Kickoff Sessions

#336 James Galligan - The 22-Year-Old Playing A "Decade Game" While Everyone Chases Virality

• Darren Lee • Season 336

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Most people build a business anyone can copy. This 22-year-old built the opposite.

James Galligan runs A Players Club, a European members club he's taken city to city across the continent, on a tour he openly expects to lose six figures on this year. On purpose. Because the trust it builds in person is something no funnel, no ad, and no competitor can replicate.

We got into how he thinks: the "Rockefeller Move", the one needle-mover you make once a year that changes everything. Why he believes you don't find your differentiator, you accept it. How he used his own members as the "bridge" to scale across five European markets that each buy completely differently. The character he built at 17 to become who he wanted to be. And why he's playing a "decade game" while everyone else chases the next viral spike.

We also broke down the sales-commission tweak most teams get wrong, why brand is really about durability, and what we're building together at A Players and Aura.

If you're trying to build something that lasts, not something that peaks, start here.

JAMES GALLIGAN
A Players Club: https://www.theaplayersclub.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jamesgalligann
Youtube: @Jamesgalligann

Work with Voics: https://events.voics.co/apex

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Why Physical Beats Online Copycats

Darren Lee

Anyone can build an online business. Literally anybody. But not everybody can build a physical business. And it is so complex because you have so many moving parts. Why did you do it?

SPEAKER_02

I know I'm gonna lose a couple hundred thousand euros this year on these tours, but I also know that long term it's gonna be the beneficial player for the company.

Darren Lee

You're thinking third, fourth, fifth order consequence ahead. You know, honesty man, like I know people in their 40s and 50s who are successful entrepreneurs don't do that.

SPEAKER_02

I asked myself what do I do better than anybody else? The answer to that question was I'm really good at creating experience. So it's my genius zone was the event. And I was like, okay, well, people can't really compete with you or what you're best at because that's just your edge. I don't think you find your unique differentiator, I think you accept your unique differentiator. I think people spend too much time searching for what makes me different versus actually accepting I know what makes me different, and they don't think that that advantage is actually their advantage.

Darren Lee

If you're gonna give people three pieces of advice to build a magnetic brand like A-Players, what would you advise? The first thing I would say. One thing that I find like most impressive about yourself is anyone can build an online business, like literally anybody, but not everybody can build a physical business, an in-real life business, and it is so complex because you have so many moving parts and you have people and you have like equipment and everything.

SPEAKER_02

Why did you do it? I wanted to build an undifferentiated commodity, is a quote that I followed from Peter Thiel in regards to I have the online business, the online business is how my money's made. The physical business doesn't make my money, but it makes sure that I'm different than anybody else in the space. And I know that anybody can replicate any funnel or piece of information that I put out there, but they can't replicate an experience or the people that we can pull or the locations that we can get, and I think that that layer of trust, and on top of that, the online side of things it just creates this ridiculous amount of trust that allows me to do the online thing longer. And so we just look at it like it enables me to play the long game because the trust built from what we do in person is just so big.

Darren Lee

What I like to say is like whether you love me or hate me, when you see me in person, you can form an opinion of me. Whereas online, like you can literally be anyone in the wrong way. Does that make sense? When you were deciding to do this European tour, like this annual huge tour, what was going through your head?

SPEAKER_02

There was a philosophy that a mentor of mine gave to me, and all of my mentors, I only paid one mentor in the online world, it was actually Dan Martell, because I bought it because I was hiring my executive assistant. When I was hiring my executive assistant, Dan Martell in his book had a section on his EA. So I wanted to buy the course to be able to duplicate some of his SPs for my EA. That's literally it. The rest of my mentors have always been like 40 or 30 in the software world or doing 10-15 million a year with web development agencies in a way that we don't even sell. So it's always different perspectives. And um I called one of them one day and I said, Look, the contracts that you guys pull and the tangibility to your business is something that I crave. And he said himself and his partner had this philosophy called the Rockefeller Move, and that what the Rockefeller move was is simply uh a mindset that once a year you do something to your business that changes everything, or you build this there should always be one massive needle mover because you can always grow, but the difficulty to scale to the big, big numbers does require a certain move, and I just crafted my move. I said, What's one way that would make me irrefusable to trust it's the online events? I asked myself, what do I do better than anybody else? That the answer to that question was I'm really good at creating experience from when I was younger organizing buses to festivals when I was 16 to now, it's the same thing. I was doing that as well, man. It's the same thing, it's the same pressure, but apply at a different scale, and obviously your tolerance goes, it's the same thing. That's crazy. So it's my genius zone was the events, and I was like, Okay, well, people can't really compete with you with what you're best at because that's just your edge. You're 22 now, 22, yeah.

Early Lessons From Running Experiences

Darren Lee

So can bring me back to some of those moments when you're younger, like what were the the morning, like those kind of small instances for you? Because for me, like I ran mystery tours. I used to yeah, man, I would hire a bus in Cork, and we'd bring someone to a like a mystery location. Now, everyone just gets pissed in the bus, and we'd end up in Kerry, which is already a mystery. But like they those were the things I was doing like when I was literally in my teens.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I was actually for my mother and father. My grandfather is a pioneer, so he never drank in his life. My dad barely ever drank, so I didn't drink till I was like 18, or like maybe slightly before 18, like maybe 17. So from like 15, 16, everyone was else was drinking, and so it was just natural that I was the one who wasn't drinking to where I'll organised the bus or the DJ or the house party, etc., to make sure that everybody um had a good time, and when everyone was done, I was still like actually in in shape to be able to clean up or do the things. So it happened very naturally, and then when A Player started like two years ago, it was just simple, it was just dinners. Now people always ask me what was that master plan, and I feel like anybody who's ever done something new, it was never too strategically planned. There's a there's an aspect of luck in that along the way, or things came together very naturally, and that's what happened with us from back in the day to where we are now.

Darren Lee

My first mastermind was in my kitchen. In my kitchen, man. I work as a mastermind in my kitchen, and we hit with 15-20 people there. You sell tickets or is it free? Yeah, it was 2k. What? Yeah, it was two days. That's impressive. And this is where you like you start things, and I did it for my oh, I did it, and I was like, okay, this is one, I enjoy the format, I'm good at it, and I enjoy it, and people get a ton of value from it. And um, I think that was the same me looking out on the outset into your business, like okay, you guys obviously have like a repeatable format that you really enjoy, but dude, there's a big difference between running a mastermind and running a tour and the complexities. I actually would love to find out more about like how is it actually being city to city, like that experience, because so many things can go wrong to the point that it can really hurt your fucking brand.

The European Tour As A Moat

SPEAKER_02

There is a couple of reasons to why I did the tour that are like really deep business five-year plan reasons. One of them was one of our unique moats is that we're actually a European members' club, and so like we're not American, we don't really deal with much in the UAE, but like we're very heavily European based. And I said that's a very, very unique moat because in the US, with software companies or in businesses in general, when they want to scale in towards Europe, they find it very difficult because the culture from the UK to Denmark, the Netherlands to Sweden to Spain, it's different in every country. And my philosophy was if I can use the people, like from my own self, I was like, How can I scale in across Europe? With with just me and my team. I said that wasn't the answer. The answer is how can I utilize my members from these other countries who already trust me to be the face and the language and the culture bridge for me and my company to be able to go into their cities and establish a base. So my plan is this year we're going to be able to say, Yeah, last year we had an event in Amsterdam, we had 50 to 100 people, 150 people. Yeah, we did it in Stockholm, we did it here, here, here. So when we go back to expanding to these countries or have uh whether it's physical locations or ambassadors in that country, so we can start monetizing that country in the future, we already have trust there because they've seen that we've been there. They've seen that we've got 50 people in faces that they know and trust into them locations. So there was a huge I know this is going to be extremely difficult because many companies, even if they have hundreds of millions, don't want to venture into Europe because how difficult it is to bridge culture gaps. So we utilized um our advantage, which was our members already existing there, and we got into these countries. Now, the difficulty of it though is each culture acts so different. Like the way the Danish market buys versus the Swedish market is so so crazy different. Wild. Like in Stockholm, they have the Red Bull basement, they're very entrepreneurial. You have the lovables, the Spotifies, everything that came out of Sweden. In Denmark, the way that they get paid to go to school, the money in their account when they're 18 from the 18 years that they've been in school, so they come out with like a basically a limity fund. And so like their drive to try new things or to take risks is so low because they're they're so comfortable that they don't didn't they don't need to do anything. And in the UK, obviously, there's good parts and bad parts, so the UK is pretty easiest for us to sell to because they're ambitious, they speak English fluently, and then same with Netherlands in these countries. Netherlands is a very ambitious country. A lot of entrepreneurs from Netherlands and a small population, and um, you know, we we sold very well there. So it was just for me to understand these markets had to spend twice as much to get the same amount of people. We have to speak ads in their language, versus countries who don't have to speak ads in their language. How do you do that? We get we get so we have our members who already trusted us that we brought in for a fraction of the price two years ago, who we built relationships with who record ads as a players club in their language. They're they're a bridge, they're a bridge into these countries, they're a bridge as we go over to the US. We signed the partnership with WAP recently. Like, to me, it's like how can I bridge a European membership into the US? Well, what's the most reputable US identifier for our niche? It's it's WAP. And so I always look at things in regards to bridges, whether it with any problem that you're solving, what is the bridge to get over there?

Darren Lee

It's crazy because like a lot of people look at it at the micro stage, like one of the massive advantages to masterminds is the people, right? 100% like you go there, you work with people. I even spoke to Marius today, and I was like, oh man, like you could be a key partner for our clients, you know. Marius, like a mutual friend of ours now, but thanks to you. But you're thinking like third, fourth, fifth order consequence ahead, yeah. Which you know, honestly, man, like I know people in their 40s and 50s who are successful entrepreneurs don't do that. Would you say that that came from your external views outside of the info coaching space?

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Darren Lee

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Long Game Trust And Differentiation

SPEAKER_02

It's because one of my mentors just edited a software company for about 50 million, which is a lot of money. Um and the with the way they build philosophies, they have the way they need to build long term to be able to survive. There's definitely aspects I've taken from that. Secondly, it probably would be I don't really have an attachment to physical um like materialistic items. And so with that lack of attachment, just means that I can just not care about needing the money right now, and so therefore I'm okay about impact. And I think when you're a very experienced-led person, and since you've ran master wise in your kitchen from a young age, you can probably say you're an experienced-led person. That means you care about the experience, and you know a good experience actually does take time, and to create real marketplace trust, it takes time. And I had on the screen there, yes, they had the law of third-party association in regards to the more people that you're seeing with physically who have different languages, cultures, and looks means the more people that can say this this is I'm trusted by this group, and so that was just the whole philosophy of this tour is like I know I'm gonna lose a couple hundred thousand euros this year on these tours, but I also know that long term it's gonna be the beneficial player for the company.

Darren Lee

But the equity that you're building is basically uh is basically again, it's you can't repeat it, it's not repeatable. So one of the one your members asked yesterday about like what's the unique differentiator that you guys are doing. I think I I'd love to get your take on that because I think you're the only person that didn't answer it. What I said in that regard was like find what you enjoy, your zony genius, and literally go balls deep on it. Now, it may not be like a a specific skill, right? So for us, like we run events too, but the skill could be it could be an interest. Like for me, like it's like dogs, right? People recognize it because they know that's a big part of like the facet of my life, the characters of my life. I'd love to find out from your perspective, like how you found your unique differentiator. Like, how do you think about that?

SPEAKER_02

Because it's very unique. I don't think you find your unique differentiator, I think you accept your unique differentiator. I think people spend too much time searching for what makes me different versus actually accepting I know what makes me different. They're in turn, they internally know this unique bit about me is actually a bit weird or unique, or I have an advantage here, and they don't think that that advantage is actually their advantage. They're like, how can I monetize this? Yeah, how does it actually make sense in terms of my brand? And nothing makes sense until it's in hindsight. And if you asked, there's a lot of people with unique brands, like let's say they're hermosis or martels, but there's also unique brands that people watch that they weren't actually necessarily plan like the blue shirt or the nose shirt, like it would actually happen very naturally, then it became their identity after. So I wasn't over obsessed with finding it, I'd over accept with just accepting who you truly are and actually showing those unique sides of what you think is interesting from your perspective as

Escaping A Small Mindset In Ireland

SPEAKER_02

well.

Darren Lee

I'd love to chat about man, uh mainly your just like perspective and mindset because you're an Irish guy. Yeah. And so something that we've never ever communicated together about was like, oh, like how how tough it is in Ireland and there's negative mindset and so on and so forth. And you spend a lot more time in Ireland than I do, right? Like I've barely spent any time in Ireland for the past five years. How come that just never that never surrounded you? You know, because a lot of guys out there are yesterday. To be fair, they're much further on, but they would have had that issue, and a lot of guys that look up to you now have that issue. And now I don't think that's an issue myself personally, purely because like I'm like half Irish, my dad was like English, and I spent a lot of time out of Ireland, you know, but I feel like for you, like you're born and bred Irish.

SPEAKER_02

I'm a born and bred Irishman. Like yeah, we went to the Irish bar yesterday after the like you can just tell we're very Irish with the way like we drink or our accents, or there's so many factors that make us very Irish. I got very lucky with parents who never had any imposed beliefs on me. That's my one really unique advantage towards. Actually, very similar to Kanye. The the reason he flips on like Kim and these people in the in the media was because they were like you can't do this, Kanye. But his parents never for 18 years never ever said that to him once. So like he doesn't believe that. He doesn't believe it's not true, not possible. My parents are always the word can't wasn't allowed in our household, impossible wasn't allowed. And I think for people who have that, if knowing there is the alternate reality where your parents maybe would have raised you and said the other things, and if that reality was true, then how would you act? Probably a good question to ask yourself.

Darren Lee

I guess like all of our actions are just led by the preconceived notions that we tell ourselves or indoctrinating in us, like school, religion, beliefs, everything like it that comes from top down.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

Darren Lee

How come just double tap on this? Like, how come you didn't have like friend groups that actually particularly held you back? But I think a lot a lot of young guys listening to this now will really want to like understand like deeply how can they do that?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. I believe that instead of trying to figure the problem out for themselves, maybe they should create a character that they look up to alongside because I actually had this character, you know, the way David Goggins had Goggins, when I was like 17 or 18, I had like Galley was my name at home at football. I'm Galligan, so Galley. And Galley was this person who woke up at six o'clock every day, didn't care what people thought, didn't hang around people who did drugs, drink, uh educated himself on XYZ thing. So I had this character to where when I woke up at six o'clock, it was like, do I want to be James today and I'm in the fucking bed, or do I want to become Galley? And so it was like, instead of me competing against my internal self, I was like, okay, I have something external to kind of hold on to a little bit. And so that was the real key difference for me was that I never really felt too much guilt on myself, and I just kind of painted this character of who I really wanted to become. Um I I find it very difficult to speak on this topic because I find it very difficult to relate to the people who didn't have parents who said like you can go get it. I find it very hard to st I I can't really switch into that mindset of like what does it feel like to feel like everything's not possible or like can't go and do this. Because when people ask me certain questions on Instagram DMs, in the back of my head I'm like, I don't even know how to answer this question. It's like I'm it's come from such a blessed position of parents being like you can do whatever you want. Not that we had like financial benefit at all. Like I was I paid for most of my stuff since I was the age of 16 from just my normal jobs. Um but I don't um I'd like to hear your perspective as well.

Darren Lee

I I just think to add like so I have like a bit of a different upbringing, like I spoke to you about it in the past, but it doesn't change the fact that me and you took action. Yeah, do you get me? So I spoke yesterday about the banker receipts, and I really want to speak about this more, which is it's like whatever you've done in your life, no matter how insignificant it might be, you use that as a proxy for doing the next thing. You know, so for me it was athletics, and I was a good hundred meter runner, and then it was rugby, and then I got really badly injured, and then it was bodybuilding, yeah, and then I was working a nine to five, but being actually really good at it, like a career, a proper like graduate career, and thinking fucking hell. I did all those stuff and I hated I hated a lot of it, I hated athletics, I hated a nine to five, but I could do it, and because I can do that, this new thing I can go back to, and you don't need to be great at things. I think that's just what I'm trying to really get across. People is just like it's the micro actions, you know. And uh, I was the same as you, man, like up at six o'clock in the morning in the gym before I went into college in Cork, and everyone thought I was a fucking loser. Like, like funnily enough, dude, I would wake up in a college house, and as I'd wake up, the guys would still be smoking weed in the house, and they'd be like, Where are you going? I'm like, going to the gym. Yeah, and I would walk out in the lashing rain, November, December, January, and uh, you're doing it for yourself, man. You're not doing it for anybody else, you know.

SPEAKER_02

That's what makes you very different, and there's a section in Rockefeller's, I think it's 38 letters, where he says that you need to be the best regardless of what agency you're in, and not agency in regards to agency in regards to just job or any sort of asset you attempt to be the best at. And you say, but like whether you're working in an oil counter, so a petrol station, should be obsessed with the customer experience, understanding the sheets. You need to become like let's say you're working in a shop right now at home. If you're not grasping every opportunity internal in that store, you will never be able to go and do it in the business. So any experience I led or any company that I was in, I was always curious to know, like, how does the money behind this work? Or how is this experience created? What's the margin here? Why does the coke and the petrol station make more money? Oh, it's so the real margins in the coffee, or everything else is a distraction. So it's like the curiosity doesn't only begin when you're in a certain vehicle, it needs to begin right now, whether that's in football or in work or whatever sort of industry that they're in.

Darren Lee

Like characters, characters trait.

SPEAKER_02

Does it like I think Chris said yesterday that the business is just the asset, but it is the game of your own self. Yeah, and um I think too many guys are obsessed with finding the the thing before the character is developed, where it's very easy to find the character and copy paste it into whatever sort of vehicle that you're in.

Darren Lee

Honestly, man, when you start getting a positive feedback loop about anything, yeah, you start to enjoy it. Let me give you a random example. Everyone hates taxes, everyone, and everyone's quite scared about it because they want to fuck it up, right? Rightly so. I remember when I started my business properly, I properly started making money. Like I said, 2021. I was like, oh damn, like taxes is a thing. And I set aside like a month or two to like really, really learn it to the point that I was like, this is fucking pretty interesting. And now like I have companies everywhere and all this kind of stuff, and like me and my team are talking, like I have like I actually have an opinion about it. I'm like, yeah, and like there's this and this and this. And you grow to like things that you become good at.

SPEAKER_02

It's very true, you know.

Darren Lee

And I'm like, and I used to hate that shit, and now I'm like, oh, that's quite interesting. And like I could have like actual like dialogues around these very nerdy things. And what I would say as well is in terms of and I want to ask you what brand next, I think it's a huge part of this my opinion is that people love people who are obsessed. Yeah, so like the fact that you're so like in the weeds with these experiences makes me really attracted towards you as a business owner because I'm just like this dude just loves it. Yeah. And it's almost like to the point where like he loves it and you don't need to explain it. Yeah. That's like the nice part. It's just like who gives a fuck? You know, you like pens? Go ahead, bro. Like talking about pens on YouTube.

SPEAKER_02

I do I do like fully agree 100%. It's it's it is the most difficult step to make in the beginning. That um but one one of my measurements back in the day was also actually I think it was a Luke Bellmar thing of small wins. Which is a challenge for me how many small wins can I stack? Because momentum is such a key aspect of business. And you gotta realize that with the way the algorithm and the work, the world works, luck is simply just more exposure to chance. And the more small wins that you can stack in the momentum that you can build, the odds are it's probably gonna fall in your favour.

Darren Lee

I'd

Regrets Risk Tolerance And Speed

Darren Lee

love to find out like what were some of the ha the biggest like mistakes and screw-ups you've had with the business, even even exterior.

SPEAKER_02

Me and Colum had this conversation before, my CEO, and it's a very a mature business mind would say I have no mis I have no regrets because it all made me who I am, etc. The only regrets I do really, really have is not spending not getting aggressive earlier, so not turning on the ads earlier. Like it's just it's it's why didn't I do things a bit earlier and why didn't I not have the belief in myself to do it a bit faster? If I was to go back in time, I just move at a bigger speed. Um when it comes to actual risk or losses, what people don't understand about physical events, what probably scares them the most, it's probably two things that scare them. Number one is will people find out who I truly am? And if you're not who you truly are online, it's a very scary thing, so that's why most business guys I don't think actually run them. Because they're like, Man, they're gonna find out my actual who I am. So it's actually way less competition because it's not even just the fact that it's hard to run, people don't want to show their true acumen, or if they're caught on the hop, can they actually solve the problem that they're talking about? Do they care about it enough? And secondly, it's the risk tolerance. So, for example, for this event, you've only spent nearly six figures before anyone like pays you, and so it's like, do you have the risk tolerance to do these things? And often the not and and understanding that it might not pay off financially, but brand wise, it's a huge payoff if people show up.

Darren Lee

I think you make those things work as well though.

SPEAKER_02

It's so funny, when you're in the gym and you say I have six more reps to go, the fifth one starts getting a bit difficult, or the fourth, or if you say I have eight more to go, it's more then it then the sixth starts to get difficult, not the fourth. And so it's always whatever goal you set yourself, you start to feel tight about like 80% towards the goal, because that's the limit that you set within your brain. It's such it's a very interesting feature.

Darren Lee

That happened to me the f when we were trying to make like 100k a month for the first time. Yeah, we're making like 50, 50 to like 80, 80 to 70, and I was just like, oh, like I just mystical thing, and then you like blow past it, and then you're like, oh wait, that was just arbitrary in the first place. Yeah, you know, it's same like with seats at an venue, you know. Yeah, like we did 50 people for a mastermind in February, 5k seat, and it's like that's that's great pricing, honestly. Well, and like it's you know, running a sales call to a mastermind is like it's tall, it's it's it's just like a it's like a business, it's like a business in itself, bro. So what I'm trying to say is like you don't know how to do it, you just do it, and then you're like, oh, like you could do it you do it this way effectively, you know.

SPEAKER_02

There's a lot of studies on how the most innovation comes from when you have to be resourceful. Yeah, and the most beautiful part about starting entrepreneurship is how creative you have to get to make it work. Um and sometimes we spoke about this yesterday. You kind of wish you were a bit in a more difficult situation because you know probably you would get aggressive towards a certain thing, or you would try to put the money here, or get resourceful and higher here, and make this action. And sometimes when everything's going pretty decent, it's very difficult to like use that same resourcefulness mindset to make things work.

Darren Lee

The biggest

Scaling Sales Teams With Incentives

Darren Lee

issues with sales reps. So I always talk about this. When I started, like I knew all the leads, I was on top of them, we were recycling, we were on top of them. Then you grow and you bring in reps, and they're like, Where's my leads? And then you grow more, and then they have so many leads that they take yourself for granted, and then they just expect it. And it's like, bitch, when I was doing this on my own, I was lucky to get seven a month, yeah. And now you're getting like seven an hour and you're pissed off, yeah. And I think it's about passing that knowledge on to other people, which is why scaling is really, really hard.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. On the sales team thing, um, I think it's Bezos who has that quote where it's like, show me your incentives and I'll show you your business or whatever it is. And one thing that's gets kind of off track because it's like a sales um piece of value that I learned only learned recently. You probably know this already, but if you give your sales reps the same commission for a new lead as you do someone who's been longer than six months in your CRM, you're treating you're treating follow-up very wrong. In regards to if they're not incentivized to go back and hustle and get an extra 5% for a deal that was six months plus ago, why would they do it? Of course, they're gonna sit under ass and wait. And so what we've actually implemented recently was obviously typical setup is five percent for setter, ten percent for closer. Anyone in my CRM for us over three months, I raise it to 10% for the setter and 15% for closer. And people might look at that as like 25%, that's crazy of your of your of your revenue. To me, it's like that's unchecked unchecked or uncashed. Unrealised uncash, unrealised cash, and so it's better than nothing.

Darren Lee

Dude, I always talk about this, which is like you know, you got you can either either have 100% of zero, or as you say, like 85% or 80% or 75% of 100k.

SPEAKER_02

People are so scared of margin for some reason.

Darren Lee

It's so it's so weird, man. Yeah, it's so weird. I'll tell you a story about uh I know we're off a little bit off topic, but this is really, really helpful just to give some context. So Sam Ovins had a consultant.com. Um, his kind of whole goal was mind share, market share. Yeah. I met the company that he did affiliates with, he did affiliate network as well, uh, last week in in Budapest, and they like blew him up, like blew him up. And his goal was market share. Uh they did 36 million and they did 1% profit. And he was like, Who cares? Let's go again, and then they cleaned up the profit the next year. He was willing to go that deep into the hole because he knew what his long-term goal was, and then he launched school. And guess what? All the guys that were in uh quantum became investors, yeah. You know, people like Jordan Platton, who's speaking to your next one, and I know Jordan very well, they all became investors in school, so it's like think in fucking multi-decades, bro. Now I'm not advising you do that, but David Dre told me this in Bali, and I was like, like that is like surely there's a lot to learn from that example, you know. And he said he was perfect at the end of it, man. He didn't die.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, the philosophy that I kind of use there is like a bulk and cut analogy of like I'd rather lose some margin and understand how I can make it work and then optimize for efficiency as in the cut after I bulk. Yeah. Because, like, for example, when we're scaling, 100% we're gonna overhire, 100% we're gonna overspend on advertising, but the goal then is to cut and it and make it efficient for okay, now let's look at our numbers after we realise that how we can make it work, we optimize it.

Darren Lee

That's where the lessons come, man. The lessons don't come from wondering what you'll do at that point. Yeah, I wonder what I'll do there. So I want to finish up with some questions around brand.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

Darren Lee

So

Three Rules For A Magnetic Brand

Darren Lee

if you're to give people three-piece advice to build a magnetic brand like A-plers, what would you advise?

SPEAKER_02

The first thing I would say is I think it's super important to have an identity. With the Tony Robbins test I spoke about in a reel recently, our content team has a grand guideline they need to stay within because one of our goals is I want Tony Robbins to invest over 10 million in our company in the next five to ten years. And for us to be able to do that, we need to have a certain level of I guess is it H or a certain level of you can't go outside these lines or talk about certain things or be controversial in this way, this way, because this wouldn't be attractive to someone like Tony Robbins. So we have a very clear identity of our brand is very, I guess, PG to an extent. There's not a lot of like models on our page with not much clothes on because it's I don't think it would attract someone like a Tony Robbins because you wouldn't respect the business acumen of that. And so, like, we have our identity of we're not gonna shape left or shape right, we're gonna use this type of font, we'll use it over and over again so people know when we post an A player's picture after an event with that certain filter on it, we're like, that's an A player's picture. I mean, I know that's from an A player's event. Oh, that he must have been on an A player's event, whether our name's there or not. So we build a very, very clear identity with what we have. Secondly, I'd say association is super key, as I spoke about before. The more pictures, masterminds, in-person things, if your profile is just you, your company, and your your own logos, it's gonna be very difficult to build that trust. Whereas a simple thing of having more pictures with more people that are also trusted and bridging the gaps of their audience and having more logos on your website of brands that trust you, it just satisfies a customer's question of are you real or are you not real a third one I think brand is experience, and I spoke about this in my events talk yesterday, and it's the fact that if you're ever gonna go into a premium restaurant, they're not gonna ask you to scan a QR code and look at the menu. And so I think when someone is talking with you in real life or growing through your funnel, you want them to have a certain experience that reminds you of. I remember when I actually spoke with Darren and his team because it felt this way and it was unique in this sense. I think if you want to build a brand, there needs to be something that people can memory trigger back to the moment of when I went through this process or like this picture or talk to this person, this is the feeling I got from it.

Darren Lee

And just to double tap on that, and you know, I'm very grateful for the partnership we have with A-Players and Aura. Like one of your members yesterday, they decided they wanted to work with Aura, and then they said, Honest here, man, because I saw you, because I talked to you, because I realized that you're going to be committed to us, is the reason why we're doing it. Yeah, there's many other bigger companies and so on, and I think that's a huge thing, which is about doing the unscalable to scale. It's just it's just like being tactile, like you can fucking feel me, you can touch me, and I think that's just so lost with like AI and stuff. That's kind of like obvious, but it's obvious, but then people don't do anything about it. So you guys have done the most about it, which is creating this in-person experience, having this insane villa which has a nice like taste and feel. Yes. But it's like you may know that, but you're still not doing it.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, people don't see the behind the scenes of like when we went to look at villas, there were so many nice modern villas. Like so many nice modern villas. But I was like, our brand has kind of these new faces but old souls type feeling to it, to where these guys are so young, but the intelligence to go and make the money that they make is is crazy. And so I was like, man, a modern villa would not suit the thing that we're trying to build, we're trying to last a very, very long time. This house has been here for I don't know 100, 200, 300 years. Probably, I I assume it's it's pretty old, and so it's like this is this is durability, and I think brand is durability. People optimise a lot of the time for virality or revenue, uh, whereas true brands optimise for being in the game as long as possible, and this house has been standing longer than the other ones, so it's like this represents that.

Training Your Audience For Durability

Darren Lee

I think there's something I love to get your opinion on is the only industry in the in the entire world that does monthly revenue is the info and coaching industry. Yeah, like it's bananas, like there's there's no other industry in the entire world, yeah. And why is that? Because guys are coming in, they're just gonna run up a bunch of ads, rent a Euris, and then shut off the funnel when they get all the chargebacks. What's your opinion on that just in general? Because like that that that encourages the short-sightedness, short-sightedness. Whereas what you're doing, what we're doing, like we've had Volks for six years, you know, like it's a fucking long time. Yeah. So I just would love to get your perspective on that. How you reframe even your team who are all super committed, they're here super early, setting up everything. Um, like, how do you put that into action? Is my question, you know?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, we uh have a daily value, which I've spoken about, which is they didn't need to listen to founders' podcast with David Senra, just so they can understand the core ways that real success actually looks like their success, your team's success, your client's success is very much so aligned with what they've seen online, which is faster and unrealistic to an extent. So my team is very much realigned to true success. If you look at how Steve Jobs with his company or the founder of Hyundai, when he was eating tree bark on a rice farm before he left his his town to go and uh and build a company, you hear all these stories about the difficulties of building something that actually impacts the world in a true way, not makes money but impacts the world. The things that you have to go to to actually impact the world and become credible enough or understand enough, it takes a long time. So my team are very, very aligned with that. And I think that the beauty of the online world is we move at such a fast speed compared to other industries. So the reason I kind of like the monthly revenue thing is because we make decisions so much faster than the corporate companies. That I think how the world will be optimized in the future is gonna be for speed, and I think if anybody can do it, it's our industry. So I think it's really good for us to over the next couple of years. If I would recommend any info or sales or agency guy, it's to expand your mindset into different businesses and start seeing new opportunities because your same skill set and a different vehicle in the next five-10 years time is gonna make so much money, like wealth, not not richness, but like wealth. But Christian excites me.

Darren Lee

Christian said that as well to finish up on he was like before you pick one business and stick at it for 30 years, you see it on someone's LinkedIn, but now you have the mobility to lean into like what is working with the skills that you have, you know. And I can just say like building aura and doing paid for Aura and doing all the content, all the marketing was a hundred times easier than Voix, yeah, because it's a different industry, yeah. Like obviously it's the same ICP, but it's it's fundamentally a different product, yeah, so it's way more stable. And what I mean by that is like team don't churn, clients don't churn. Uh not necessarily clients don't churn, but it's way more predictable, sorry, when they're when they're coming in. Whereas info spaces, it's very emotional and not logical. There is like very little logic in info, you know.

SPEAKER_02

I think you can really you choose how to train your audience. So with our brand, we actually stopped doing daily reels because I believe that with my brand the way I want to build it, I want it to be something that lasts very long, not peaks. And what I've seen with the online world and with content is a lot of people peak, they have this spike, and then it goes very, very slowly just in a downward trajectory and you're fighting to get back up at all times. I'd rather just go like this. And it's like if I post one, two, three reads a week that are so packed with value and intentional, I'd rather people know that when I post, it's I've taken time out of my day to actually give them something impactful versus I'm doing it to optimise for my growth. So we kind of have different philosophies around that, and I believe that if the only place to go watch me to find out more information is actually on YouTube where there's really, really long formats of videos, they're now trained to understand me in a different way. So I really believe you can train your company, you can train your marketing, you can train your branding. And with our team, we have sound bites. Sound bites is something that we want to say that are these like one-sentence trigger words. I think it's used a lot in the NFL as well to like trigger teams. Um, but like we have it's a decade game. It's like a trigger that we say over and over and over again to our team, so they know it's decade game, decade game, decade game. So why would they get emotional about a short-term loss? So I think it's really important to instill some new beliefs into your team and into your clientele from the second they they come to work with you or or or are aware of you.

Final Thanks And Closing

Darren Lee

Dude, I want to say a massive thank you.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

Darren Lee

You're a legend. I really appreciate everything. I appreciate everything you've done for me as well, man. Sure. And uh I'm looking forward to working together for many years.

SPEAKER_02

Thank you for backing us from day one. Appreciate it, bro.

Darren Lee

Thank you, bro. Thank you so much.