know, 400 or 500 grand. In the 1970s, they did high taxes or the taxes got really up there in the UK and we lost all the British artists. We lost the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the Who and Kinks. They all rehomed their catalogs in Amsterdam, which had a 1% tax on intellectual property rights. And basically, the response was all this incredible intellectual property that British artists had produced, didn't generate any taxes for the UK.

• 14:48Chris Williamson?

  That you've got it now.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:51Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether, I don't know, I have a bunch of friends who have also left the UK. Jack Butcher, who's over here from Visualize Value, George Mack, who literally landed here yesterday. He was in Dubai for the last four and a half years, now he's in the US.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  I'm tempted.

• 15:06Chris Williamson?

  Mate.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  I'm tempted.

• 15:07Chris Williamson?

  I don't know, it's, it is one of those things where you don't want to feel like you're dancing on the sort of smoldering remains of some place. And that's not to say that the UK is doomed, but I do get the sense that it wouldn't surprise me if Gary and Jimmy the Giant, you know, both of whom have consumed a good bit of their content and I find interesting. I don't know whether, I'm not smart enough or know enough about economics to work out the veracity or successfulness of their proposals. But I can see the popularity of them. And I think, okay, well, are you going to end up moving further and further toward a more socialist style construction when it comes to the way that the country is going to be put together financially?

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we know how that ends. Socialism always ends the same way, in collapse. It just happens, you know, over and over and over again. There's a few exceptions to the rule, you know, social democratic socialist countries like the Swedes and Norway. And there's some reasons why they haven't collapsed under the weight of a big government. But the vast, vast, vast majority of countries that try this experiment collapse. The UK has to make a decision post Brexit, what does it want to be? Does it want to be the USA's, you know, 51st state? Does it want to be in lockstep? Does it want to be the fifth Nordic country and become a, you know, social democratic socialist country?

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Does it want to be Entrepreneur Island, the Switzerland or the Singapore of Europe? It's got to pick a, pick a lane and go for it. Problem is, is you've got all the people in London who want to be Entrepreneur Island, you know, and turn the place into like an amazing sort of vibrant place for entrepreneurs to come and set up companies. But you've got all the people outside of London who want it to be essentially the Nordic, fifth Nordic country. Want it to be Sweden 2.0 or whatever.

• 17:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's interesting coming from the northeast of the UK, you know, very blue collar and that there was not much by the way of entrepreneurialism, maybe someone would own a window cleaning business.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Which kind of sucks because the northeast of the UK was the heart of the industrial age. That was literally.

• 17:16Chris Williamson?

  Stockton Antis was where the first steam engine was actually constructed and it went to York.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that was the quantum computer of the day. Like a steam engine, can you imagine like seeing a steam engine in like when it was first rolled out? It's like, it's magic. It's like us seeing chat G P T for the first time. It's like, what the hell have they created?

• 17:34Chris Williamson?

  I guess it just shows how these little phases, you know, you talk about empires falling and but you have little microcosms of industries falling and bubbles falling as well. And you know, currently S F is still kind of it for tech. But if you keep pushing people into like stupid stuff, the living standards, if you don't clean up the street. I walked through downtown San Francisco and San Francisco is this wonderful blend of fruity and homeless. Like those are the two ends of the spectrum, like super, super liberal and really, really sketchy.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  It's a snapshot into the future because imagine that the world is dividing into dirt and cloud. And in the cloud is your digital environment. That is where you live in the digital space. And in the cloud, anyone, anywhere could be your customer. So it doesn't matter if someone is in Brazil or Brisbane or Bangalore or Budapest, right? They can be your customer if they can, you know, click a link, they're they're a good good customer. In the in the dirt, in the world of geography, you can only do business with people who are who are local. So you you have local customers. And what's happening is that all of these businesses that are local geography limited

• 18:51Speaker 01

  are losing out to all the businesses that are international, global, digital. So you can even see examples of like a little local grocery store and they're scratching their head going, or every, in the UK, we have this thing called the high street and the high street is like the main shopping street in every little small town. And they're all closing down and they're sitting there going, well, what's going on? Well, we all know what's going on. People are ordering on Amazon. They're getting their groceries delivered and they're buying their products and services on Amazon with a click. So one big American company is able to look after all the geographies for all the things, all at once, all the time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Why am I going to walk down into this little local high street and go into a like a shop

• 19:36Speaker 01

  and see if they've got something when I can just do it in a click? So the world is, this is this world dividing.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  And it's a little bit like for hundreds of years, we've all been running a marathon race. And then some people get given bicycles and some people get given cars. And then everyone's angry as hell because the bicycles and the cars are getting wildly different times compared to the people who run. And why is that happening? Because a bicycle is technology and a car is technology. And it's, it's essentially, once you see it, you see it everywhere. You see that essentially the world is dividing between those who know how to leverage technology and those who are not leveraging a lot of technology.

• 20:20Chris Williamson?

  Is that the fundamental changing nature of work in your opinion?

• 20:23Speaker 01

  That's it. That's it. It's all, it's all clouds and dirt. It's basically, are you running your entire life in this new economy, this digital economy? Or are you essentially stuck in the industrial age model of going to a, like, if you go to a office, that's old technology. If you have a start time and a finish time and you essentially measure your, if you're selling time for money, that's old technology. It's a really old way of doing things.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  If you are limited in any way by geography to who you can sell to, that's old technology. So all these things that are just like the most normal things in the world, essentially have just been superseded over the last five years since COVID, which accelerated the whole thing. And now the world has divided between those who get it and those who are stuck in the old system.

• 21:14Chris Williamson?

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• 21:25Chris Williamson?

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• 22:08Chris Williamson?

  by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/modernd wisdom using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. A lot of the time, I think people are pretty disparaging of working for anybody else. There's sort of two camps on the internet and one of them doesn't talk at all. And that's the one that most people fall into where they have a job or they work for somebody. And the only one that anybody else ever talks about is, well, you should solopreneur your way to your first 10K a month and so on and so forth. How do you come to think about the relative usefulness of working for versus owning?

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Well, look, you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Entrepreneurship is a team sport and it's entrepreneurial teams that make things happen. So we need to have a bit of nuance that it's not just the founders who start a new company that are in this new world. It's the founder and their core team. And it's also, it's a way of working. So there are plenty of people who are part of a small growth company and they can live and work from anywhere. They're getting great pay. They get bonuses. They might get stock options. They might get bonuses for hitting outcomes and targets as opposed to staying and doing overtime. So that way of working is a great way to work and it's great to be, it's exciting to be part of that kind of a team. And then you've got drudgery and you know, drudgery is like, you know, I, I clock in and I clock

• 23:41Speaker 01

  out, I have to wait essentially five years to get a promotion because there's another person who's in line for a promotion before me. Um, I get paid for time and really it doesn't matter what I do, it's just time spent, you know, in the office. So, you know, we have to kind of have this nuance that I like, I'm not against at all. Like, I, I mean, I have a hundred plus employees, so I don't have any issue with, with the, like, there's nothing wrong with being part of an entrepreneurial team, but you don't want to be doing drudgery. If it feels like you're just drudging on, if it feels like this isn't going anywhere, this thing's in decline, there's no electricity flowing through this, that's the time to reconsider. But, um, you know, you talk a lot about agency and entrepreneurship is just a way of expressing

• 24:23Speaker 01

  agency. It's, it's just a way to have an effect on the world. It's a way to get your ideas out in the world in a commercially successful, you know, manner. There are many other ways that you could do that as well. But, you know, if you were high agency in Japan, a couple of hundred years ago, you'd be a samurai. Um, you'd roam around with your samurai swords. If you're high agency in this modern economy, you'd probably be an entrepreneur or be part of an entrepreneurial team.

• 24:48Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah, you've taken a ton of businesses from zero dollars a month to a million dollars a month or where do you start with that? Is it always the same process?

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, yeah, for, for anyone who hasn't, not familiar with my background, I've had seven startups that went zero to a million in their first 12 months, and I've had three that have gone 10 million plus. I've run an entrepreneur accelerator for five and a half thousand companies where we've gone through a growth journey. I've written six books on entrepreneurship. So basically, I'm saying that not to try and impress anyone, but to say, I spend a lot of time thinking about entrepreneurship. Um, uh, yeah, there's, there's a very predictable set of steps. So entrepreneurship is a lot like getting a plane off the runway. You need to follow a set of processes and a set of steps, and it's extremely dangerous to fly a plane, except if you follow a set of steps, and then it's extremely safe. So

• 25:40Speaker 01

  there's a narrow, straight path for getting a plane off the runway. There's aerodynamic principles, and there's like pre-flight checklists. So it's the same with entrepreneurship. Do you, should I go through it or like?

• 25:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Well, the first, the first one, the first step is to work for an entrepreneur. So like being being a number two for an entrepreneur is is a really great first step. So I never recommend people just like quit their job and go start a business. I would always say quit your job in a large faceless company and go work for a company that has less than 12 people on the team so that you can just see what it's like and just have an experience. Do two years working for an inspiring entrepreneurial little team. And really, it doesn't matter if it is totally aligned, like if you don't necessarily love the product or the service, but just be there for the team, be there to see how it works.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  You know, when you work for Goldman Sachs, they shove you in a corner and they tell you go do these spreadsheets. You have no idea why, you just do it. And you don't know who the client is or how much they're paying or any of that sort of stuff. When you work for a small business, you know, everything, you know, the revenues and the profits and the growth and what's working, what's not working. So you want to like, step one is just go work for an entrepreneur for two years. Step two is do some side hustles. So 90 day open and shut side hustles. So just like, see if you can come up with something just to kind of test your test your strength.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  How old were you when you did nightclub parties?

• 27:14Chris Williamson?

  I started at 18. The first ever seminar that I sat in at uni, I sat next to what would be my future business partner for a decade and a half, which is very serendipitous, it's really weird.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  So like, I was 18 doing nightclub parties and those were those were side hustles. So you, you know, you and I can totally relate to what it's like. You you book a venue and you know, it's 90 days out. And then you have this job to try and fill it and make it cool and get everyone to turn up all at once and make sure it's a really great party. And then there's that moment where you collect all the cash at the door and put it in the the belt around your tummy and and take it home and count it. And it's like super exciting and and it's open and shut. It basically, at the end of that night, at the end of that party, you can stop. But man, I learnt a lot from nightclub parties. I don't know about you.

• 28:03Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I mean, it was the baptism of fire, but I my flag, I'm I'm aware that I have a lot of motivated reasoning here, not least that my one of my best friends and ex-business partner still runs his in Newcastle. But if you're an 18, 19, 20 year old kid going off to university in the UK or the US or something. Go work for a club promo company.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:22Chris Williamson?

  You'll see everything that you need to. You will see B to B, you'll see B to C, you'll see hiring, firing, accounts, marketing, advertising, social media, tech, you'll learn how to organize logistics, operations, supply chain stuff. You'll have to deal with different vendors, you'll have to be able to.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  And urgency and.

• 28:41Chris Williamson?

  Everything is on a very, very, very tight timeline. Everything, because the event's happening on Thursday. There is no, oh, well, we'll do the event on Friday because it's not ready. It's fucking happening on Thursday, whether it's an absolute car crash.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Get on your phone and text 500 people right now.

• 28:54Chris Williamson?

  Yes, correct.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Where am I going to get the, just figure it out.

• 28:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Go out on the street, stop people and see.

• 28:59Chris Williamson?

  It's very solutions focused and a lot of businesses are problems focused.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  It's weird that actually a lot of entrepreneurs I've come across did nightclub party promotions.

• 29:08Chris Williamson?

  Well, that says one of two things, either that nightclub partying is a good training ground or that lots of people that are successful entrepreneurs used to be degenerates.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  It's one. Or both.

• 29:17Chris Williamson?

  It's one of the two, yeah, exactly. I mean, look, this, one of the main lessons that I took away from running nightclubs, and I still see this, I think, in, no matter how big the business gets, there was two types of people. One were people who loved to party and realized that, holy shit, I can get paid to do what I like. I can get paid to do what I would do for free and for fun. And then the other side were people who had looked at it as a particularly profitable vector that you could treat professionally and sort of crank a bit of leverage and operational efficiency into, and this actually turns into a legitimate business. And you still see this now, you've got your idea of sort of lifestyle business versus profit maximizing business.

• 30:00Chris Williamson?

  And I think that those two things largely kind of map onto that.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Map onto the nightclub party thing too, yeah. I, I mean, isn't it funny to, you, you mentioned about how you learn so much through the process. You, you told me before you're doing like a fundraiser, you're involved in a fundraiser. It's the same stuff, like all the stuff that gets a party promoted and gets people to turn up at a nightclub. It's the same stuff for raising a $20 million round.

• 30:22Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Scarcity, limited access, I mean, I.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Bit of hustle.

• 30:26Chris Williamson?

  You're right, and we're doing, we're doing this raise at the moment for New Tonic and it's very, very sort of private and we haven't listed it anywhere and it's just me texting a few people in my phone book and some people that I think, oh, they might be interested, so I'm like, yeah, Bartlett, like. Got this thing, would you wanna, do you wanna see the deck? Like, yeah, sure. I'm like, they really fired me up because it made me feel like I was twenty years old again. Yeah, exactly. But the difference is, you know, you're not asking for five pounds on the door. You're asking for twenty five grand checks.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that, and that is, but that's why it's such a great training ground. The other training ground that I had when I was a teenager is I worked at McDonald's. Um, and McDonald's was incredible for, like, we were fifteen, sixteen year olds running a two million dollar a year restaurant. And it was like, it was wild, you know, at busy times, it was doing something like four thousand dollars every hour. And like, the store manager was twenty three. We were all fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. And we were just smashing out four thousand dollar hours. And like, we couldn't tidy our bedroom, but we could run a restaurant.

• 31:28Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  It was, it was epic. Like, I loved working at McDonald's.

• 31:32Chris Williamson?

  How do you come to think about the way people go from an idea to a business launch? That process. A lot of people got lots of ideas, very few people launch businesses.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  So the first step is ideation, which is to come up with not one but ten ideas. You must look at ten different ideas. Because when you come up with one idea, you become fixated on it, you become obsessed with it. And when you say, I'm gonna come up with ten ideas, and then I'm gonna talk about it with a few people, and see which are the best three that we think could go, go for. And so you, you start with ten ideas. And there's a few ways to approach an idea. Uh, number one is noticing a problem. So it's like, I've figured out something that's wrong in the world. There's an unmet need, there's, there's a problem that's not solved. There's something that's not as good as it could be. Um, so that's the problem window. You can come through that.

• 32:19Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Uh, the next one is passion. So you could say, I just love this, right? I'm massively into snowboarding, so I wanna do something snowboarding related. Um, and then the third one is payment, which is that I've noticed a bunch of money floating around X. So ultimately, the business needs all three of those things. You need to solve a problem, you need to stay passionate about it, and you need to get paid. But you tend to start by noticing from one of those three angles. So you're gonna sort of like, kind of evaluate those ten ideas based on how passionate, how big a problem is this, how much money could this make?

• 32:53Chris Williamson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  Right? So you kind of go through those, those ones. Then what you do is you pick your favorite three and you launch a, one of two or three campaigns. So campaign number one, which is my favorite, is a waiting list campaign. So this is where you set up a landing page and you just say, we're going to be doing X, Y and Z. If you want the information, join the waiting list. And essentially, um, so like, like all I need, let's say I want to come in and compete with your brand here. Yep. I just need a graphic designer or chat G P T to mock up what this might look like. And create a few basic designs. I put that on a landing page and say, we're launching a new drink. Um, that, that is all about focus and mental clarity and blah, blah, blah.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  If you're interested to know more, please join the waiting list, answer five questions. To join the waiting list and, and, and go in the running to win $500 worth of product or something like that. And you want to ask, you know, obviously their name and email address. You want to ask, you know, uh, about what they currently do in that particular space. What they're looking to achieve, what their biggest barriers are, what their budget might be. So you ask a few questions and then they join the waiting list. My rule is if you can't get 150 people on a waiting list, then it's game over. That idea is dead. So 150 is the minimum that has to be on the waiting list. And it shouldn't be like every waking hour to get those people. It should just be, I can D M some people.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  I can drop this into a group on Facebook. Um, I can circulate it amongst some friends. I can do a post on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever. So it's like, yeah, pretty easy. I've got my first 150 people on a waiting list. This is, this idea can progress. Another way you could do this is a WhatsApp group. So you just launch a WhatsApp group and you say, um, I'm, I'm going to be launching a new fitness challenge.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  All the information will go into this WhatsApp group. If you're interested in fitness, join the WhatsApp group. Once again, you're trying to get 150 people into a WhatsApp group. Or the third one is a, um, an assessment, a take the assessment, an online assessment. Basically, it's just free to take an assessment. So if I said, I'm launching a new fitness business. And I've created a fitness assessment. Start with that. Take the assessment to see if you need this fitness business. So launching a quiz or an assessment, launching a WhatsApp group, launching a waiting list, these are the three first tests. And we're conducting a hundred and fifty, can we get a hundred and fifty people on?

• 35:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What's the principle that's underlying that beyond I just need to test whether or not there's a hundred and fifty people that are interested in this? What's the dynamic that is sort of pulling people in and makes this an interesting structure?

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Well, essentially, if this business has a place in the world, it shouldn't be too hard to get a hundred and fifty people to do something that's free. Just to, just to say I'm interested more and I'll give you my details. If this business is just of no interest to people, they, you know, I mean, if you can't get a hundred and fifty people to fill in a little form, you're not going to get a hundred and fifty people to buy anything, you know, it's game over. You know, like this is a very low bar to clear. So you just need, the reason I want a hundred and fifty is because I want to next step be able to talk to thirty. And normally out of a hundred and fifty, you can get on a phone call or you can have a conversation or a text conversation with thirty.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  And, you know, so there's this concept called statistical significance, which is basically when they do things like drug trials or when they do testing of products, you need to test enough people to get real feedback. So there's thirty people is a statistically significant number and a hundred and fifty is a statistically significant number. So I'm just constantly, if it's an easy low bar, it's got to be a hundred and fifty. If it involves talking to people, it's got to be thirty. So these are my first steps.

• 36:46Chris Williamson?

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• 37:27Chris Williamson?

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• 38:10Chris Williamson?

  Just lingering on the idea point for a little bit longer. What are the reliably best and worst areas that you see people focus on? I imagine lots of people get seduced by the same dead ends and what are those?

• 38:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, anything high volume, low value is the biggest dead end for most people. Look, you're different because you've got millions of followers, so you can do a drink. But anyone who doesn't have millions of followers, this is a business that relies upon

• 38:43Chris Williamson?

  Scale.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Thousands and thousands and thousands of sales every day. You know, lots and lots and lots of people. This has to get into stores and those stores have to, like a lot has to happen. But it's one of these seductive businesses because someone who looks at this and goes, oh, like it would be really cool to have a drinks company. Anything that involves food or drink, nightmare. You know, people who want to do cupcakes, coffee, restaurants, burger vans, all terrible businesses.

• 39:12Chris Williamson?

  supply chain perishable, tethered, can't ship worldwide.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it doesn't have scalability. So if you want to sell more burgers, you need to open more burger restaurants. So whereas software, if I want to sell more software, I just give more people usernames and passwords. I don't, I can build software once and then I can just onboard new customers at scale. Whereas, so anyway, high volume, low value businesses are notoriously hard because most people just don't have access to volume. They just, you know, if you're an influencer and you've got a million followers, by all means, go for it.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  The next one that is notoriously good is B two B services. So business to business services. So for example, if you say, hey, I can help companies introduce their first chatbot. We charge three and a half thousand dollars. We come in and do a deep dive into your, you know, your business. We find out what are the most common customer success questions that need answering, customer service questions. And we're going to help you set up an AI chatbot to answer 70% of your customer service inquiries. And, you know, the package starts at three and a half grand. Or if you're a bigger business, it might be as much as 15 grand. And you can, you know, in that kind of business, you only need, you know, four, five, six sales a month. And you're in the tens of thousands of dollars already.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  So B two B services is just notoriously great. Anything where you can make a sale and then the lights come on is a really good business. As opposed to where you need setup costs and then you can make a sale. So like, you know, you, you know, we're in a, a building that has like, I don't know, dozens of businesses here. If you could literally just walk around and say, hey, guys, we're doing a cybersecurity thing for people in this area. If you're interested in making sure you don't get hacked, we can help you with that. And then you just make all the sales and you say, okay, cool. We're going to be, we're going to be available next month to start this. So you sell first and then build or sell first, then deliver. Great businesses, sell first, then build is, is a great principle.

• 41:13Chris Williamson?

  Right, yeah, because you don't put any liability down before you actually have guarantees that people are going to want this thing.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 41:20Chris Williamson?

  So it's the waiting list with financial.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're getting certainty. Yeah, you're getting some commitment there. Yeah.

• 41:27Chris Williamson?

  Okay. What gets you from zero to 10K a month?

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Chaos.

• 41:32Chris Williamson?

  Ah, yeah, yeah, I remember that.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Chaos is concept audience offer sales. So, um, so you've got to have a good concept. So it's, it's, it's a concept that has a nice hook. People understand it. It's like, um, so for example, a drink that helps you to focus. That's a great concept. It's like, okay, this is, you know, this is going to do X, Y and Z for you. It's all on the side of the can. It's great, right? So, um, or. AI chatbots for financial planners, customer success agents for financial planners. Okay, cool. That's a cool concept. Okay, why would they need one? Because of this and it has to be regulated and it has to be there. Okay, cool. And you know how to do that? Yep. So we need a good concept. Audience is getting in front of people.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  So literally face to face or on the phone or on Zoom or, you know, getting their attention in some way. So audience or attention. Offer is constructing a gold, silver, bronze offer. So a bottom tier, mid tier, high tier offer. And giving people the choice of being able to do one of those three. Being able to make that offer visual. So it's on a brochure, it's a landing page, or it's a slide deck. And then sales process, the ability to get into a little rhythm of generating leads, booking appointments, presenting your value and making a sale. So we call that laps. So chaos laps. So when we're getting our first 10 grand, it's chaos laps. Concept, audience, offer, sales. How good are those things?

• 43:00Speaker 01

  How do we improve those four things? And laps, leads, appointments, presentation, sales. Are we, are we able to smash out, you know, activity? Now, I've never seen a business where they're focused on those four things and they're doing their weekly laps that doesn't rapidly hit 10 grand a month. Like, like just, just those, just those simple focuses. And you very rapidly either kill the idea or go to 10 grand a month.

• 43:25Chris Williamson?

  Could you do this on your own?

• 43:27Speaker 01

  I believe that entrepreneurship is a team sport. I'm a big believer that it's, it's teams that do really well. And it doesn't mean that you need a co-founder. But I feel like you need someone who's helping and supporting. I don't know, when you started this, did you have anyone helping?

• 43:43Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  Just all on your own?

• 43:45Chris Williamson?

  Just me.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  Aren't you, aren't you a machine? You're a savage.

• 43:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, just a. British desire for suffering, I think. No, I got within nineteen episodes, I think it's episode seventeen or episode nineteen, Dean came and shot, my video guy came and shot an episode because he was like, oh, I see you doing this podcast. That's kind of cool. Have you ever thought about shooting it in a little bit higher quality? Maybe me and my friends have got fancy cameras and we understand how lighting works and framing. Maybe we could come film one. Okay, well, if we're gonna do this, I better come up with a big episode to do it. So I did what it's really like to live on Love Island, which was the first episode we ever did that hit ten K and it got us over one thousand subs and did all the rest of this stuff. And then I said, okay, well, let's, let's work, let's do this.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  See, that, I mean, that's the real story. The real story is doing it on your own didn't work. And then as soon as some team members show up, you achieve more.

• 44:38Chris Williamson?

  A team member.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, a person. As soon as that happens, then you achieve more in a week than you previously had in months.

• 44:44Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Yeah, I think the, the interesting point there, and this is something I'm increasingly thinking about now, is you may be able to grit your teeth and use the chip on your shoulder or the people that doubted you or the desire to prove that you should be validated by the world or whatever. But it's way easier to just have some boys with you that are kind of cool to work with.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:09Chris Williamson?

  And you will get a lot more longevity, I think, out of your career by finding people that externalize that motivation and give you a bit of a sense of, yeah, you did it. Like, dude, we did this.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  And you're nattering and you're like planning and you're like eleven o'clock at night, hey, I've had an idea. Can I run it past you? It's, it's, it's so much more fun. You know, starting a business is a bit like a bank robbery. You watch all the bank robbery movies. They don't do it on their own. It's a bunch of guys who sit around with a pizza box and they've got like the little model car and the Legos and they're like, okay, the car, eleven AM, it's gonna go here and you let off the shotgun and I'll crack the safe. Like, they're figuring it out and they sit there in the car together, watching the bank, like writing everything down, talking about what's gonna work and what's not gonna work. That's actually what a startup feels like. It feels like a couple of people nattering, like thinking it, thinking it through, figuring it out, you know, running little simulations. Yeah, all of that. Like, I've started so many companies. I've never started them really on my own.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  I've, I've been the founder, but I've always had an assistant or a salesperson. I've had co-founders.

• 46:12Chris Williamson?

  Who's the first person that you should hire?

• 46:15Speaker 01

  So the like teams develop two, four, eight, thirty, right? So a two per and this is military. This is how the military do it as well. So the two person team is a scout team and a scout team is really looking at two questions. Can we, can we sell it and can we build it? Can we get a customer? Can we look after a customer? So on the scout team, you're just trying to have one person who's really focused on can we sell this and one person who's really focused on can we create a happy customer? And so the first team is those two people answering that question. Now, it could be that you're, it's your business and you're really, let's say you're technically

• 47:00Speaker 01

  skilled at something. Let's say you're an IT services company and you're, you've got amazing IT skills. You want to bring on a salesperson who's, who says, can we sell this? Or you might be really extroverted and really good at selling, but you're not quite, you know, sure if you can actually technically build the thing. You want to bring on a technical person who's, can we actually look after customers if we get customers? So you, you're essentially looking for your complementary opposite. Are you going to be the salesperson running around figuring out whether we can sell this? Or, or are you going to be the delivery person figuring out whether we can make customers happy? So those are the first two. Once you've figured those two questions out, you jump to a four person, what we call fire start team. So a fire starting team is, is four people and you're going to have someone who we call a key person of influence.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  You're going to have a salesperson and a delivery person and what we call a Swiss army knife. Swiss army knives can do 25 things, but badly. And that's, that's, that's what you want. You want that high, a high agency generalist. Let's call them that. High agency generalist. And the Swiss army knife is a high agency general tool. So, um, so you go to this four person little team and this is about launch campaign, getting your first sales, getting your first customers through the door. You know, holding everything together with sticky tape and, you know, like just doing the, yeah, yeah, exactly. And then you're then jumping up to eight person team. And this is what I'd call a stable core team.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  At this point, you've got a lifestyle boutique. If you run this well, you can do one to three million pretty easily. You can be highly profitable. Have your weekly team meetings, everything runs really smoothly, you've got eight people on the team. You can actually just stay there for years, making a ton of money. Everyone's having a great time. Provided you don't go over thirteen, provided you never have the thirteenth person on the team. So eight, you can go eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, but never thirteen.

• 48:59Chris Williamson?

  Unlucky thirteen.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  Unlucky thirteen.

• 49:01Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 49:01Speaker 01

  Disaster.

• 49:02Chris Williamson?

  What happens at thirteen?

• 49:03Speaker 01

  The thirteenth person splits the team. So twelve, twelve people is up, up to twelve people is one team.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  The thirteenth person divides the team into two or three. So as soon as you hire the thirteenth, you now have a sales team, an ops team, a finance team. Right? And now they don't talk. The thirteenth person introduces just this, we're too big to be small, we're not too, we're not big enough to be big. Like, it's just a world of awkwardness, once you've got the thirteenth person.

• 49:31Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Okay. And then thirty.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  And then, yeah, if you go to thirteen, you might as well go to thirty.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. So at thirty, it gets good again. So from thirteen to thirty, it's too big to be small and too small to be big. The business is not going to work on either. It's going to work as a six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve person team. It's going to work as a thirty to a hundred and fifty person team. It's not going to work from twelve to thirty people, thirteen to thirty people. So too big to be small, too small to be big. You're not, you, you have this old, original crew who are the family who got roped in and they, they were the ones who used to be there, you know, eleven o'clock at night, five o'clock in the morning. We used to, we used to be friends, man.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen people, two of them start sleeping together. So you get these relationships and it gets awkward and weird.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, at around seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty people.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  One of the original crew who was like so useful, that was your Swiss Army knife in the, in the beginning days, this person held the company together. They bleed the brand. They are so loyal. And then now they are so like a bottleneck and they're just not good enough.

• 50:47Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  And you have to.

• 50:48Chris Williamson?

  Because you've hired people that are at a higher uh skill level than they are and they haven't been able to keep up.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  And they, and they just don't fit anywhere. And they're just like, they go through six months of like not being a fit. And like, they're just like feeling like an outcast. And they keep pulling the whole, I was there at the beginning, man.

• 51:03Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  And you're like, I know, man, but like, I need you to either sell or this, you know, because the company's turning into specialists now.

• 51:10Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  So now you're going from generalist.

• 51:11Chris Williamson?

  Raise your game.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, you gotta raise your game. They may or may not have it in them. Like you might, in the early days, you might have just taken the neighbor's teenager and like brought them on board and they were amazing, you know, but they're just, they're just not up to the game now.

• 51:23Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  So there's like, what tends to happen is there's like a great shakeup and the great shakeup is like, you know, you go from twenty one people back down to fifteen and, you know, it's a dark time. But then, if you can, if you can press through to thirty, you end up with an executive team, a sales team, ops team, delivery, development, you know, now you've got this really tight unit at thirty people. You've, you've got executives running teams of teams and now you are smashing it. Now you're doing ten million plus, you've got a million of profit or more.

• 51:56Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  So eight figure revenue, seven figure profit, and now away you go.

• 52:00Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Just going back down to the sort of twos and fours and eights, how do you come to think about finding, hiring, training?

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:10Chris Williamson?

  Retaining the best talent?

• 52:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. So i- in those early days, especially twos and fours, even eights, it's uh, do they breathe? Do they have a pulse? Um, can they speak English?

• 52:22Chris Williamson?

  You're available on time.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just, I mean, even that's a good bonus, right?

• 52:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  Um, it's, it's, it's literally anyone you can plausibly get to join your team. Now, it changes over time. Like you could get some pretty amazing people. If you launched a new company, you could rope in some pretty amazing people.

• 52:39Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  Um, but I go back to my first company when I was twenty one. So I had to.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  I had to rope in a friend from school. Uh, I roped in my girlfriend. Uh, I roped in, um, this kind of, uh, spotty, funny teenager dude who I knew, who came and slept in my basement for six months.

• 52:59Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  Um, like, basically, I just pulled together who I could. Later on, some guy tried to sell me a mobile phone package and was really like great talker. And as he was selling, I said, hey, look, you're really good at this. Do you want to quit your job and come work with me? Um, and so I pulled someone across there.

• 53:21Chris Williamson?

  Called promo mentality.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was in a, um, I was in a cafe and someone was like wiping down the table with a big smile on their face and like super pumped and they're like happily wiping tables down. I'm like, what a positive attitude. So I'm like, do you want to quit your job and come and work with me? And like, what do you do? And I'm like, let's have a, let's have a secret conversation after. What time do you get off work? Right? So I'm just literally in those early days, people are like looking for the right people. The right people are not going to work for you. Like as a startup, you're not going to get someone quit their job at Google and come and join your little team.

• 53:55Chris Williamson?

  A quick break. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Having a cooled mattress topper is kind of like magic. It's a sort of wizardry that I didn't know existed. And every single person I've got onto using an Eight Sleep has become a full fledged cult member. It's unbelievable. And if you get too hot, if you struggle to sleep because you're too warm on an evening, this is so far beyond a game changer. I can't even describe it. When I'm on the road, I hate medieval. I can't believe that I have to sleep on a bed that doesn't cool itself. And when you start, when you join us on this side of the cult, you'll understand what I mean. It's got all of these sensors that do stuff too, and it can have each different side. One for you, one for your partner. If they sleep hot and you sleep cold, that's why it's been clinically proven to increase total sleep by up to one hour every night. It's a game changer.

• 54:40Chris Williamson?

  I'm in love with mine. I use it every single night and they've got a 30 day sleep trial. So you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 nights. And if you don't like it, they give you your money back. Plus they ship internationally and you can get $350 off right now by going to the link in the description below or heading to eightsleep.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's E I G H T sleep.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. So what are you optimizing for?

• 55:07Speaker 01

  Um, staying alive, staying, staying in the game, making sales.

• 55:12Chris Williamson?

  What are you optimizing for when you look at, when you're assessing members of staff? You're not going to have the level of expertise, they're not going to have this illustrious history.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm just looking for, are they, are they like, to be honest, it's just are they willing to join the team? Like, are they actually, when I'm talking to them about the idea of joining the team, does that raise their energy or lower their energy? So the right people, I mean, the people I've always started, well, the people I started businesses with in the early days, they're all ex hospitality, so pubs, restaurants, cafes, they're all ex door to door salespeople or.

• 55:46Chris Williamson?

  Great communication.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:48Chris Williamson?

  Savvy.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  And working in shitty jobs where it's not a big risk to quit a shitty job to come and work for my shitty job.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  Because at least my shitty job is like some cool new thing that may or may not work. But it's like, for them, it's not a big deal to then, if it doesn't work.

• 56:05Chris Williamson?

  Go back to selling McDonald's.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 56:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  So like, I'm just looking for people who are willing.

• 56:11Chris Williamson?

  And what about when things get a little bit more sophisticated? And you can be a little bit more discerning with talent, with hiring, assessing.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really weird when that happens. Like, the first hire who's good, it really freaks the whole team out. It's like, wow, we have a proper grown up in the team now. Like, oh, wow, this person has a master's degree. Wow, that's amazing. This person used to have a, like, a proper job. They've got a BMW. What? Right, so, um, so you get like a couple of grownups around, uh, and suddenly the, suddenly this changes the dynamic. Cause now you're into, this is going to be a proper business. This is going to be, we're going to hire proper salespeople, we're going to hire proper people, uh, through a hiring process. Um, you know, so there comes a time where you get around, around eight,

• 56:59Speaker 01

  uh, or on the journey to eight, where you actually bring on a few people who are actually talented and specialized and trained. Um, and that's, that's a big breakthrough moment.

• 57:09Chris Williamson?

  What about 10K to 100K a month? What's the difference there?

• 57:12Speaker 01

  Okay, so 10K to 100 grand a month is where you go from one to one selling to group selling. So in whatever form that looks like. So to get to 10 grand a month, you just talk to customers one at a time and you just go out. You literally go out and talk to people. So you might bang on doors, you might drop emails, you might have Zoom calls, you might have phone calls. But you're essentially just selling. You're just doing like you're doing one to one sales. To go to 100 grand a month, you need to somehow be selling to groups. So you might be doing videos on YouTube, you might be doing live events or webinars or workshops. You might be doing marketing campaigns where you're sending out marketing materials or you're running ads.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  So you're now like hitting groups at a time. In order for that to work, you need to establish one person who is the face of the business. And that's going to be your front man. That's going to be the front person of the band. And we call that person the key person of influence. They're the talker.

• 58:13Chris Williamson?

  Always the founder?

• 58:15Speaker 01

  It tends to be that it tends to be the founder. It's either the founder or one of the top salespeople, but it tends to work best as the founder.

• 58:21Chris Williamson?

  Better story, more heritage, great buy in.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Exactly. People and and it well, there's another reason too, which is a bit selfish. Anyone who gets good at it leaves and starts their own company. So even if you could put someone else in that role, it's only a matter of six to 12 months before they go, wait a second, I'm bringing in all the business.

• 58:41Chris Williamson?

  You're going to take this platform and now use it.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, you work for me, not like, like I'm, I'm feeding you, you're not feeding me. So it flips pretty quickly.

• 58:51Chris Williamson?

  Just to interject there, we saw this problem with within nightlife. That if you as the owner of an events company made any of the event managers too independent when it came to managing, looking after the front door, cashing the till, dealing with the manager of the venue, the venue, the GM. If you ever did that for too long, and again, this is. I'm not. I always felt weird. It's so funny. We had this really sort of unique set of principles and algorithms that we went through when it came to nightlife. And I was always so hesitant about ever talking about them on the podcast because I felt like that was the playbook that my old business partner Darren was still using. I actually think he's become more sophisticated now. So this is like archaic dusty shit

• 59:34Chris Williamson?

  that Indiana Jones would have to go and get. But one of the, one of the main rules was you never let anybody except for you cash the till.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 59:41Chris Williamson?

  Because if someone else starts cashing the till, they're in the office with the, the GM at two in the morning, two thirty in the morning. So where's Darren? Where's Chris? It's like, oh, they're at home. What would you mean? They're at home. Oh, okay. Well, who looks after most of the staff? Well, you know, I'm the point, point of contact. So who pays the DJs? Oh, well, you know, like it's usually me and one of the boys will do that. And after a while, the GM goes, hey, we can fucking cut voodoo events out. But they're, they're on an eighty twenty or they're on a one grand, a one grand flat fee. I reckon we can do a dry hire, a little bit more expensive, give it to this new kid. He seems to know everyone in any case. And that guy's like, well, I'm cashing the till. I'm the one that's up until three thirty in the morning. I deserve this. You're like, dude, you're fucking twenty one years old. And the only reason that this gig exists is because of what we did. But certainly that level of,

• 1:00:23Chris Williamson?

  not compartmentalization, but, but to a degree.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:00:26Chris Williamson?

  That sense of, look, people have your best interests at heart. They have the business's best interests at heart until the offer becomes too good to say no.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  Water, water finds its level. So if someone has the ability to generate the business, like create the product, manage all the relationships and all that sort of stuff. Unfortunately, like the value just starts flowing.

• 1:00:48Chris Williamson?

  Every single time that someone did that, every single time you stopped seeing an events company owner on the front door of one of their events, and it was just the event managers, they had, it was like a ticking clock between six and 12 months before that kid left and started his own company. That's what I can do this on my own.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. Low barrier to entry, low mode.

• 1:01:03Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  So, so yeah, so that's why you should do it as the founder. All right. So as the founder, you should be the key person of influence. So what is your job now? Your job as the founder is to be the person who does the pitching. You do it on the videos, you do it on the stage, you do it on the screen. You write the main marketing content or you sign off on the main marketing content. So essentially you're setting the tone with the pitch. The pitch is like the positioning of the business. It's who we are, what we do, who we do it for. And, you know, it's the ability to. Initiate relationships. So it's that important pitching role. So you're in, you're the one doing the big important pitching, whether it's directly or indirectly.

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  That's the first one. Published content. You are publishing stuff on all the social media platforms. You're putting out content, you're doing videos, you're doing posts. And it's all like centered on your personal brand.

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  Building out the product ecosystem. So what you want to do as the founder, as the key person of influence is introduce the new products. All businesses that succeed have a group of products. It can never just be one product. If you want a successful business, you need to have several products and services that act as a bit of an ecosystem. So you've got to.

• 1:02:18Chris Williamson?

  Give me some examples.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  So like, I'll give you a big example and then we'll go small examples. So big example would be BMW. The cars make three percent margin. The finance and insurance and servicing makes thirty percent margin.

• 1:02:32Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, so.

• 1:02:34Chris Williamson?

  Three percent margin on the car.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  Tiny, tiny margins.

• 1:02:36Chris Williamson?

  Presumably the absolute top, top, top end stuff is a little bit bigger.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  Probably.

• 1:02:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but not by much.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  But ultimately, the car business isn't wildly profitable because there's so many costs involved in being open and available and having cars.

• 1:02:47Chris Williamson?

  It's crazy.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  But once someone signs up on the car, then selling the finance and insurance and all of that, then those are recurring revenue products. If you take the big chefs like Gordon Ramsay, they will always have a product ecosystem of books, restaurants, cooking ingredients, pots and pans, all the different things that go around a celebrity chef. And you then go, oh, okay. So the chef just shows up and does one thing, but then there's all these things that monetize. You know, Stephen Bartlett, great example. He's now built a product ecosystem around him. That he, all he has to do is just show up and do the podcast and all these other businesses light up.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  Um. If you just take a small business like a consulting business, the consultants who make a lot of money, they have a signature talk where they give a talk in front of an audience and that's called a keynote. Um. They have maybe a YouTube channel or a podcast channel. Um. They might have a book. A lot of consultants have a book and that is a like a a entry level product. And then they have their main consulting package. And then they might have licensable materials or they might have a membership.

• 1:03:56Chris Williamson?

  Maybe one on ones.

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  Annual retreat. So it's the combination of these. Um. I've given all of these a name. There's a gift, which is a free thing, a product for prospects, which is an entry level thing, a core offering, which is the main thing, and a product for clients, which is an ongoing thing. Um. So you need one of each of those four.

• 1:04:14Chris Williamson?

  And you ladder people along.

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  You you ladder people along. So the gift gets attention.

• 1:04:18Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  Um. The product for prospects build trust, the core offering delivers a transformation, um, and the product for clients maintains a hot a standard over time.

• 1:04:26Chris Williamson?

  Imagine that you're a a musician. I'm trying to think about people that are sort of a little bit more spit and sawdust and stuff like this. So I spent, I've just come back from New York and I was around a bunch of musicians there. So a lot of them do weddings, they do brunches, you know, someone's a percussionist, but then they also have a manager. So they've got a member of staff in that regard that's handling this.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:04:48Chris Williamson?

  Uh. But maybe they have a little bit of merch too that's on the side. Uh. And they do uh gigs, but they put music out too. So, okay, so I'm putting music out and I've got a page and you can see my content. But then they also, if they're unable to do a gig because they're already booked, they start booking other people and then they take a little bit off the top.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:06Chris Williamson?

  Then they go, well, actually, I mean, I can just put the whole gig together and then maybe I can book myself. I don't.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:10Chris Williamson?

  You know, the manager actually becomes an administrative assistant as opposed to a gatekeeper that's in between me and the clients. And you start to sort of build this out. The same thing presumably would be for comedy. It would be.

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:05:21Chris Williamson?

  You organize dancers in nightclubs. If you can do pop ups for for different coffee shops and stuff like that. Oh, I can get you the the events. You can go out and make this happen.

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  You go and look at anyone who's actually making money and they've got an ecosystem of stuff. It's never just a thing. Like it's it's an ecosystem of. So you take the musicians or the DJs, the most successful of them, they've got music licensing deals, they've got uh party promotions, they've got uh merch, they've got uh live gigs, they've got streaming rights. So there's this whole ecosystem of products and services that they're making.

• 1:05:55Chris Williamson?

  Maybe they're doing tutorials online that.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  They could be doing that.

• 1:05:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, Kajabi or Teachable or something like that.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  Could be doing private high-end parties. So there's all sorts of things that they have on their menu of things. So you have to have at least four things um that that that do it. Um, you know, I've I've worked with consultants where they've struggled along as a consulting business, maybe doing a hundred and fifty grand a year several years in a row. And then we just get them to write a book and we go get your best consulting ideas into a book. Um, and now you've got a book, I want you to give away a thousand copies a year as a gift. And they go from a hundred and fifty to seven hundred and fifty.

• 1:06:32Chris Williamson?

  And the cost is writing a book and giving a thousand copies.

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  Giving a thousand copies away. And now they do an extra, you know, six hundred thousand a year. Um, and it's just because they just created a gift product. Um, and you know, and then you add in a speaking tour and a speaking tour and a and a book. And the consulting goes through the roof. And now they're doing a million plus and they need.

• 1:06:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, interesting. So uh lots of people would look at something like a speaking tour, doing B two B or doing e- events in that regard. As well, that's the money on it. Like, no, that's the front end of the funnel.

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:02Chris Williamson?

  To get people.

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  Or in your case, the back end.

• 1:07:04Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  So you created all these like followers on YouTube and then you did a speaking tour.

• 1:07:08Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did it in reverse.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  And that makes money because it's on the back end of of of the YouTube channel. So the YouTube channel is the gift. And then the product for clients, the product for, you know, the back back back end is go see Chris live. How did you go with the speaking tour? Was it great?

• 1:07:24Chris Williamson?

  Fucking epic, dude. I mean, I went to uh your home country of birth, my ex-country of ownership and um. It was, it was fucking sick, dude. I wanted to do a land acknowledgement. I wanted to say that we are on stolen land, precisely stolen from the British.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  Oh, you're a comedian now.

• 1:07:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, I'm trying. Um, no, it was great. It was great, man. I, I, look.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  You've been hanging around Jagger.

• 1:07:47Chris Williamson?

  One of the problems that you have, and you know, being a degenerate internet entrepreneur where you can work from anywhere on the planet, and you can have a team and you don't need an office and all the rest of it, that sounds great, but it becomes a very sterile way of running business. And um, to have immediate feedback from an audience, to be able to do something that gets that, you know, dopamine firing is really important. You know, I've got, I'm about to announce, in fact, we may have already announced it by the time this comes out. I'm doing the US and Canada. We're doing 12 dates around the US and Canada. It's a proper domestic style tour. So I'm on the road every weekend, like three months.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:23Chris Williamson?

  Right? I'm back and forth here to wherever. I can't say the dates yet because I don't know.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  It's great fun.

• 1:08:28Chris Williamson?

  It's awesome. And I get to bring my boys with me and we get to record content and we have an adventure.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  And real feedback with real people.

• 1:08:35Chris Williamson?

  Hundred percent. And you know, I think, at least in, in my experience, I'd be interested to know if this is the same for you. People's sort of business lives occur in sort of between five to nine year epochs or eras. And typically around about every seven years or so, something starts to pivot a little bit. I noticed this in nightlife for me. I got to about 29, having started the weeklys at 22. It's like, ah, like I'm just feeling a little like.

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  Seven, seven years, yeah.

• 1:09:04Chris Williamson?

  Crab hitting up against its shell. Uh, and with the podcast, uh, it's a little bit like that now, which is for so long, it was me and video guy Dean.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  How long have you been doing the podcast?

• 1:09:14Chris Williamson?

  Seven years.

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 1:09:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So this is.

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  This could be the last episode.

• 1:09:17Chris Williamson?

  This is your, right? It could be. No. Uh, so I look, it's mostly around this. It's the way that I'm thinking about structuring the business. I still love what I do. But the way that it's put together needs to change.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  It changes. Yeah, I found that too. Um, and it's actually quite true with life. So zero to seven is like infancy to childhood. And then seven to 14 is like child to adolescence. And 14 to 21 is, you know, adolescence into adulthood. So there's these kind of seven year cycles in life. Um, I, I, you know, my, as a, in my twenties, I had one company which morphed into another company, which morphed into another company, um, morphed into countries. Yeah, I, I find that type of thing. The big thing that's actually going to happen is with the advent of AI. People are going to have extremely high velocity, fast paced careers that last

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  three years and then dissipate and then a new one and like the, the, the, the ability, the AI superpower is it's, it's not going to be rare anymore to meet someone who's simultaneously writing a book, doing a tour, running a podcast, starting a drinks company.

• 1:10:25Chris Williamson?

  They've got way more leverage.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  There's huge amounts of leverage. It's like having a team of free employees.

• 1:10:30Chris Williamson?

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• 1:11:12Chris Williamson?

  to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernd wisdom. That's functionhealth.com/modernd wisdom. What aspects of business should we be outsourcing to AI right now?

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  So anything that you would outsource to the Philippines can now be outsourced to an AI agent. There's some big breakthroughs in AI. So there's something called Agents, which is essentially an AI that can grab your credit card details. So I was with Stephen Bartlett the other day and all he did was told an AI agent to get us three bottles of water and it looked online, found a local DoorDash facility, ordered three bottles of water, got his credit card details, punched in the credit card details, ordered the three bottles of water to come to this address and then in walks a dude with the bottles of water.

• 1:12:00Chris Williamson?

  Love.

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. And all he had done is asked an AI to go and organize the three bottles of water. And it just magically happened. Like, so that's the.

• 1:12:09Chris Williamson?

  The ultimate Amazon one click.

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  It is, but this is for everything. You could say, go and build me a list of 150 potential clients. Just go through websites of people who might want this and find their contact details. Use LinkedIn if needed. All right. So boom, go, go and you could go do that. Um. And there's also something called vibe coding. Vibe coding is the ability to build applications by just talking about them. So I had a go at vibe coding the other night and I said, um, I want an application to run the pocket money in my household. I've got three kids. We've got uh about ten chores per year, uh per week that we wanna do. There's a certain amount per chore. I wanna, I wanna application that can manage all of that. And it just codes it up and it's an amazingly cool application.

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  It even gave it a name and a brand, Cash Kids or something like that, Kids Cash with K's. Um. And then it uh, like you could add kids, you could um add chores. It had a little mini database payout system and it like took fifteen minutes and it just coded it up itself. So we are now living in a new world, like this is, the, the tractor has plowed the field for the first time.

• 1:13:15Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh.

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  Um. So yeah, you can outsource every, every single person on your team now has superpowers.

• 1:13:23Chris Williamson?

  One area that I think a lot of people find is a sticking point is pricing, increasing the price specifically. How do you know when to increase the price?

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  Prices are, price is always a factor of demand and supply tension. So demand and supply tension is that you have so many people who want something and a bunch of them can't get it and they miss out. And ultimately, um, people just randomly put up prices, um, but you have to start with demand and supply tension. So for example, when you launch a waiting list with a hundred people and there's only ten spots available, that pushes the price up of those ten spots, um, especially if there's any what's called transparency of demand and supply tension. So transparency is where the market can actually see that you're in demand.

• 1:14:09Chris Williamson?

  And queue outside of your nightclub.

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a queue out the front of the nightclub and when people are worried about will they get in or not. Um. So that's, that is transparency of demand and supply tension and that pushes prices up. So any opportunity to create that transparency.

• 1:14:23Chris Williamson?

  What are the best ways to create transparency?

• 1:14:25Speaker 01

  Waiting lists, um, social media followings, uh, live events or events where people can see that other people are either at the event or on the Zoom call. Um, launches, uh, pre-registration lists for drops. Um, you can even just tell people, like, for example, one of our businesses, we launched a, a product or service and to get that you had to do an online assessment. So we just told people, well, seven thousand people took the online assessment. We can only take three hundred and fifty clients. So we wanna, we're gonna select who we wanna work with. If you get selected, then that's, that's good for you. Uh huh, uh huh. Um, so that was just telling people and showing them like, you know, we did, we, they know they filled in the online assessment.

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  Um, and we were completely truthful. In fact, we can screenshot the actual, how many people filled it in. So we can actually put that on an email and say, look, 7,000 people filled this in. Um, we can only take 350. Uh, Glastonbury Music Festival does this beautifully. For 364 days of the year, you can't buy a ticket, you can only pre-register. Then they tell you how many people are pre-registered. They say 1.2 million people have pre-registered for tickets. We only have 136,000 tickets available. Uh, they go live tomorrow morning at 5am. Don't miss out. And people just get up at 5 o'clock in the morning and buy a Glasto ticket. Uh huh. So that's transparency of demand and supply. There's one other trick, which is being very selective about what you call an ICP.

• 1:15:52Speaker 01

  ICP stands for Ideal Customer Persona. So an ideal customer persona is where you select a type of customer who gets extraordinary value from what you do. And you become exclusive for them. So for example, you may, have you had Esther Perel on the show? No. So you know who she is though, right? So she's a marriage couples therapy therapist, but she's exclusively for billionaires. Like you have to be a billionaire to sign up for her marriage therapy. Um, now because her ICP uh, gets so much value, like think about it like this, if you're a marriage couples therapist, a 22-year-old who's single sees zero value in you. A 31-year-old who's in a new relationship and it's honeymoon period sees little value in you.

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  And a 52-year-old billionaire who's about to go through a divorce that will cost 40 million uh, in, you know, in capital destruction and 8 million in fees, sees an extremely high value in a marriage therapist, couples therapist, if they can fix the, fix the thing. So when a billionaire has trouble with their marriage, they go to Esther Perel, they pay quarter of a million bucks. And they, they, they want serious dedicated service and she's exclusive for that market and she's positioned herself for the market. So in every single audience, there's three categories within the audience. So there is what's called the mass market. They're just interested in price shopping.

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  There's the niche market or niche market, which is interested in passion, community, story, experience. So they're interested in value, whatever that constitutes for them. They'll pay more for value. And then there's the luxury market and the luxury market is the ultra high end. They're interested in pedigree, exclusivity, those kinds of things. So like one of the best ways to push prices up is to become exclusive for either a niche or a luxury market. As far as spending power goes, inside an audience, 1% of people have 15% of the budget.

• 1:17:53Speaker 01

  9% of people have 45% of the budget and 90% of the people have 40% of the budget. So the top 10% have 60% and the bottom 90% have 40%. So basically what most businesses do is they target the mass market because there's lots of them, but they don't realize that the 90% of people only have 40% of the budget. And it's the top 10% who've got all the money. So if you can reposition yourself as a key person of influence for these passionate people up here and be exclusive for them, you're going to end up earning a lot more money.

• 1:18:28Chris Williamson?

  How do you overcome the discomfort of increasing the price? That's something I think a lot of people, this is what I used to charge. It's a very similar product. Maybe it's the same product I'm in more demand. There is just this, especially if you come from a more sort of blue collar background and you're now trying to sort of climb up that entrepreneurial ladder. Maybe again, you're in direct contact with whoever the client is. By the time it's you, it's you that they're getting some sort of service, maybe high ticket, could be high ticket, but it's like, I used to charge 500 bucks and I like, I have work coming out of my ears.

• 1:18:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:58Chris Williamson?

  This needs to be more, it's 750, it's like, dude, this needs to be $3,000.

• 1:19:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:04Chris Williamson?

  How do you, how do you help people get past those blocks?

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  It's a great problem to have. A lot of people don't believe that's a problem, but it's so a problem. Like I've experienced it, you've experienced it. I mean, yeah, so there's a couple of, the best way is to create free content that's for everybody so that if you're priced out of the market for someone, you can just recommend something for free. Right?

• 1:19:28Chris Williamson?

  So a low entry equivalent.

• 1:19:29Speaker 01

  And no entry.

• 1:19:30Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:19:31Speaker 01

  So like someone says, hey, you know, Chris, I really need your help. With X, Y and Z and you say, let me send you through the episode that talks about that. You know, look, I I'm really sorry, I can't, I'm spread too thin. Um, and I've, I've always used that terminology. I'm, I'm really sorry. I'm just spread too thin right now. Um, and that's kind of like a, people kind of acknowledge, okay, fair enough. He is spread too thin. Um, so that phraseology has worked for me. Um, I'm a little bit spread too thin right now. Um, can I send you a free copy of a book? Can I send you? I know a book that would be really great for that. Or I know a coach, I know a supplier, I know a company that does something.

• 1:20:05Chris Williamson?

  Someone else that can do it. You can't get me, but you can get.

• 1:20:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and I've said, I've actually said to people, hey, look, this other person I'm going to recommend is better than I am, but just not as well known. Um, so like you're going to get the solution you're looking for. I, I can't do it.

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  You know, so, so having free content, having a gift you can send out, uh, having an alternative supplier. So just putting a little bit of thought into, you know, people tend, tends to be that people want to solve a problem. They want something that solves the problem.

• 1:20:38Speaker 01

  They don't actually want you. They just see you as the path of least resistance for getting what they want. And they're just kind of like viewing you as the only one who could offer a path. And you can just say, hey, look, there's another path. You know, you can get what you want, you know, without spending 50 grand.

• 1:20:52Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Okay. So we've talked about pricing, hiring. What about firing? How do you know when to let people go?

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  Ah, I hate this. I hate firing. Um, uh, look, you know, he, he, here's my answer. My, my honest answer to this is that I have brought on amazing ops people to run my businesses. And by the time we get to the point where we need firing, uh, I have an ops person who does firing. Now I can have that conversation. I hate it. It makes my gut turn. Um, and I've, I've got a script and I know how to do it, especially in the UK. Here's what sucks, right? What sucks in the UK, as soon as you're in a firing situation, there's all these rules you have to follow. And you can't actually just have a sensible conversation. You can't actually just say, hey, look, here's what's really going on.

• 1:21:43Speaker 01

  You did this, we can't do, you can't have this. Like, as soon as you go talk to a HR lawyer. Because most companies have insurance for HR and in order to be insured, you have to follow their scripts. So what really sucks is that you may wanna say, um, look, here's what you're, you know, here's this, here's the issue, right? Here's the actual thing and here's what might work. Um, I mean, and in certain situations, you know that someone's going to get fired and you're, and you're going through the process that the HR is giving you. And you're just like mentally going like resign, like you wanna resign. So I will give you a massive like

• 1:22:24Speaker 01

  written, uh, positive thing, but we can't, we can't keep you. You know, we're going through a process. This is the time that you should resign rather than be fired. Um, but you're not allowed to say that, you know, it's constructive dismissal. It's all these kind of things.

• 1:22:38Chris Williamson?

  Constructive dismissal.

• 1:22:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So if you suggest that someone resigns, that's constructive dismissal.

• 1:22:45Chris Williamson?

  You've contravened some, something.

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  If you've done something that, that if your performance is at a point where like you might really like the person, but the performance is just not there. And unfortunately you just can't go on any longer. So you now have to either make the role redundant or you have to performance management, manage them out of the business. What sucks is they may have been great for like three years, but now they're just the lowest performer in the business. For the business to move on, you'd need to performance manage them out of the business.

• 1:23:14Speaker 01

  And you, to, to stay on the right side of your insurance, your HR insurance, you now have to go through the scripts. So this is meeting one, we're assessing the performance. We're going to be going through a process over the next two weeks to just assess where you are with your performance. And if we discover that, uh, the performance is an issue, then we may need to look at disciplinary, you know, issues and blah, blah, blah. So you have to follow the script.

• 1:23:36Speaker 01

  And you're sitting there going like the decision's been made, you know, like seriously, just get out.

• 1:23:42Chris Williamson?

  Dancing through this weird sequence that we both have to keep on doing.

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I, I got sued once.

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  I had, one of my co-founders was not getting along with one of the long-term employees and they were really locking horns all the time. And she came to me and she said, look, I'm just fighting with this guy all the time and it sucks and I'm really frustrated and blah, blah, blah. And like, I'm, I'd just gotten off of a long flight from Australia back to the UK. So I was so tired. And I said to her, look, here's the problem. This is a co-founder, a director of the company. If you really object to working alongside him, um, I hate to say it, but you probably need to find somewhere else. If you're unhappy, you should find somewhere that makes you happy and we can support you as long as that takes, we can help you find the right thing. But if you're unhappy here because you cannot, you know, work alongside this guy, unfortunately,

• 1:24:34Speaker 01

  he owns the company and he's a director of the company, right? He, like, he's not gonna go. Um, you, you need to find something that is your next move. So I just said this, uh, eighteen thousand pounds. Uh, so I settled that for eighteen grand because it was constructive dismissal.

• 1:24:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's a painful business call. Okay, so your best advice is to have a prophylactic in between you and the hiring, the firing process?

• 1:24:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I have a, I, I get to the point of having an ops person. And a good ops person, that's just what they do. No emotion, they're just, they, they've just done it like, let's say they've used to run a Starbucks or a pub or McDonald's, or they used to run a travel agency or something. They've done this a hundred times or dozens of times before. That's why you hired them, because they know how to run the business.

• 1:25:17Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:25:17Speaker 01

  So, you know, they, typically they come to you and they say, hey, look, so-and-so's not performing, you know, they're not performing. Why are you keeping them around? Oh, because they were there at the beginning. And you kind of like have to have this kind of, I'm sorry.

• 1:25:30Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:25:31Speaker 01

  And they go, look, unfortunately, this is like, we, we need to get someone in that role who can perform because they're not, they're dropping balls. Okay, well, what do you want to do? Like, I want to performance manage them out. I want them out. I want to get someone proper in. Oh, okay, fair enough. And then they go and do it.

• 1:25:45Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Okay, so you've got a hired gun. What about selling the business? We've got all the way through the different processes and then the final point of, I'm gonna exit this thing.

• 1:25:54Speaker 01

  Have you sold a business?

• 1:25:55Chris Williamson?

  Uh, I exited my events company, uh, which involved.

• 1:26:01Chris Williamson?

  Impossibly trying to work out what it was worth. Where there's zero assets beyond the brand equity and the contacts. And I was a key person of influence within that and I was taking that.

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  How big was that business?

• 1:26:14Chris Williamson?

  Uh, we would have been doing probably somewhere in the region of a quarter of a mil G B P.

• 1:26:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the, that's not going to be a life-changing exit. It's very common that that is a slow handover type deal. So what you do is you vendor finance for that one. And you say, look, the business is worth one times revenue. And you go, so you're going to pay quarter of a million and it's going to be over five years, fifty grand a year for five years. And I'm going to help hand over over the next twelve months. And then if you can't pay the fifty grand a year for five years, then I get to take the business back in whatever form it's in. So it's secured against the business. So that's kind of a, these are these micro exits. Mind you, you can be on the right side, you can be on the other side of that. You can buy a business like that and it's epic.

• 1:26:59Speaker 01

  Like you can buy a business that's doing a few million by just vendor financing it in and almost nothing down and the business can afford it. There's a lot of people now who want to retire and, um, and you can buy their business for, for nothing down. So that's totally a thing. Once you get to a certain size, especially when you hit seven figures of profit.

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  And then again, if you hit five million US dollars of profit, you then get proper exits. And proper exits, what they're looking for is three things. They're looking for a core team of people who won't leave when you leave. So normally that's thirty people. And they know that four or five or six might leave when you leave, but it's not, the whole business isn't going to fall over. So it's not founder dependent. So you want to have thirty people on a team. They're looking for what's called recurring revenues. I really want contracts in place for recurring revenue. So subscriptions, memberships, uh, service level agreements, those sorts of things. Um, and the final one is called proprietary assets.

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  So it could be the brand, the database, it could be intellectual property, it could be, um, uh, channels to market. You know, those types of things. And when you can present that and you can present a document that shows these are our proprietary assets, you can present a forecast of this is our forward looking revenue that is contracted. And this is our org chart of our thirty plus people who are going to stick around after I leave. Then you get wildly high valuation and it's life changing. So it's a life changing amount of money all in one hit. You typically can earn more than most people earn in their entire career in one sale.

• 1:28:46Speaker 01

  And mind you, we hear about the billionaire ones. We hear about the, you know, Mark Zuckerberg sold a company or whatever. But there are like every day of the week, non newsworthy. There are people who sell a company for twelve million or, you know, six million or twenty two million. You know, these ones don't even make the news. So you can have these kind of events where you sell the business for a multiple of revenue. You know, one of my businesses, we just turned down an offer for thirty five times profit. And we turned it down. So, you know, if you do.

• 1:29:16Chris Williamson?

  Why did you turn it down?

• 1:29:19Speaker 01

  Because the business is going like that. And we set expectations around a certain level that we would sell the business. So like there's an actual number that we want to hit, which is like we're slightly off. And because I've been on a journey with these investors and we don't, I don't need to sell the business.

• 1:29:36Chris Williamson?

  But keep writing it.

• 1:29:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I keep writing it and just hit that number and then we'll probably do the deal. But imagine getting thirty five years worth of profit in one year, like in one go. Like it's life changing. So, um, so you can have, you can have these kind of exits that are, you know, profound. And all you have to do is prove that the team won't leave. Here's the org chart, that the finance, that the contracted revenue is going to keep contracted. And that you have proprietary assets. And if you've got those three things, you then can basically put those into a set of documents. And once again, going back to the thirty, the thirty people, you pitch that business thirty times and you're going to sell it for a life changing amount of money at that point.

• 1:30:21Speaker 01

  So yeah, it's, it's pretty, pretty cool. It's pretty wild.

• 1:30:23Chris Williamson?

  Is there a difference between building a business to sell and building a business to generate cash flow?

• 1:30:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, so. A lifestyle business, a lifestyle boutique is normally built around the brand of the founder, the key person of influence. The revenue, you want to keep the team at about eight to 12, not never 13.

• 1:30:44Speaker 01

  It's geared towards fun, freedom, flexibility and cash flow.

• 1:30:50Speaker 01

  And it's never, it tends to be that it's never worth selling. And the reason I say that is because when someone crunches the numbers, they go, well, it is founder dependent.

• 1:31:01Speaker 01

  Like it's largely built on you. The proprietary assets are mostly linked to you.

• 1:31:07Speaker 01

  And then they give you a price of what, and they give you like a transition, 18 month transition plan. And when you kind of look at the price and the transition plan, you go, meh, I'll just keep it. So you go down the, you keep kind of dancing up against, oh, I could sell it to, it's not worth it. I think it was public information, but Stephen Bartlett got offered a hundred million. But it was just too, it just wasn't a good enough deal.

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  So it's like, okay, I can do this on my own. So anyway, these are lifestyle businesses. Then there are performance businesses, minimum 30 people, minimum 10 million of revenue.

• 1:31:43Speaker 01

  And subscription revenue and proprietary assets. And these are the ones that do sell. So I would say 90% of people should build a lifestyle business and only a small percentage of people should build a performance business. Cause a performance business is hard. It's a black belt move.

• 1:31:59Speaker 01

  You're going to have a, you're having this experience, right? So your experience is, uh, modern wisdom is a lifestyle business.

• 1:32:05Chris Williamson?

  Nutonic.

• 1:32:06Speaker 01

  And this one is going to be a performance business. Fast forward two years from now, you're going to have a board of directors. You'll have someone who's like ex Pepsi on the board or whatever. Coca, some Coca Cola guy will join the board. You'll have 30 plus employees. You'll have recurring revenue contracts with all your distribution chain. You'll have all these proprietary assets online. And then along will come Coca Cola or Pepsi. And they'll offer you an amount of money that will completely change your life and blow your mind. And that will be a, um, a, like a moment.

• 1:32:39Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting with stuff like this.

• 1:32:43Chris Williamson?

  I don't know whether it's growing up as a business person. I don't know whether it's being a little bit less personally associated with the brand. I wonder whether it's being less personally involved with the day to day operations. But you know, if you ask a lot of people about, you know, would you sell this business? And I think they'd struggle because their identity is very much wrapped up in that thing. Modern Wisdom, for instance, there's no amount of money.

• 1:33:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, that that is so personal. It's an extension of you.

• 1:33:13Chris Williamson?

  Of course, but I think in the past, something like this might have felt like that too. And I'm trying to work out, I'm trying to decipher what it is about certain projects that allow people to treat them more rationally, with a little bit more objectivity. And what it is about other ones that has a, you know, a real sense of personal belonging to it.

• 1:33:35Speaker 01

  The, well, once you've had one exit, you realize how quickly you get over it. So if you've had, if you've sold a business, you realize that, oh, my goodness, what was once deeply personal extension of myself, what was once my baby gets sold and the deal is done and then I move on with my life and I'm really happy I sold it. And you go, oh, okay, like, I get that I can actually have separation. When you have real kids, when you actually have kids, it changes the game completely because you no longer place that level of attachment to a business. It's you just, you completely, you have these other entities in your life that have real paternal energy wrapped up in them.

• 1:34:20Speaker 01

  And then businesses can never even get close to that. So you can never, you can never feel that way about a business. Once you've had kids, a business is just a way of.

• 1:34:28Chris Williamson?

  Do you think people, I talk a lot on the show about slow life strategy, sort of extended adolescence, as it's known, people moving into houses more slowly, people getting into relationships, starting families more slowly, lower birth rates, stuff like that. Do you think that businesses are surrogate families for a lot of people in that regard?

• 1:34:49Speaker 01

  There's definitely misplaced maternity and paternity energy on all sorts of things. So you see people who, the way they treat their dogs and the way they treat their career, the way they treat their business, that is the same sort of biological drive that would normally go into kids and you see that a lot these days. So it's, you know, it's funny because when, as a father, I look at a lot of that stuff and I can immediately say that's misplaced paternity. Like you literally, you're treating that like you should be treating kids. So yeah, definitely. We've, we've hacked our normal biorhythms with technology. Like it's not normal that someone in their twenties could travel the world and go to all the different countries and see all the different people and have access to all

• 1:35:32Speaker 01

  the different things straight away, straight out of the gate. And that the brain has access to all of that stuff. And it's totally natural as a response to go, why would I just ruin that with children and a mortgage and like all these kind of life markers that used to be meaningful 50 years ago? Why would I do that? I'm going to push that down the pipes. So that's a normal reaction to having amazing opportunities available.

• 1:35:58Speaker 01

  And then we go, oh, wait a second. Now I do want to tick off those boxes. I need to rush and get it done, right? So who's available? Does anyone want kids? Anyone want to have, anyone want to have a few? So then you, you then kind of have to juggle it. But like, it's only, this stuff is only happening because of technology. You know, this, this weird life that we're now in.

• 1:36:20Chris Williamson?

  How do you ensure that running a business is fun? How do you ensure that you enjoy the process? Because I imagine that you've worked with people and seen people and maybe at some point it's been that person yourself where you have reached a string of miserable successes.

• 1:36:36Chris Williamson?

  And in retrospect, you think, well, I got the outcome, but the actual process of getting there was, it kind of sucked a bit. And then you think, well, I, I've got the money, but. Does that compensate for the amount of time that wasn't enjoyable? What are the things that predict running a business is an enjoyable experience?

• 1:36:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's type one and type two fun. So type one fun is enjoyable in the moment and type two fun is enjoyable when you look back on it. So, um, and you need both. So like type one fun is being at a party. Type uh two fun is doing six to nine months work on a particular difficult thing. And then getting it done and achieving a launch or achieving an exit, for example, might be horrible to like. Selling a company might be six months of really difficult conversations and difficult decisions. And then you look back on it and go, that was such an amazing life changing thing. So it's good to recognize there's type one and type two. So you say, well, uh, which one am I lacking?

• 1:37:39Speaker 01

  Am I doing something that's meaningful that I will look back on and be really proud? In which case I need more type one fun in my life. So then build in type one fun. So take the team out, um, often have slow starts to the morning. Incorporate, um, travel into, into what you do. You know, uh, take the team to comedy clubs. Just do those, do those sorts of things. Allow yourself the gift of, well, allow yourself a bit of love language. Like, for example, the other day I spoke to an entrepreneur who he's been working in his business for three years. He's never taken more than two and a half thousand dollars a month out. The business is like climbing up into the five hundred grand sort of a year territory.

• 1:38:24Speaker 01

  And I said to him, I said, hey, did you play Nintendo as a kid? And he said, yeah. And I said, can you imagine what it would be like if you started Mario? And you have to play fifteen levels before you discover one box that has a coin in it. Like, you're not going to stick with that. Like, the, like Mario works because all the way along, ding, ding, ding, ding. It's like you've just starved yourself of dopamine. I said to him, you know, what's something that you want to like? What's something that for you symbolize a success? He said, oh, this particular watch. I said, well, how much is the watch? And he's like a hundred and fifty thousand. I said, well, that's ridiculous, right? That's a, that's a sell the company watch. I said, let me look at the watch. And he said, he showed me this picture of the watch.

• 1:39:06Speaker 01

  And I said, okay, it looks a bit similar to this I W C watch, which is similar. And we had a look at that one. And I said, this one's four grand. Right. I said, what kind of watch do you have now? He's like, no watches. I'm like, so you've created a game where you only feel like you win when you get to the point where a hundred and fifty thousand dollar watch is doable. So let's make the game more fun, where you get a four grand watch along the way. And it's, and it's very similar to the one you want. And as soon as he was like, oh, cool. And he says to me, what do I have to do for the watch? I said, well, let's do these five things, which you can do in the next, like, uh, five weeks. And if you, if you do this, this and this, if you sign that, then you get to buy the watch. And he's like, oh, this is great.

• 1:39:49Speaker 01

  So suddenly the, it was amazing to watch the lights come back on. Like, he went from, like, not, like, like, being really down in the dumps. And I'm like, well, you've put yourself here because you've created a game that feels unwinnable. Let's create a game where you get a win in a few weeks from now. Um, so, so like, his love language was obviously gifts, but it could be that your love language is getting a massage, or it could be that your love language is doing some travel. Um, you know, so you've got to figure out what would keep you in the game. Um, so that would be type one enjoyment. Um, or the opposite could be true. Your business might be giving you a lot of type one enjoyment. You're a nightclub party promoter, but you don't think you're going to look back and be proud of yourself. There's a lot of hangovers going on.

• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  So then you go, okay, I need to link this to a charity. I need to raise money for a cause. I need to use my influence to do something of, of great meaning. I want to partner up with a foundation. I want to, um, you know, use some of the money that we've got to do a fundraiser or, you know, this, this sort of thing. And then you start saying, okay, in what ways could I bring in type two fun? Like where I feel like I'm playing a more meaningful game. Um, I'm making a dent in the universe. I'm doing something of great importance, something that I'll look back when I'm eighty. And so I'm really glad I did that. That was, I'm really proud of that. Um, yeah.

• 1:41:10Chris Williamson?

  I wonder where most people's problems lie. I wonder whether most people are bereft of type one or type two fun.

• 1:41:23Speaker 01

  Kids is getting back to kids. Kids immediately gives you a diminishment of type one fun in the early days. But it gives you a lot of type two. Suddenly you have the most meaningful thing in the world. All you no longer have any quest for meaning. You now have a meaning and you know, you, you, when you think about where you're going to be at 80, you're going to be talking to your kids and your grandkids and you know, and all of that sort of stuff. When you think about what, what you want, like want more than anything else. It's to see that they do well in life and that, you know, that those things happen. So you suddenly get this new arc of vision for your life and the importance of different things. And you're every single day doing something that feels incredibly meaningful, raising, raising kids.

• 1:42:07Speaker 01

  So if you've got kids, you need to bring type one fun in because you've already automatically kind of got a type two. Thing.

• 1:42:17Speaker 01

  And you know, if, if you don't, you need to look at legacy stuff. So it's like, can I use my business as a force for good in the world? Can I partner up with a charity? Can I, can I launch my own foundation?

• 1:42:32Speaker 01

  You know, is there a message I want to see in the world spread? So it's, it's, yeah.

• 1:42:39Chris Williamson?

  What has been your experience watching founders and watching yourself? I think a lot of people that are career driven, they have big aspirations monetarily, commercially, in terms of their status, they look at the prospect of starting a family as a governor, the speed limiter, they're going to put on their capacity to do that stuff. What's been your experience?

• 1:43:04Speaker 01

  Total opposite, total opposite. My marriage and my kids are rocket fuel. Like, you know, that my, my life really took off when I had kids. Because, well, look, for very practical reasons. Um, when you've got kids, you can just say no to whatever you wanna say no to.

• 1:43:21Chris Williamson?

  It's a great excuse.

• 1:43:22Speaker 01

  It's a great excuse. And you can just say, look, I'm so sorry, I'd love to come to your party, but I've got issues going on with the kids at home and blah, blah, blah. Oh, fair enough. So you can just say no to the stuff you don't wanna, you don't wanna do.

• 1:43:33Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:43:34Speaker 01

  Um, you also just have like a biological inbuilt meaning system that has lasted the test of time. So like all decisions go through the filter of is this building? Is this, is this actually putting roof overhead? Is this actually building long-term success uh for the family? Um, is this, am I, am I acting in a way that I'd be proud if my kids saw? You know, these decisions that I'm making now, you know, if this was, if there was a, if there was a video camera in the room, would I be proud of? Uh, you know, the decisions that I'm making. So you just, you, you, you're no longer thinking short-term, you're thinking long-term. Um.

• 1:44:13Speaker 01

  Uh, you know, it's, the, the data is pretty clear on this as well. I think, you know, the average high net worth person has got three kids. Uh, you know, like it's, it's, it's very correlated. There's not, there's not this huge number of people who didn't have kids who are now massively successful because of that. It's actually incredibly rare to find wildly successful people who don't have a family.

• 1:44:33Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. I wonder whether that's a bit of ballast against the tides, the buffeting that you're going to end up having.

• 1:44:41Speaker 01

  Time will tell, but it's incredibly stabilized. Look, here's, here's an interesting thing for me from my point of view. I just flew out from the UK to LA and then here in Austin. And I'm, so I'm away from my family for three weeks and um, cause I'm, I'm going to uh on a little mini tour and whatnot. Um, God, it's incredibly fucking lonely. Like, it's really weird. Um, it's quiet. It's like you, as a, as a dad, I imagine, oh, this is what I want. I want a quiet room and I just have some time to myself. Man, that gets, uh, gets old real quick. It's like, damn, this is scarily lonely. I don't like this at all.

• 1:45:19Speaker 01

  This feels, this feels like, you know, like I feel a little bit at a loss, I'm at a loose end here. Um, you know, so, yeah, I, I, I find that um, this is a really good little wake-up call as to how much it's, it's an orientation towards.

• 1:45:41Speaker 01

  You know, there's something that orientates me towards the bigger goals in life.

• 1:45:45Chris Williamson?

  How do you think about developing your mindset or the kind of mindsets that are useful in as much as resilience against difficulty, insults from running a business, from, you know, having your self-worth tied to this commercial enterprise, you know, people, I imagine lots of people will get kicked out of the game by going bankrupt, running out of liquid capital, you know, starting a business that was never going to be profitable in the first place. But some non-insignificant number of people too will end up leaving the game because they just can't take it.

• 1:46:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the US celebrates a bit of failure, which I love about US culture. You know, they love that they love someone who just tried, whereas Britain, British is a little bit more like, ha, we'll never let you forget that.

• 1:46:33Chris Williamson?

  Correct, yeah.

• 1:46:35Speaker 01

  So what I have, what I've discovered from having friends who have had businesses that have failed is I've got this friend of mine called Jeremy, who has had multiple businesses. He's now getting close to being a billionaire, but he had a business failure when he was in his twenties and he fought it and fought it and fought it and then his business went bankrupt. I think it was insolvent or whether bankrupt or something like that. And he said that it was the weirdest thing in the world. He woke up the next day and he felt relief. And he said, you know what? He said, it was like I was balancing on a tightrope and then the tightrope was only six inches off the ground.

• 1:47:19Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:47:21Speaker 01

  He said, when I actually fell, there was nowhere to fall. It was fine. Like it was like, oh, okay, I'm fine. The business is now closed. I can go do another business or I can join another team or I can get on with it. And he says, you know, no one, no one actually is thinking that much about you and your life. For a week, someone might go, oh, did you hear Chris shut down that business? Yeah. Oh, yeah. It didn't work out. Oh, yeah. What happened? Apparently they couldn't sign up enough customers. Oh, that sucks. Anyway. Like, you know, so that's the metaphor that I really like to share with people, which is Jeremy's metaphor. You're standing on a tightrope, but the tightrope's only six inches off the ground. Our grandparents, your grandparents, my grandparents or great grandparents, I mean,

• 1:48:06Speaker 01

  they fought wars. You know, failure to them was getting shoved to the front lines. You know, um, my grandfather was a Palestinian policeman in World War Two, at the end of World War Two. And, um, he was in right place and like, he literally was driving through this particular area, swapped driving positions and then was sitting down and the other guy was like driving and 15 minutes later got shot in the head. And it's like, had he not switched driving positions, he would have been shot and I wouldn't be here.

• 1:48:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:40Speaker 01

  And, you know, like, we've become a little bit detached from the fact that our ancestors fought proper problems. You know, here we are a little bit worried about, oh, I launched a YouTube channel and it didn't, you know, it didn't get a thousand views on that video, you know, or I tried to launch a product and, you know, I wanted to get 150 on the waiting list and I only got 147. Dan said it had to be 150, so had to shut it down. And it's like, you're not getting shot at, you know, you're like, let's keep this in perspective. A great perspective is this idea of how many, what percentage of your ancestors would trade places with you in a heartbeat?

• 1:49:15Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:49:16Speaker 01

  All of them. The answer is a hundred percent. Every ancestor you have, if they could see your opportunities in your life and, and even if they saw your difficult, most difficult day, they'd be like, let me in, tap out, let me, let me swap. You, you come back here and fight tuberculosis.

• 1:49:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's funny, you know, we often hear about, uh, it's the objectively the best time to ever be alive. But it's funny to couch it in your own lineage to think about, yeah, but what about your great, great grandparents? What would they think about it? Not some random caveman from 10,000 years ago, like what would they think specifically about this situation?

• 1:49:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I often think about that.

• 1:50:02Speaker 01

  And how far things change. I, one thought I have, which is weird, is the idea of trying to explain to my grandfather what a personal trainer is. Because I have a personal trainer. It's like, well, grandpa, I don't actually want to go to the gym. So I have to pay a guy to meet me there. And then he counts how many times I lift a heavy thing. And then he tells me I've done a good job. And then he tells me what to lift next. And tells me if I'm lifting it correctly. And then I pay him a lot of money and then I go home. And he's like, what are you talking about? What on earth is this?

• 1:50:37Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:50:37Speaker 01

  Why would you do that?

• 1:50:39Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:50:40Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:50:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's it's funny, man. You know, trying to have a little bit of perspective on the luxury or opulence that you have, even as, you know, someone that's still on the ladder or the climb, wherever it is that you are on your journey. I, the more that I give myself that perspective, the more that I do inversion. George, who's just landed in town. I don't know whether he still does this, but he was doing it for a long time. Once a month, he laid in bed and did a really, really hardcore meditation that he had no legs. Just to be like, what would life be like if I had no legs? Okay, so I've got to get up. I got to go to the bathroom. Like, how do I get to, how do I get to the bathroom? Like, what's the way that I get?

• 1:51:15Speaker 01

  Do you know, I've got a mate of mine who woke up with all four amputee, all four, like legs and arms amputated?

• 1:51:20Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:51:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've got this mate of mine. I would love to introduce you. He's, he'd be a great guest. His name is Pedro. Went out clubbing, went out to a nightclub, got sick, like totally started like feeling this heat rush, passed out. Woke up in hospital to this horrific smell. And like looked down and he's got all four limbs amputated.

• 1:51:43Chris Williamson?

  What happened?

• 1:51:44Speaker 01

  He got this, um, to not, uh, forget what it's called, but basically it's this virus. That once it sets in, if you don't amputate, it takes over your whole body and you die. And your toes and the fingers turn black. And it just like, like within forty eight hours, it starts creeping up and your skin starts going, it goes from your extremities.

• 1:52:03Chris Williamson?

  Something out of Game of Thrones.

• 1:52:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's quite, it's got a, I'd have to look it up, what, what its name is, but it's like this, um, this particular very nasty virus that he contracted and.

• 1:52:13Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:52:14Speaker 01

  Um, and they, the doctor who was in charge. Said this is what we have to do. Um. So above the elbow, above the knee. Um. And he was nineteen and just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. So all four limbs. And he's laying in bed and he, like, everyone's crying and sympathetic and like all this sort of stuff. And I think a few weeks in and like, obviously his brothers and like they they now get on with their life. They go back to work and his mum is now looking after him and he's just sitting there watching television all the time.

• 1:52:43Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:52:44Speaker 01

  And he has this vision that he told me about where he saw himself looking down a pathway of either this is the greatest thing that ever happened to me, or this is the worst thing that ever happened to me. And if I don't make that decision today, I by default go down the worst path.

• 1:53:03Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:53:03Speaker 01

  And he makes this thing where he says to himself, this is the greatest thing that ever happened to me. I can't change it, so I'm gonna make this amazing. So fast forward to today, he runs a chain of uh rehabilitation clinics, uh seven figure business. He's in his thirties. He's married to like this beautiful woman who's a G P. Uh. First baby has just been born. Um. He snowboards, he drives. Uh, like he he's an entrepreneur, he's written a bestselling book. The guy's unbelievable and he's and he's also like the most hilariously cool guy you've ever met.

• 1:53:38Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:53:39Speaker 01

  Um, like it's wild too, being driven around by a quadruple amputee. It's it's a little bit like Waymo for the first time.

• 1:53:49Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:53:49Speaker 01

  His name is Pedro Pinmenta. So.

• 1:53:51Chris Williamson?

  That's so cool.

• 1:53:52Speaker 01

  I'll put you in touch if ever you wanna. It's a cool story.

• 1:53:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, he sounds great. I I uh.

• 1:53:58Chris Williamson?

  Doing that inversion stuff, dude, realizing just how different life could be. And then also realizing that whether things go well or whether things go badly, your happiness is gonna get back to the same point that you're probably at now.

• 1:54:08Speaker 01

  Kind of at a at a at a set. Uh, you you said on one of your recent videos, you're pretty hard on yourself, right?

• 1:54:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:16Speaker 01

  Do you think that's because you have a low thermostat when it comes to happiness? Or?

• 1:54:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think I have a disposition toward negative affect for sure. That's that's definitely.

• 1:54:24Speaker 01

  Always?

• 1:54:26Chris Williamson?

  Uh, well, I can, oh, have I always?

• 1:54:28Speaker 01

  Cause objectively, you got it pretty good.

• 1:54:30Chris Williamson?

  That's true. That's true indeed. But you have to look at, you know, I have this little bit, I say about how you should look at successful people with more pity than envy. Because what is it that's driven them to do this thing? Well, most people in my experience are driven by fear of insufficiency, not a desire for greatness. They're running away from something they don't want and that they fear as opposed to running towards something they desire.

• 1:54:50Speaker 01

  Filling a void.

• 1:54:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah. And I think typically that's that's the case. And that's not to say for everything and, you know, objectively, it is way, way, way better to be successful and rich and, and, you know, be able to afford healthcare and go on a holiday and do stuff like that than it is to be poor. But when you look at, you know, real sort of outlier performers, a lot of the time they're driven by stuff that that is a little bit more sort of dark. But yeah, I can be very tough on myself and it comes in sort of waves. I think one of the challenges you have is a little bit of gold medalist syndrome that you have a big goal that you're working toward. And then when you think that this is going to be a thing and you you have all of the dopamine, you have all of the positive, and then you go, okay, well, what do I do now? What's next? What's next? What's next?

• 1:55:36Chris Williamson?

  Now, there's sort of two ways to deal with that problem. One is continue to find nexts to what toward. And the other one is to realize that the what next game itself is fundamentally broken and to try and transcend that. And I'm torn between the two pretty regularly. But yeah, I think I can be, I can be tough on myself. I can drive myself forward to do really great things.

• 1:55:59Speaker 01

  The hard thing with your world too, it's so quantifiable. So like there's all these metrics that you would never have had to live to live with in any other time in history, like. You on any given day can see how many subscribers, how many views, you know, how many sales, like there's just the dashboard is there all the time. And if you think about it, any other time in history, when would you have had that like minute by minute feedback on how you're doing?

• 1:56:29Chris Williamson?

  What you want is a dashboard for the things that you truly care about.

• 1:56:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:32Chris Williamson?

  You know, how peaceful were you today? How many moments was your mind resting where your feet are? How connected do you feel to your friends around you?

• 1:56:42Speaker 01

  You've got to work at that too, though. Like, you've really got to be conscious about that.

• 1:56:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, I'm balls deep in CBT at the moment for that exact reason, to see, okay, how much can I step in and sort of purposely reprogram?

• 1:56:52Speaker 01

  Getting

• 1:56:53Chris Williamson?

  This works.

• 1:56:53Speaker 01

  Getting back to the technology thing, you've got to realise too, that for the last 15 years, the smartest people on the planet have been hired with one goal in mind, which is to optimise you for time on their website.

• 1:57:08Chris Williamson?

  Get you to click on ads.

• 1:57:09Speaker 01

  Getting you to click shit. So people who previously would have launched rockets to Mars are now optimising algorithms so that you spend an extra 17 minutes on TikTok every day. Like, that's, that is like, and in the same way that you cannot beat an AI chess player,

• 1:57:30Speaker 01

  like, your brain cannot beat an AI algorithm designed to get you to watch TikTok videos. You can only either have it on your phone or delete it off your phone. There is no way around this.

• 1:57:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, avoidance is way easier than resistance.

• 1:57:43Speaker 01

  We're going to have a society that goes in two directions. We're going to have, because AI gives you the power to create or consume more than you intended. And we're going to have a society where a bunch of people consume way more than they intended, and their life becomes a very dystopian because of that. And we have another group of people who create way more than they intended, and their life becomes like unbelievably opulent as a result. You know, so you're going to have like plenty of people who make a million dollars a month, and plenty of people who need like UBI just to survive and not die. And AI is going to bifurcate.

• 1:58:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think. Looping back to what we spoke about at the very beginning and this maybe rising socialist light tenor that we see in the UK, maybe it's going to come out in the US. I think this capitalist American dream thing is very, very strong over here. So I wonder whether it would catch

• 1:58:40Speaker 01

  It'll come on, it'll come in.

• 1:58:42Chris Williamson?

  Quite the same way.

• 1:58:43Speaker 01

  Karl Marx came off the back of the Engels pause. So all of social, the origin story of socialism is a technology breakthrough that benefited those who could.

• 1:58:55Chris Williamson?

  What was the Engels pause?

• 1:58:56Speaker 01

  So Engels pause was from 1790 to 1840. All the economic gains went to industrialists and all the people who were from the farms basically saw no economic gains for 50 years. So you've got the bifurcation of society, Charles Dickens, all that sort of stuff. And then boom, you get Karl Marx, Gary Stevenson. And Gary Stevenson, if I take a list of Karl Marx quotes and put them up against Gary Stevenson quotes, they're the same. It's the same shit that resonated in 1840.

• 1:59:30Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether, so the thing that a lot of the UBI and a lot of the socialist light policies look at, that I don't think fully captured the human experience. And this was shown out, you see there's a big study done on what happens when you actually just pay people. They did a UBI sandbox, a couple of them actually, and the results came out probably about a year ago, maybe a little bit less than a year ago. And the outcomes that people had, even including their health, didn't improve that much, really, really didn't. I'll send you the, I'll send you the studies to have a look at. One of the problems, I think, especially when it looks at life satisfaction and happiness, is that

• 2:00:11Chris Williamson?

  the reason that humans value money, first and foremost, yes, you need to be able to pay for things. You don't want to be starving on the street. You don't have to steal food. You don't want to not be able to pay for the medical stuff like that. But even when that's still a problem. Money itself is a status indicator. And if you get money without the associated status that comes with it, it's the same, it's the same reason that no guy flexes the number of OnlyFans goals that he subscribes to. Because anybody with the price of a cheeseburger per month can subscribe to it too.

• 2:00:42Speaker 01

  That would be a fun flex.

• 2:00:43Chris Williamson?

  It's the same reason, I think, that AI girlfriends and robot girlfriends.

• 2:00:48Speaker 01

  Will never be high status.

• 2:00:51Chris Williamson?

  It fundamentally misses, and I'm totally open to being wrong, and I probably will be. But my current working theory is that it'll work for guys, maybe that are like super tactile in the way that they need to.

• 2:01:02Speaker 01

  It'll be like porn. It'll be something that they do but don't want to talk about.

• 2:01:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. The, the, the reason that men like to be in a public relationships in that way is that it shows that they've been selected of all of the men. And there were many more men available than just this one. I was chosen.

• 2:01:21Speaker 01

  I was chosen.

• 2:01:21Chris Williamson?

  Look at what that says about me.

• 2:01:23Speaker 01

  You see this, if you look at the groups of people who do have a form of UBI now, trust fund kids. Trust fund kids are notoriously miserable.

• 2:01:31Chris Williamson?

  They're the highest, one of the highest risks for drugs.

• 2:01:34Speaker 01

  Drugs, gambling, all devices.

• 2:01:36Chris Williamson?

  Oh, hang on. Is it the working class, underclass kids that have it? It's like, no, no, no.

• 2:01:39Speaker 01

  I, I have known some trust fund kids in my, in my years. As soon as we get close, oh my goodness, does Pandora's box open up? Like, what do I do with my life? I'm lost. I'm dark. I'm depressive. I'm anxious. I'm lost, you know, like just, and these are, these are kids who are like, one of them who I'm thinking about from a family that's 600 million, I think. You know, every, every month there's millions flying around. The family has a, a plane and a boat, multiple houses. Miserable, miserable, dark, because it's like, what am I meant to do and how am I meant to handle this?

• 2:02:17Chris Williamson?

  I heard Eddie Hearn on a podcast and somebody asked him about, you know, if he could go back, what would you change? How would you do things differently? And, you know, what, what do you, what do you sort of regrets? One of his biggest regrets, I didn't realize the way that his boxing promotion had come about. I didn't realize his dad was a legend in the sport. He was. He says, you know what? I just. Wish that dad hadn't done it because I never got to do it first.

• 2:02:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, this is the problem. If you are the son of someone great, if you succeed, it's because you were their son. And if you fail, then you're a real idiot for not succeeding because you were their son. You can't win. Like Sam Branson, he's living a very difficult life because realistically.

• 2:03:01Chris Williamson?

  Beat Richard.

• 2:03:01Speaker 01

  You how do you beat Richard Branson at anything? He's an icon. And it's like, if you do something great, uh, well, it's because Richard Branson's your dad. And if you don't do something great, well, then.

• 2:03:12Chris Williamson?

  I wonder how much of that explains Elon's kids, at least I think one of them, maybe a few of them are pretty rebellious publicly.

• 2:03:19Speaker 01

  Totally. They've got a carve. They've got a.

• 2:03:21Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna make my own path and my own path is going to be diametrically.

• 2:03:24Speaker 01

  Has to be detrimental. Yeah. Or else how do I, how do I?

• 2:03:27Chris Williamson?

  I can't, I can't win this game that he's playing, so I'm just gonna break it.

• 2:03:32Speaker 01

  Well, at least he has many samples to choose from now. What is he up to 14?

• 2:03:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, he's slowly reversing population decline. Uh, Dan, dude, you're, you're fucking awesome, man.

• 2:03:41Speaker 01

  It's been great.

• 2:03:41Chris Williamson?

  You're really, really, really great. Uh, where should people go? They're gonna check out everything that you do.

• 2:03:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. So my company is called scoreup.com, which is our software, um, and dent dot global, which is our online entrepreneur accelerator. Check out my books, um, connect with me on X or LinkedIn, um, or Insta. Yeah. And, uh, and let's, let's continue the conversation about entrepreneurship and this crazy fun way of, uh, expressing yourself in the world.

• 2:04:07Chris Williamson?

  Heck, yeah. Daniel, I appreciate you, man.

• 2:04:08Speaker 01

  Cheers, mate.

• 2:04:09Chris Williamson?

  Oh, made it to the end of the Daniel Priestley episode. Well, Joe Hudson, who is kind of like an embodied emotional business coach type guy, similar to Daniel, a bit different, really great. Fantastic episode with him, which you should watch. It's just that. Go on.

• 2:04:26Speaker 02

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