Kickoff Sessions
Weekly podcast episodes with the sharpest minds in the world to help you live a richer & more fulfilling life.
Previous guests include Luke Belmar, Justin Waller, Sahil Bloom, Gad Saad, Peter Schiff, Stirling Cooper, Jack Hopkins, Sadia Khan, Matt Gray, Daniel Priestley, Richard Cooper, Justin Welsh, Arlin Moore and more.
Kickoff Sessions
#271 Daniel Priestly - How to Triple Your Business in 2025 FAST
Watch This NEXT: https://youtu.be/dkixSG4hVRI
Daniel Priestley showed me how to triple my business in 60 minutes.
The best part?
I recorded the entire conversation—so you can do the same.
If you’re struggling to generate leads…
If you’re struggling to make sales…
If you’re struggling to keep clients…
This episode is for you.
My second podcast with Daniel is a step-by-step roadmap to:
- Triple your lead flow
- Have clients lining up to work with you
- Become a category of one in your industry
Here’s what you don’t need:
- You don’t need to go viral
- You don’t need to chase leads
- You don’t need to beg for business
If you want 2025 to be your best year yet, this podcast is for you.
(00:00) Preview and Intro
(00:48) How to Scale Your Business Fast
(01:30) The Shift from Industrial to Digital Age
(03:47) The Flaws of the Education System
(05:21) How to Leverage Intellectual Property
(08:48) Lessons from Stephen Covey & Simon Sinek
(12:30) The Four Essential Product Types
(16:06) Why Selling Information Alone Doesn’t Work
(23:41) Building Online Communities
(25:40) How Podcasts Generate Millions in Revenue
(32:34) Why CEOs Are Prioritizing Podcasting
(35:46) The Importance of Personal Brands
(45:12) How to Build a Scalable System
(50:46) The Psychology of Demand & Supply in Pricing
(56:06) The Power of Exclusivity in Business
(01:02:47) Why Creating Scarcity Drives More Sales
What I see is a lot of people trying to sell information and that just doesn't work, where they give away a little bit of information in the hope that you'll buy more information and it's like no one cares about information. I can go to ChatGBT, which summarizes the world's information, and I can get it to be a lawyer. I can get it to be an accountant, I can get it to be a philosopher. I don't need information anymore, Like there's no value in information.
Darren:You mentioned. Products and services don't make money on their own. It's going to be the ecosystem around it. Should people look to go high ticket or should people go to low ticket first?
Daniel:All the money's moved to the top 10%. So in any audience the top 1% has 15% of the budget to spend. The next 9% has 45% of the budget to spend, which means 60% of the money that can be spent is in the top 10% of the people.
Darren:Every entrepreneur wants to grow, but how do you triple or even quadruple your business this year? How do you go from chasing clients to becoming oversubscribed, where people compete to work with you? In this episode, I sit down with Daniel Priestley, the master of creating highly desirable businesses, to break down the exact steps to scale fast, attract premium clients and position yourself as the go-to authority in your industry. This is a clear, simple roadmap to exponential growth this year. Where I'd love to start is what's one thing that, if solved, would help all small business owners to grow their entire business.
Daniel:So the big shift that's happening at the moment is from the industrial age to the digital age and most people still have an industrial age mindset towards their business versus a digital age mindset to their business. So when you think about most businesses throughout the last couple of hundred years have all been local businesses serving a local market. People naturally think about their business as existing within a locality and you need to stop thinking about it like that. You need to start thinking about an ideal customer persona and the intellectual property that you represent. Most business owners think about the idea that they're selling their time for money or a variation of that, and they need to shift towards the idea of selling intellectual property packaged up as media and software. Most business owners think in terms of package sales and they need to get to subscription revenue. So I would sum all of this up as the idea that there is a digital age and an industrial age, and I would say most business owners are stuck in the industrial age.
Darren:Why do you think they haven't made the shift? Because you're a couple of years older than me, right? But because you're a couple of years older than than me, a lot of guys in your demographic they still think you know, sell by hour day rates, uh time, late time for money. But our generation have just kind of almost not grown up that we haven't seen it. But what's been the big shift for you? Because like that would never come into like a younger person's mind to be like I'm gonna just do get paid hourly or daily. It does. It's not really in the ecosystem well, that's the thing.
Daniel:If you, if you've grown up around digital and you've experienced digital like you have, then just seems such a foreign idea. But, um, the entire schooling system that I grew up in was designed around creating people as component labor. Um, ultimately, it wanted what? What it wanted you to be is a very easy to understand part of a machine that can plug into anybody's machine and that you can just have an hourly wage, or, sorry, an annual wage that can be broken down into monthly payments for the business, and that you could basically plug into anyone's business and be a good little happy worker. And that's what the schooling system was designed for.
Daniel:And the schooling system taught us things like don't be an attention seeker. Obviously, in the digital age you have to seek out attention. The schooling system said don't cheat, whereas in the digital age you'd be crazy not to copy what's working and figure out what's working and model it. In the schooling system they said don't get the smart kids to do your homework. And, of course, in the digital age, you collaborate with everyone and you get the smart kids to work with you on your projects.
Daniel:Schooling system was based around the idea of being ordinary, boring, easy to understand, whereas in the digital world, you need to be special and unique and hard to copy. So, essentially, the reason all of this is happening is that we were raised in a schooling system that was designed for a purpose which was to create factory workers in a local environment, and we've found ourselves in a digital economy that wants key people of influence and, um uh, collaborators and creators who operate across borders and operate, uh, with these new assets. Um, if we think about, if we think about the value hierarchy of of like, how do you create value? Or the leverage hierarchy? You've got time and skills at the very bottom, and then one level up is intellectual property, one level up is media and content, one level up is data and one level up is software automation and, essentially, most people have just not experienced the higher levels of leverage.
Darren:Just want to take one quick break to ask you one question have you been enjoying these episodes? Because, if you have, I'd really appreciate if you subscribe to the channel so that more people can see these episodes and be influenced to build an online business this year. Thank you, let's walk through that. That's an excellent example and a visual right. When they're moving through almost like that pyramid and that different aspects of leverage, how does someone transition through that? Because someone could say, all right, it's all well and good for you, daniel, you got this publishing company, you got us over here, but they don't know that you once weren't the key person of influence. How did you transition through those points of leverage? Even we talked about software earlier.
Daniel:So most people start out with time and skills. They're working in an environment and they're getting some sort of experience of the world. What we need to do to create intellectual property is we need to stop, pause and document. So you need to stop doing what you're doing and go into a different environment. You need to reflect, stop, reflect, document right. So reflect is think about the last five years. And there's a question that I get people to reflect on, and the question is in the last five years, did you do something special that would benefit a certain type of person? You got a quantifiable outcome and you can explain it step by step and I get people to reflect on that. So in the last five years, did you do something special that I'll repeat it because a lot of people want to write it down. Did you do something special that would benefit a certain type of person? You can quantify the outcome and explain it step by step. If that's the case, if you can say yes, that I can think of something like that, then that has the potential for intellectual property and when you document it, that's the creation of intellectual property. So I'll give you an example.
Daniel:There was this guy called Stephen Covey who wrote a book called Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and he sold 20 million copies and he built a $400 million consulting business. You know amazing success story. He passed away about 14 years ago, um, but he built this incredible business. Everyone's heard of seven habits of highly effective people. Most people don't know that where that book came from. He was literally a church guy who ran a church group for business owners in his church and he was in Utah and basically he was working with completely boring, normal businesses like small to medium sized businesses. This was not a guy who was floating companies on New York Stock Exchange. He was not launching rockets to Mars. He was not, you know, creating unicorn companies in Silicon Valley. He was a guy hanging out at his church, running a church group for business owners and running some consulting. But what happened was that after he did all this consulting with these small businesses, he made his own little list of the things that he noticed. That was the difference between those who implemented and those who didn't. So he got frustrated that some of his clients didn't implement and some of his clients did implement and he wanted to kind of do research. He's quite a researchy kind of guy, so he wanted to do research to see if his list of observations were accurate, and in doing that he wrote the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and in doing that he became one of the world's most famous speakers and consultants. So he could have easily spent the rest of his life just running consulting and charging day rates. But it was the creation of the intellectual property.
Daniel:I'll give you another example. There's a guy called Simon Sinek who was a consultant working between London and New York, and he used to bounce between London and New York, used to run these workshops for growth companies, and he noticed that one of the things that many companies struggled with was how to describe their purpose beyond making money. And he noticed that companies that were really good at this tended to recruit people and grow faster. So he wrote a book called Start With why and he gave a talk called Start With why and it got seen by tens of millions of people and he ended up building a 50 million plus business off the back of this idea of starting with why.
Daniel:So what is he doing? He's just thinking about his last five years. He's saying what is something that I've done that I've noticed that would benefit other people and I can explain it step by step and I can quantify the outcomes that you get if you follow those steps. And he's just writing it down. He's stop, reflect document. And he's just writing it down. He's stop reflect document.
Daniel:So document is as simple as write an article about it, write a blog about it, make a list, do some research, create some intellectual property, give it a name, right? So name. What's the name of this method? Right? Start with why? Seven habits of highly effective people. So ultimately, you've got to create something of value by creating some form of intellectual property. Once you've got intellectual property, then people are going to buy not just your time, but they'll also buy into the intellectual property. So that's the first way that you break free of time for money and the industrial revolution, mindset creation of intellectual property. Once you create intellectual property, intellectual property naturally wants to turn into media. It wants to turn into a video, it wants to turn into a diagram, it wants to turn into a PDF, a book. So boom, intellectual property turns into media. And then you're getting further and further away from time for money.
Darren:The biggest thing there for me is the fact that you have to realize that there are smaller components within what you're doing that's also going to be sellable. It's part of the ecosystem play that I know you mentioned quite often and it's a big thing that we even recognize. And even from when we first chatted I had something that was like a big thing over here, and then it wasn't until a mentor said, hey, you could unbundle that and unbundle it further, and unbundle it further. And then it turns out that someone might just buy the coaching or they might just buy the info, or they might just buy certain components. But I didn't realize that myself. But it's almost like at some point you need to slow down because that's actually not necessarily. It's a greater opportunity, which I guess it is in many ways. But if you looked at Simon Sinek, what he has on the backend, if you ever look at his landing page or his website, it's crazy. No one knows that there's so many different courses doing XYZ and it's a next step.
Daniel:There's courses that you can have his licensed consultants come in. There's media portals that you can access. Access.
Darren:There's all sorts of things tell me about that, because you you mentioned products and services don't make money on their own. It's going to be the ecosystem around it. Should people look to go high ticket or should look people go to low ticket first?
Daniel:uh, the. The four products that you need is a gift, which is something that you can give away for free. So forget low ticket, that's just gift, right. You just gift people things. And then you need something called a product for prospects, and a product for prospects is low ticket, but it's designed really just to get people to engage and to trust you and all of those sorts of things. Then you've got your core offer, which is the thing that delivers the biggest, most high value transformation, and then you've got your product for clients, which is the ongoing subscription product.
Daniel:So businesses need all four of these, and if you're starting out from scratch, the two to start with is the product for prospects and the core offering. So you might, let's say, you're launching a new business, you might do a mini workshop online, like a live zoom, and then follow that up with a call to action to become a client, to sign up as a client. So that is just product for prospects, straight into a core offering. If you're then growing to a bigger business, you might add some gifts so that you can get some scale, because gifts help you to scale, they reach more and more people. And then, if you've got customers signing up but you want to extend the value of the customer. Then you say, okay, we need a product for clients, we need something else to sell as well. So that's the minimum ecosystem. So you can go bigger than that. There are bigger ecosystems, but essentially until you've got four products, you're not going to be maximizing the value of your business.
Darren:I like your thoughts on this because my perspective on this I would add to it being saying that the free content you put out pulls them into the ecosystem. That brings them into the ecosystem, and I call that the charity work. Right. That's something that someone should be able to use and build a business off, because your free content should be better than most people's paid content. And the next step then should be like, let's say, an amazing lead magnet or a low ticket offer. That's amazing, but sometimes, when I'm looking at other people's offers, they're gatekeeping. They're holding stuff back when they could be giving out some amazing value which could bring in even more prospects. What would be your kind of observation on that?
Daniel:if you think about it around what each product is there to do, then you, then you'll probably get it right. It's not that you want to give people a little serving, it's that the job is to do it. The job is to do a job for the business and the job is of each product. A gift is there to capture attention, a product for prospects is to build trust. A core offering is there to deliver transformation and a product for clients is to maintain high standards over time. So they each have a job to do. It's not that you like give a little, then give a little more, then give a little bit more. It's kind of like this idea of like, oh I'll play you one song and now I'll play you two songs, and now I'll play you four songs. It doesn't work like that. I'll give you an example.
Daniel:If you take Porsche, their core product is sports cars. Their product for prospects is that you can actually go to the Porsche driving center and race a Porsche for 90 minutes around. The track Costs about $700. When you do that, you have an amazing experience with driving a Porsche around the track and it naturally makes you feel like I wish I had a Porsche. I don't want to hand the keys back. I want the car. I want to keep the car. So it's not that they're giving you, it's not that they're like holding something back for the Porsche driving experience, that track experience. It's a really amazing experience, but obviously it comes to an end. It's a 90 minute driving experience and you get great value. You've spent $700 and it's been worth $700. And you're just like this was great. I loved it, but it's not. It's you know, can you see the difference? Like it's a full and it's a great experience on its own, but it makes you want more. It's a great experience on its own, but it makes you want more.
Daniel:What I see is a lot of people trying to sell information and that just doesn't work, where they give away a little bit of information in the hope that you'll buy more information, and it's like no one cares about information. I can go to chat GBT, which summarizes the world's information, and uh, you know I can. I can get it to be a lawyer. I can get it to be an accountant. I can get it to be a philosopher. I can get it to be a philosopher. I can get it to be a poet. I can get it to be a marketing consultant, like for $20 a month, I can be on the plan for open access to AI. I don't need information anymore, like there's no value in information, the intelligence, the insight. That's fallen to zero. Or $20 a month for all the information in the world, I don't even need to.
Darren:Google anything anymore. It's crazy. So where is the edge? Is it in the customer experience?
Daniel:Customer experience, implementation, community, all of those types of things. The information should be free, but when people work with your business, they want to experience some sort of transformation. See, ai doesn't transform you, it just gives you the information. This transformation still has to happen.
Darren:I think that's super interesting to observe because I noticed that a lot with mentorship and mentoring is that when you teach someone, you almost enable them and they're like super grateful, super appreciative as a result, because you've given them the keys to the castle, whereas if you do something for someone, like a service and services, it's almost like the goal is expected right, and it depends obviously on the individual. But it's an interesting dilemma, right. When you've taught someone how to do something, they're like Daniel's a man. He gave me, he taught me everything to do with this, he taught me sales, he taught me how to build a product. It's like you implant that little level of information. I think that's why people don't value something that comes off of google or something that comes off of chat, gpt. But when you're in a community, when you've connected with people, that's when there's almost like a better connection being built and faster results. Right, that's what you're doing.
Daniel:You're paying for speed there's also another dynamic at play here that's worth talking about, which is that in any audience that you could be talking to, it's only one to ten percent of the audience that are potential buyers. So it used to be that you, your business, had to be set up to be accessible to everybody. So if you in a local industrial environment, if you set up a butcher, baker, candlestick maker on the high street, everyone needs to be able to walk in and buy something from the butcher. Everyone needs to walk in and get something from the bakery. There's no point doing something that's extremely niche for a small group of people. You need to be accessible and you need to be widely understood and accessible.
Daniel:Now, when we run digital businesses, it's far more the case that you give away for free to 90% and only 10% are even in the conversation of buying anything. 90% and only 10% are even in the conversation of buying anything, and there's a reason for that All the money's moved to the top 10%. So in any audience, the top 1% has 15% of the budget to spend. The next 9% has 45% of the budget to spend, which means 60 percent of the money that can be spent is in the top 10 percent of the people and 40 percent of the money is in the bottom 90 percent of the people.
Daniel:So if your business tries to please everyone, you'll find yourself in the 90 percent of people who don't have a lot of money um to spend. So you're better off just giving those people free value and not even asking anything of them, but then having a way of filtering for the top 10 and then having a serious conversation with them, because they have very neat, very different needs. The top 10 of people have got no time but lots of money, um, and they've got lots of desires for things they want to throw money at problems. The bottom 90% have got no time and no money, so they're terrible clients. So your job is to build a big audience, but really only monetize the top 10%. Now, if you become wildly successful and you end up with a massive audience, then you only monetize the top 1%. So if you go to the Gary Vaynerchuks of the world, he's giving away huge amounts of value to 100% of his audience, but only 1% of the audience will ever see him offer anything.
Darren:That's really interesting. Let's dig a little bit deeper into that, because that's I call that audience capture. So I completely agree with you. Like there's that proportion of your audience that are just never, ever, ever going to buy. And let's just say there's a tiny proportion that can buy and then the rest simply can't afford.
Darren:However, you've seen someone like Hormozy, who publicly was saying this, saying that, oh, look, I have nothing to offer you, nothing to offer you. And now he's you know, partner up at school to be able to give a platform to offer everyone. So is there like a mech, is there like a way to be able to capture a broader part of your audience as you grow? Because I'm similar enough to you in a way that I would think that, look, just have the products that are the products that you have, um, that go after the right niche, go after the right buyer and then everybody else, just give them the free content. But but it looks like Hormozy now is at the point whereby he's like, look, let's get everyone onto school, let's try to capture that audience in that regard and let's try to see can he help everyone. That kind of seems to be like the play on that side.
Daniel:Well, you would think that, but that's not what's happening. He has one client, which is school, and he's taken an equity stake in school and his value proposition to school is to tell people about school and make school cool. But when you think about Hamosi, he didn't start school, he found school as an opportunity and he basically manages that one relationship with them and he's become the face of it and he's directing people to it. Now it's true that you're, as a customer, you might think, oh, hamosi's really changed, but actually he's always just doing private equity deals with a very small number of companies. So, for example, of all the millions of people who know who he is, he probably has 30 private equity deals.
Daniel:One of them is school and his value proposition to school is I will direct my followers over to you and I'll be a face of it and I'll be a representative of it, but it's still just one private equity deal. He's really only working with 30 companies. One of them is school, really only working with 30 companies. One of them is school. Um, so so, in his mind, if you were, if you were, alex homozy, you would be thinking about the equity deals that you're doing. Your, your, your customers are 30 companies that you've done private equity deals with such a good point.
Darren:It's interesting because a lot of his were brick and mortar initially. Right, a proportion of them were brick and mortar, so it's kind A proportion of them were brick and mortar, so it's kind of an interesting change initially to move into that.
Daniel:Yeah, what he's trying to do is, realistically. What he's really trying to do is take an equity stake in school and then sell that for 10 times what he bought it for. So let's say he owns 20% of school and let's say he came in at a 4 million valuation and he's trying to get out at a 40 million value you know 40 million.
Darren:Would you think that they have really sparked the community drive in the past couple of years? Do you think that's been a big instance to drive people more towards communities? From your observation, Because you've seen it from the other end as well?
Daniel:Look, I don't. I'm not close enough to school to know what they're doing well or not. Um, I do know that it's incredibly difficult business. Um, network effects are very real. Getting people to actually show up to a certain number of platforms is very hard. Um, you know, nine times out of ten fast forward three months.
Darren:People join a community and then they forget to log into the platform it's an interesting observation because that's like almost as human tendencies right, it's just consumption of anything. That's why, funnily enough, you know, like any sass and subscription base is a lot of churn, trying to keep, uh, trying to keep on the platform yeah, trying to keep people on platforms is so hard.
Daniel:It's a miracle. I don't know how Mark Zuckerberg does it, but it's incredible to see that, like years later, people still log into Facebook and years later they still log into Instagram. But so many people have tried to get people to join a community and so few of them stick, because it's just as soon as the numbers start to dwindle. People stop turning up. And as soon as people stop turning up, everyone else everyone stops turning up.
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Darren:Damn, that's such a good point. It's like it's a snowball effect working both ways right. The faster that it rises, so the faster to climb, the harder to fall, basically as well. At the same time, you've mentioned a lot about attention. So you've mentioned attention a couple of times in terms of getting attention and I know you mentioned podcasts before as well and the power of how influential that's been like the podcast effect. How have you seen that plan out even for yourself, like how beneficial has it been to be on some big shows, be be on some big podcasts, and how has that, even? How have you seen other business owners use that as well?
Daniel:Well, for me, a big podcast is literally worth millions. You know it's, it's a. When I go on those, literally millions comes in as a result. It's it's quite incredible. And you know, essentially podcasts is relationship building on steroids. It's like, you know, it's as close as you can get to having a cup of coffee with a million people. Imagine that you were an immortal and that you could actually, if you wanted to, have a cup of coffee with a million people and sit down and tell them your story, you would do business with so many people because they're just a percentage of people like you and want to do business with you. You can't do that physically, but, my goodness, that's what a podcast is like. It is just relationships at steroids.
Daniel:If you think about the idea that there's a minimum effective dose of a relationship to have a relationship so like, for example, if I said for us to be friends, we have to spend a certain amount of time together to cross a threshold called the friend threshold. So the research says that for us to just have a decent friendship where we remember each other and what we're up to and we're like on each other's minds, minimum is that we have to spend seven hours together. That's the minimum effective dose. If we spend less than seven hours together, we forget each other really quick, but once we've spent seven hours together then we feel a connection, a friendship. That's the minimum. So if you think about most people showing up on social media, they post maybe once a week, maybe once every two weeks, and they might post something that people can consume in a few minutes. They're never, ever going to hit the seven-hour mark with people. They're never going to hit the minimum effective dose of being remembered by that person. On the flip side, if you go on three or four major podcasts, you've just hit that threshold with literally hundreds of thousands of people.
Daniel:So like, for example, example, anyone who's watched both of my diary of a ceo episodes and both of my ali abdallah episodes, like they, they feel like I'm best brother, like best best mate. Um, you know, I I walking down the street the other day in in london. This guy just comes bounding up to me and he's like Daniel and I'm like hey, and he's like man, he goes. It's so good to see you and for him he's talking to me like I'm a friend and I said, um, I said remind me, how do I know you. He goes you don't know me, I know you and he says I've been watching your cause, I've been watching your podcasts. Um, I had a guy come up to me in the gym and he's like I'm listening to you. Right now I'm literally I've got you in my ears listening to the podcast and people are so happy to see you when they've listened to a podcast.
Darren:Dude. That's the thing for me, right? I think it's just crazy, because I think most business owners don't realize this. I think guys think, like, oh, like, podcasting that's just for Joe Rogan, it's over there, right? But people like you are showing people the opportunity like this. It's like, hey, if you're a busy CEO or business owner or you're just getting started as a small business owner, you can go on a baking podcast down the street and that could be enough to get baking clients into your bakery, right? That's actually the irony of the situation, right? Is that you don't need more, you need to do it better. Now I know, like a very like famous influencer in a space. The guy recorded a podcast in 2023. So he did like seven or eight in 2023. They're still running the clips from 2023 for today and they're still able to, like, get a ton of traffic to their products and services. It was two years ago.
Daniel:In every good long podcast there's going to be one or two clips that are just great pieces of content and they can last for years. Yeah, exactly.
Darren:Tell me this, though, because, of course, you're big on showcasing what's happening with AI. I do a lot of this in my content, too. What do you think the relationship is between podcasts specifically going deeper people and almost like the antithesis of AI, where it's like, okay, everything else has been used for AI, like, what do you think about that? Like, does that? Do you think that's a big drive towards this, or what do you think?
Daniel:We saw this in the presidential election with Kamala versus Trump. She didn't prioritize podcasts. He massively prioritized podcasts. She created about three hours worth of content. He created, I think, 27 hours worth of content. His podcasts were watched by several hundred million people. Hers were watched by a few million people and he really was able to bring people around to his way of thinking. Now, the thing that blows Democrats' minds is they think, oh, this guy, he's crazy and he's like, he's a felon and he's this and he's that. But the counter to that is that when he goes on Joe Rogan and just is totally unfiltered for three hours, anyone who listens to that says well, I've heard you say that he's a horrible person, but I'm listening to him on Joe Rogan and actually I'm hearing a different side to the story, I'm hearing a different perspective and ultimately, I now feel like I have a bit of a relationship with him. So therefore, I'm going to be swayed in that direction.
Daniel:Us presidential elections are actually one of the big predictors of major trends. So Obama was the one who was the first social media president in 2008, and then social media became the big business tool. First social media president in 2008, and then social media became the big business tool. Um, jfk versus nixon in 1960 was, uh, the big, um big television debate and television became the big thing. Uh, franklin roosevelt in the 1930s did the fireside chat on radio, on national radio, and then national radio overtook print media. So we can see that, uh, presidential elections are very, very much the formula one of the marketing world, where it tells us what are the big trends.
Daniel:So my prediction is that the ceos of the world are going to get onto podcasts. They're going to be working their asses off to be on the big podcasts. We're already seeing it. We. I just saw a great podcast with the ceo of microsoft. I saw another great podcast with google ceo, saw another podcast with tim cook. Um, you know all of these top ceos whose time is worth millions per day. Uh, they're prioritizing getting on well-known podcasts it's crazy, I think.
Darren:Uh, after that event on uh rogan's podcast, you had the Argentinian president going on, lex Friedman, you had Zelensky. You also had I think it was the Indian prime minister either planning or about to go on one of the big podcasts as well. It's almost like someone needs to give permission. It's kind of like, you know, when someone buys mentorship and then they almost asked for permission and then you just have them to do what they were going to do anyway. Like they need to ask for permission to do it. But even if it's not podcast, it's it's just the fact that it's the individual, like whatever the narrative it is or whatever the company's objectives is. When you see the individual go do something and I know you've mentioned that about, like the importance of, like that personal brand where it's like Elon Musk is bigger than NASA, you know Tim Cook is bigger than Apple, it's almost like this is the truest and organic form than nothing that's been chopped up and just thrown around in a piece of internet.
Daniel:Basically, yeah, humans are not very good with abstractions. We don't have any real emotional connection to anything that's abstract. So, you know, if you show humans logos, they're not really. They don't really care about logos. Even when people say, oh, what about nike and the swoosh? Well, yeah, nike and the swoosh is a great logo. But the reason we feel something for nike is because, as we were growing up, michael jordan wore nike. Um, you know, andre agassi wore nike. So, like all of the athletes that you have a personal affection for, they're wearing nike. So then it's like, okay, well, that's how come I feel something for the abstraction of the logo? Um, because of the people, and it's the same. We felt like, you know, I'm slightly older, but what?
Daniel:There was a period of time where, where steve jobs was decoding the future and showing us what the future was going to look like and revealing these devices. And he was, he was, you know, he was the elon musk of my generation and, um, and when he was going through that, like you know, he would have, he could have shot, you know, sold us all dog shit. We would have followed him to the end of the earth. Because it was, it was steve jobs who was telling us what the world was going to look like, and we all went on the journey with steve um. And look at elon, elon musk right now. Elon Musk look, he's not everybody's cup of tea. He has his detractors as well as his supporters, but ultimately he has millions and millions of people who have watched enough interviews with him and seen him speak and seen what he's all about and read his biography and they want to see him succeed.
Darren:Yeah, it's super fascinating. It's like and we can only look at this, you know, almost retrospect like I think people will look back and like what you know musk was saying, what he was pushing, 50 years from now and think, okay, it made sense or it didn't make sense at that point. But it's almost like in the moment we don't realize it, we also don't appreciate it as well. Also, you're like, oh yeah, a bit too soon. It's just like oh yeah, it's just like a video it's almost like in the moment.
Daniel:We don't realize it. We also don't appreciate it as well.
Darren:Also, you're like oh yeah, it's just like a video. Someone's just going on a podcast and someone's just making a YouTube video. Does that make sense? I know you mentioned about Serena Williams and Roger Federer making more money now than when they were playing professionally because of their personal brand.
Daniel:Well, because they have so much personal brand equity. You know, roger Federer, for example, is incredibly respected by some of the richest, wealthiest luxury buyers in the world, as well as sports people and athletes, and to a degree he built such a massive personal brand that playing tennis became low-value activity versus high-value activity, that playing tennis became low-value activity versus high-value activity. His highest value activity now is taking equity stakes in companies. So he took an equity stake in Uniqlo and he took an equity stake in On Running and he's made $600 million off the back of those. As opposed to, you know, as opposed to running around the world playing tennis all the time. You know, if you win every tennis match, you make about $12 to $15 million for the year. If you leverage your personal brand to take equity stakes in companies, you make 10 times that, 100 times that.
Daniel:So Serena Williams she's become a venture capital firm. You know she's taking equity stakes in brands. She has the ability to open doors and relationships. She has the ability to get things you know seen on television and on podcasts and on social. So it's all about leveraging the personal brand. Ryan Reynolds has made close to a billion dollars now from his personal brand. He only ever made tens of millions from acting only right. Obviously it's all relative. Um, you know, we see ricky gervais making a fortune with a vodka business. Uh, we see, um, yeah, all of these examples of of people who end up making more money as a personal brand than than they did from how they got their personal brand.
Darren:How do you do that as an extension of yourself, to build a brand and build a business? That's almost like elegant, right? You know that makes sense, that fits, because, like for you, for your products, for your services, it's like a natural extension. How can someone do that elegantly?
Daniel:Well, two things I'll say is that, first, think about your personal brand as like an Eiffel Tower and around the Eiffel Tower is the coffee shops and the restaurants and the hotels and the art galleries. The Eiffel Tower itself is not there to make money. The Eiffel Tower is there to draw people to Paris, and the way to make money is the ecosystem of businesses around the Eiffel Tower. So when we think about personal brand, a lot of people think that someone's going to come and buy you, they're going to pay money for your coaching or pay money for your consulting or whatever. But actually just simply having a personal brand and putting businesses around in proximity is actually of great value. So, for example, I own part of an agency. When I took an equity stake in that agency, it was doing 200 grand a year and the following year it was doing 1.5 million. Um, so I was doing, you know, 200 grand every six weeks and I didn't really do anything like all all the team did is I had a couple of kickoff meetings with them, but they started using, uh, my network, and they started using me in the pitch and basically saying that I'm part of the business and all of that sort of stuff which I, which I am, um, but that just gets enough cut through for that agency to to, you know, do more than 10x or close to 10x revenue, just because it's in proximity. So there's value in proximity.
Daniel:And then what you choose is things that you genuinely think are good for your people. So when you look at who are the people that I serve, uh, what, what would add value to them? Um, so you want to be authentic in helping and serving people, um, and uh, you know, every personal brand has an essence. If we take richard branson, richard branson's essence is shaking up old industries, uh, creating fun places to work, and champion, champion, the customer. Anytime he does that essence, he does very, very, very well. Anytime he strays away from that, then it doesn't go as well. So you know, my essence is develop entrepreneurs who stand out, scale up and make a positive impact in the world. My essence is all about entrepreneurship and the entrepreneur revolution. So anything that powers entrepreneurs, like software or publishing for entrepreneurs, or entrepreneur accelerators or entrepreneur agencies all of those things tend to do well it's a good point because it's the fact that it's just leverage right, as in no one builds their personal brand.
Darren:Initially they think that has leverage, but that example of going from 200K to 1.2 million or 1.6 million is just the essence of it, and you know, it's funny because people will say an agency has no leverage, but they. But if they don't understand how you could add this, as well as all the ecosystems of products. You know, the way that you've explained this to me is actually exactly what I learned from you and what I did basically from our first podcast. This is exactly. I literally did exactly what you've told me, though, jenny, that's actually. It's an.
Darren:It's an important point to like note is that I had my own brand. I was building it, I had the agency. We use it to partner with people, we built the education piece, we scale that, we put more content out and then create it like a flywheel. So it's literally like a test case of it, because it's it's so visceral for me. That's why I can see it so clearly, because, like um, and also you know, one thing I always say that I learned from you is rough roads and smooth, smooth roads and rough, and I think uh, that was a big inflection point for me too, which, whether it was even looking at the brand and looking at, we're getting no engagement. We're getting engagement, I feel like that. The fly wheel, the speed and velocity increases exponentially, but you only realize that once you stay in it you know you truly stay in it, yeah, once that flywheel speeds up.
Daniel:Look at also, I'm guessing, for you personally you kind of still pretty hands-on with your businesses.
Darren:No, not on the agency. So on the, on the on the media side, um, we have a team team of 10 and then on the education piece, there's a team of four. Uh, we've two products. We have a get started product, uh, which is run by another team member, and then we have a high ticket, a 20 K offer that I would run. That it's more like an internal, it's more like a mentorship. Often would you interact? How often would you be interacting with your team? How often interact with a team? Um, daily, as soon we do a sales with you, a sales meeting at four o'clock yeah, we'll have like a.
Daniel:So there you go, so daily, but not, not on the not on the media side, though sorry, on the media side not necessarily.
Daniel:They would kind of like do it, but I know what you mean I'm not fully extrapolated from it yeah, well, all I was going to say is the next spin of the flywheel for you is you can literally be in businesses. So I own several businesses that I've never visited. I've never been to the physical place where the business is, um, like and these are seven figure businesses, um, I own businesses where I could not tell you who works in the business. Um, you, you know that I just simply have a relationship with the founder, uh, with the you know, with with the partner, um, there there comes a point where just the value of just being showing up in the world, uh, is enough for you to add value to that business and you don't have to be hands-on at all, and then you've got really high leverage again.
Darren:Another thing that I learned from you was around the sales management and sales metrics. Like you don't understand how many times I've taught my sales raps about laps, like, literally, you don't know as much, but you know again, full, full transparency. I tried to build a sales team since 2023 and I had basically two failed attempts to do it and I, I would say the I would say the reason why this sales team works works as a relative term, uh is probably due to the client acquisition strategy in terms of, you know, systematically getting leads from either Instagram or LinkedIn, or maybe from the podcast, but having like an actual acquisition strategy and that's organic weekly lab, yeah, exactly.
Darren:But then I think, um, my question for you on this is, like, when you are looking at those different businesses, how would you advise businesses to build a sales like organization sales infrastructure to get their leads Like? How would you advise to that if you're even if you're not even touching the business? The majority of my guests run content businesses. They've used content as the main element of their business to drive more revenue and build their influence online. We've been doing this through a podcast for many years.
Darren:We have many guests, clients and even customers use a podcast as their main source of driving more revenue for their business and building their influence online, and we're offering a handful of spots to book in a call with our team to learn how you yes, you can leverage a podcast to generate more revenue for your business and drive your influence online. Many of our clients and customers start from nothing, but each one of them are action takers and they want to learn more about how to build a podcast and a brand right around their business. So if you want to learn more and you're really interested in building a podcast, check out the link down below and book in a free call with our customer success manager and he will guide you into how you can build and generate more revenue from your podcast this year.
Daniel:Yeah, so well, we always put in a laps dashboard so I can see the laps dashboard and see how that's flying Well. Laps dashboard means every week we measure leads, appointments, presentations and sales and we can see the flow. So normally I won't touch it for a few months or for a few weeks and just see how it's flowing, get the data at its current state and then we look at okay, well, how can we run some lead generation campaigns that are sustainable that we can run every single week Nine times out of 10, we launch a scorecard. So a scorecard is just one of the best ways to generate really high quality leads. I don't know, have you launched a scorecard yet? I of the best ways to generate really high quality leads? Um, I don't know, have you launched a scorecard?
Darren:yet I actually haven't, and you just reminded me because I was looking at score after today what happens to your lead generation. I'm gonna write it down right now. I'm gonna do it in the morning. I know it's like 60, I'll do it in the morning.
Daniel:So a scorecard is basically like uh tell me about, uh tell me about who your perfect customer is.
Darren:So, on the education piece, it's much easier to explain. So we help business owners increase their revenue with a podcast.
Daniel:So they either have a podcast or they don't have a podcast, and then we so you do a scorecard are you ready to launch a podcast, or should you launch a podcast, or are you ready to be a guest on big podcasts? Take this scorecard to find out whether you're ready to be a guest on big podcasts. Take this scorecard to figure out whether your business would benefit by launching a podcast. Take this right. So let's say, they answer 12 questions. At the end of 12 questions, they get a score out of 100%. You scored 70%, you scored 80%, you scored 30% and then it essentially, when you talk to them, you've got all the data. So let's say, one of the questions is do you feel confident being a guest on somebody's podcast if they ask you about your backstory and they say no? And then when you talk to them, you say I'm curious, why did you say that you don't feel confident talking about your backstory? And they say no. And then when you talk to them, you say I'm curious, why did you say that you don't feel confident talking about your backstory? And they're just like, oh, I just don't think it's very interesting and say great, would you be open to us having a conversation about how you would describe your background, your backstory? So now you're talking about the specific issues. If you said, do you have a budget for launching a podcast? And there was an answer that said, yes, we could spend up to a thousand a month on this. Yes, we could spend up to 5,000 a month on this. Yes, we could spend up to 20,000 a month on this. Now, imagine, most people never say 20,000 a month, but imagine that someone fills in the scorecard and says, yes, and we would spend $20,000 a month on this. You're going to get on that phone call and have a very different conversation with them. You're going to say out of curiosity, you said that you can spend $20,000 a month on this and you say, yeah, the board has already approved a quarter of a million to launch a podcast this year. So we can spend a quarter of a million to launch a podcast this year. Um, so we, we can spend quarter of a million on this.
Daniel:Say, what kind of company are you? Oh, we're a software company. And they say, well, what could we do for quarter of a million? Well, we could get you know all we could pay to have certain guests on and we could have sponsored content and blah, blah, blah and they go, oh, that's great. Now imagine that you didn't have a scorecard and you just didn't know that they're thinking in quarter of a million terms. You're talking to someone junior and you're thinking, oh, this person doesn't know very much, so you get off the phone call. After 10 minutes they're sitting there going. Oh, that was a bit rude. I was about to tell them that I had quarter of a million to spend um that's just the reality, right.
Darren:And then you see that over and over again, that people are you're able to qualify them better to that point, totally right.
Daniel:So there's SQLs and MQLs. So SQL is a sales qualified lead and an MQL is a marketing qualified lead. So essentially, your campaigns need to make a distinction between is this person ready to talk to a salesperson or is this person ready to get nurtured by our marketing funnels, our marketing sequences? So what you want to do is you want to have a scorecard that helps you to determine is this a sales qualified lead or a marketing qualified lead. And if you can essentially just ask questions, that segment, uh, then you can either have powerful sales conversations or leave people on warm-up nurture sequences and it, uh, you know, the business starts running really efficiently. So, yeah, look a really well done scorecard that's beautifully designed, it's smart, it's really in alignment with what customers are trying to figure out. Um, that is um, that that's. I mean, that's just one of the ways to just double the leads coming into a business and double the quality leads coming into a business. Um, so that's that's one thing.
Daniel:I also will launch a mini course. You know, some sort of a mini course is pretty powerful. Um, I'll typically launch a um like a webinar, a periodic webinar. I might launch a discussion group. I might launch a waiting list for some future product. That's really cool. Um, I might just do a purely and simply a register your interest, um, like just expression of interest form. Um, so it's some of the businesses that I bought into. There's just no way for people like you go to the website. There's just no, no way for people to register interest at all. Um, so there's nothing you can do to say that you're interested. Uh, a lot of people will not pick up the phone anymore. They don't want to dial a number, so they just want to click a button and say I'm interested, so things like that. But if I can ramp up the leads, that there's a philosophical thing that's really important for, as the philosophy I want to share that business owners don't remember that their price is not based on value. Their price is based on demand and supply tension. So what I mean by that?
Daniel:If you're a business coach and you're amazing value let's say you've built multiple multi-million pound businesses, you're an experienced CEO. You floated a company on the stock exchange. Like you're an incredible person with an amazing background and you're a business coach, if you go out there and nobody really knows who you are and someone says how much is your coaching? Uh, you might say, oh, like it's a thousand pounds or two thousand pounds or whatever it is, and they might go, oh, it sounds expensive. You know, you just kind of like the value is there, but there's no tension around demand and supply tension. If you're a business coach and you're okay, but you speak in front of a thousand people in a big audience and you deliver a good presentation, and you deliver a good presentation and you say I can take on five coaching clients and everyone looks around the room and goes there's only there's. There's a thousand of us in the room and there's only five spots available, people will literally run. You'll get people actually run to become a client.
Daniel:So the value of something is not, is not the value. The value is just demand and supply tension. We've seen this with bitcoin. Bitcoin is fundamentally has zero value. There's nothing of value about it. It's just a code um. But its value is in demand and supply tension. It's the ratio of people who want to hold it versus who want to buy it. Um, that's, that's all it is. Um. You know, water theoretically is of life-saving value, but we get it for free because there's no demand and supply tension. So when I look at any business that I buy, I essentially start with the idea that it doesn't matter whether they're delivering value or not. It matters primarily whether there's demand and supply tension.
Darren:That's super interesting, man, because you can manufacture that based off a scorecard, based off a wait list. You can create this out of thin air, even though you may hypothesize that there is. But it's really curious because most people will never have a mechanism to do that.
Daniel:Yeah, look, I assume that most businesses have value to offer. Right, they've got something of value, but they're just not ramping up the demand and supply tension. It's really simple. Let's take your business, your education business how many customers could you sign up to have a really good year? If you wanted to have a really good year, how many customers would you have?
Darren:So how much people do I need?
Daniel:you mean yeah, or if you think about the year ahead and you said, oh, let's imagine we get to the end of the year and you say we had a really good year. How many customers did we?
Darren:get. So we were doing 25 a month. That's a goal.
Daniel:Great, so we say 300. Yeah, want that's a goal. Great, so we say 300. Yeah, so I want you to give that. I want you to give that a word that we use called official capacity.
Daniel:So official capacity is 300 per year as it currently stands. So when you're promoting your program, tell people we work with about 300 customers per year. That's what we work with, right? So that is called your official capacity. Our official capacity for how many clients we work with is 300 per year. Now I want you to imagine that you figure out a way of getting 9,000 to apply for 300 spots. Imagine that somehow 9,000 people apply for 300 spots. What would happen to your prices?
Darren:They would just increase, yeah.
Daniel:And also what would happen is you'd be able to pick and choose. You'd be able to pick and choose which clients were the best fit, and then it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy and who you can get the best results for as well, which is super important, right, just as an understanding like their characteristic traits yeah.
Daniel:So you're only talking about what? 750 per month. So if you can get 750 people a month to fill in some sort of a form and you can tell people, we get 750 people a month filling in our online scorecard and we can only take 25 clients a month, so we select out of the 750 who fill in the form. We select who's the best 25 to work with.
Darren:Crazy. Yeah, it's like a proper one-to-one coaching. I appreciate this, daniel. It's like that scenario you just created. You know, you just literally created that. My next question people's questions on this would be how do you get those leads to it? Do you guys run ads to the campaigns? Do you run organic to it? Do you guys run ads to the campaigns? Do you run organic to it?
Daniel:Do you?
Darren:run it off the back of a podcast.
Daniel:Well, what sort of revenue would 300 people do?
Darren:So that's 1.5 mil under a mid-ticket offer, and then we have the back-end offer with that as well. Let's just say 1.5 million.
Daniel:Let's say 1.5 million just as a as a starting point round number. Let's say that you're willing to spend 10 on ads, so there's 150 000. So so if we, if we were that we want 150,000 budget divided by 9,000 leads, that's 16 pounds per lead. So if you get 16 pounds per lead, $16 per lead sorry, because you think in dollars. So $16 per lead times 9,000 leads equals $150,000. And that will generate 1.5 million.
Daniel:So the way I would approach your business is I would immediately say we're happy to spend $16 per lead anywhere that we can get $16 leads to fill in an online scorecard, which is very, very, by the way, that's very achievable. I've got a lot of clients who get a six dollar or seven dollar scorecard completed. So you just simply say we'll. You know we're going to run marketing campaigns at sixteen dollars per lead. Uh, provided they're at sixteen dollars per lead, we're happy. We're going to go right up to nine thousand leads per year and we're going to set up a situation where we can tell our clients that each year, nine 000 people fill in the scorecard. About 750 people a month fill in the scorecard, but we can only take 225 clients per month. Uh, each year 9 000 people fill in the scorecard, but we can only take 300 clients per month per year, so most people miss out. Now what we've done there is we've basically said sixteen dollars times nine thousand is 150 thousand. 150 000 generates 1.5 million and it creates the demand and supply tension that we need.
Daniel:Now what's also cool is at the end of year one, you've got 9 000 on database, but you only sold to 300. So you've actually got 8700 that you haven't sold to yet. Now what happens is you put those 8,700 on a nurture sequence and the following year, I'd say, a hundred of your 300 sales will come from last year. Now what will actually happen is you keep your foot on the gas, you keep spending 150,000, you keep generating 9, 9 000, but now the numbers get even harder as in. Like you now say look, we have thousands of people who apply for just a few hundred spots each year. Um, why do you think we should take you on as a client? And it just keeps ratcheting and ratcheting and ratcheting. Um, and then what happens is like it becomes unbearable, because people are like oh, I just need to get it. Like, how do I get access? I want, I want to be on the program. I've been trying to get access for three years now.
Darren:Um, it keeps it keeps selling out and, and the crazy thing with this is that fulfillment can be expanded, and that's the beauty of education, right? Is that? Like you?
Daniel:can just ramp up or not. You can expand your official capacity, yeah, but I would warn you against doing too much of that. Um, I have built really successful businesses by constraining supply and having ridiculous amounts of demand, and I always see people fuck this up by doubling the amount of supply and then the tension gets lost. If you've got an amazing restaurant that has 50 seats and people are queuing up out the front and then you go and say, oh, we're, we're going to quadruple the size of the restaurant and now no one's queuing up out the front and the restaurant's half empty, half the time it changes the dynamic. There's a lot of power in saying enough is enough. There's a lot of power in saying I enjoy working with 300 clients a year. I've got 9,000 people who want to work with us each year. I've got 300 spots available. Most people just miss out. It's just how it is. Now, mind you, you could go to $330, $340, $350. Why not? You could also put the prices up.
Darren:Put the price up is the natural thing, yeah.
Daniel:Put the price up is the natural thing, yeah, but I tell you, the best scenario ever is where you pick and choose the customers you actually want to work with and you become really fussy with who. You take on the Harvard Business School model as opposed to trying to scale up.
Darren:Exclusivity.
Daniel:Exclusivity school model as opposed to, you know, trying to scale up exclusivity, exclusivity, um. But it's also. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy great clients get great results and great results get more people who want to become clients. Great reputations build. You know, 10 000 people, 11 000 people, 12 000 people a year applying for 300 spots. You know it's, it's at that point.
Darren:You just live in the dream it's interesting I don't want to keep you too long, I know we're probably we're well over time at this point, but it is interesting how, um, that can just be the front end of the business too, whereas, like we, we do have like backend offers, right, that's not, that was only one offer. That's what's so interesting about this is like the numbers that you ran, I'm already like so much wheels are turning, but that's just an interesting part which is like, that's not even like the main offer, that's just a offer.
Daniel:Yeah, yeah. And what you can do is you can have other offers for the other 8,700 people. You can have other offers for the 300. You can then have other businesses. All of my businesses have effectively some form of constraint around supply and we just have a massive amount of excess demand.
Daniel:Someone left me a comment the other day where they said I don't know what you actually do. You give, give away so much value for free, but like what? You never, you never tell me what I can buy. The truth is, I don't have to tell anyone what to buy because I've got too many people who want to buy anyway. Um, it's like I'm.
Daniel:I'm now at a point where it's like unless you can figure out how to work with me, that's my first filter. Um, like, people are like oh, there's no buy button on any of your websites. Or well, there is on score app, um. But they're like oh, I went to this website and there was no buy button. It's like, honestly, we're booked out. We're booked out months in advance. Um, we've got people filling in application forms to work with us and then they can't get through. I tell you, that's just a better way to run your businesses. You want people to be lining up. You want people to be missing out. You want people who want to work with you, who can't get through. Everyone thinks that that's a nightmare.
Darren:That's actually the dream. And it all goes back to building proper leverage, going up through those different verticals where you have leverage of time, leverage of money, leverage of experience, leverage of resources, media and then eventually those assets that become software. So it's almost like working up through that value ladder and like, of course you've got to that point, but, like for anyone, this isn't pie in the sky, like you can do this, like it's very clear that this is possible for literally someone going from beginner.
Daniel:We're living in the most incredible time. There's more money on the planet than ever before, more tools, more technology, more resources, more communities like everything's there. Just got to seize it. The only thing that's not there is that the education system didn't teach us how to do it, so we have to just kind of educate ourselves and learn how to do it and everything's online every like, literally everything's online for now, you know and everything's online.
Darren:Dan, I want to say a big thank you, big thank you once again. This is amazing. I'd love to do next session in person if I can get some time in your schedule?
Daniel:Yeah, that would be great.