How YOU Can Turn $100 Into $100k Per Month! - Daniel Priestley

Daniel Priestley is an award-winning serial entrepreneur and best-selling author who’s behind Dent Global and ScoreApp. This guy knows a thing or two about building and selling successful businesses, having started his first company at 21 and made over $10 million in the space of 3 years.

We get into the nitty-gritty of what it takes to start and scale a business, the real deal on personal branding, and how to cut through the noise in an AI-driven world. Daniel gives his take on whether newbies should buy an existing business or start from scratch, the secrets to hiring the right team, and why giving equity can be a game-changer. Plus, he shares his thoughts on fixing the education system and the EXACT FORMULA you need to make it as a multi-millionaire entrepreneur.

This episode is packed with straight-up, actionable advice to get you fired up and ready to take your business to the next level.

Timestamps
0:00 - Intro
2:54 - Who is Daniel Priestley?
4:27 - Did you know what you were doing with your first business?
7:01 - Personal Branding - Obama used Social Media to become President
12:59 - Being an Influencer and being a Key Person of Influence
21:11 -Why You Should Have A Personal Brand
28:31 - AI will Make the World Way Noisier
30:42 - Buying or Starting a Business - Daniel's Preference for Newbies?
34:21 - Scorecard
40:20 - Do You Have a Consultancy/Done For You Business?
42:12 - Hiring the Right Staff - What is Matt doing wrong?
54:26 - How often do you Incentivise with Equity?
56:22 - Existing Investor Base or DIY?
58:46 - The Education System, How it Could be Better Fixed, Top Key Skills & Topics to Learn
01:06:22 - Conclusion

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Who Is Matt Haycox? - Click for BADASS Trailer

As an entrepreneur, investor, funding expert and mentor who has been building and growing businesses for both myself and my clients for more than 20 years, my fundamental principles are suitable for all industries and businesses of all stages and size.

I’m constantly involved in funding and advising multiple business ventures and successful entrepreneurs.

My goal is to help YOU achieve YOUR financial success! I know how to spot and nurture great business opportunities and as someone who has ‘been there and got the t-shirt’ many times, overall strategies and advice are honest, tangible and grounded in reality.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

I've been an entrepreneur for about 22 years. I started my first company at 21. It went from zero to a million in its first year and then it went to 10 million in year three.

Speaker 2: 0:09

Your book, and particularly your methodology, came out long before the words personal branding even really existed In 2008, we've got Obama everywhere.

Speaker 1: 0:16

His engagement on social media was the thing that gave him an edge and won him the election. People look at branding and influencers as that key person or influencer They've built up hundreds of thousands of followers just by being good looking on Instagram, but it doesn't translate into much.

Speaker 2: 0:30

One of the things I hear you say a key person of influence shouldn't be running their business.

Speaker 1: 0:34

Ryan Reynolds has started as a Hollywood actor with a huge profile and he's become a key person of influence. He's on track to be a billionaire.

Speaker 2: 0:48

We're talking about, about being a business person who leads with their personal brand. The hardest thing in business is demand. How does someone create that demand? It's Well, hey, matt Haycox, here with a quick interruption Just to say I hope you're liking the show, but please, please, like, subscribe or comment. That's how we can bring you better guests. That's how we can make the show better each week. So, please, please. That's all I ever ask of you. We never charge, we never ask anything else. Just please, give us a few moments of your time. Guys, welcome to another episode of Stripping Off with Matt Haycox. And today we've got a guest I've been looking forward to for a long time. We've got author, entrepreneur, and-around great guy, daniel priestly in the studio. Thanks for being here, dan. Thanks for having me on I.

Speaker 2: 1:29

Um, actually I was telling you before we started, I've been very much looking forward to this and um, there's, I'd say you're probably both very different, but there's two people I can listen to for hours on end, which is you, and I know it's probably well, not quite as beautiful as celine, but I know it's pretty cliched in this space as well. But I love listening to alex hormose as well, I think, and you kind of similar but different insofar as um it's. You know, very, very direct, simple, easy to understand stuff. Obviously, you know the americans are always different. I was about to say the brits, but you're not. You're not, uh, I think you're as british, uh. But you know, the Americans always have their Americanisms, don't they? But I do find Alex very chilled and you can listen to for hours on end, whereas Grant Cardone love Grant as well, but very much aggressive and in your face and you've got to take him in small doses. But I just find Alex so clever and simple at breaking stuff down and you know, I think the same of you as well.

Speaker 1: 2:29

So of down, and you know, I think the same of you as well. So very cool my complimentary introduction. I think if, um, if you've been in business a while and you've been like on the front line of bootstrapping businesses and growing businesses and all that sort of stuff, you tend to notice the same sort of things that work and don't work. So you can get two guys like myself and alex on the opposite sides of the world noticing exactly the same stuff. It it's universally true, it's you know, it's the way humans behave everywhere. So I think you know, in some cases he's just noticed the same stuff, I've noticed the same stuff and yeah.

Speaker 2: 2:54

And I guess, for the people who don't know, and just to just to set the scene a bit, I mean, you know who are you, where did you come from and I guess, how did you get so clever? Learn what you've learned to be able to you know, break down and understand all these concepts that business owners need to know.

Speaker 1: 3:14

I've been an entrepreneur for about 22 years. I started my first company at 21. And that was in Australia and it was a very fast growth company. So it went from zero to a million in its first year and then it went to 10 million in year three, you know. So we went Brisbane, sydney, melbourne and we kind of expanded really quickly and I ended up expanding into the UK and launching a London office in like 17 years ago. But since then I've also done a series of acquisitions, so I've bought a bunch of businesses, I've sold some businesses, I've done several startups, so I've launched technology companies. Recently I've got two software businesses. I currently run a group of eight companies.

Speaker 1: 3:57

And my way of processing my journey is writing. I really kind of like enjoy slowing my mind down and kind of either blogging or, you know, tweeting sometimes or just writing articles. And about 10 years ago I started writing books and I've written six books on entrepreneurship. So it's kind of like been my way of processing my entrepreneurial journey. So I guess that's it Lots of businesses buying, selling, starting and scaling and writing. So going back to's it Lots of businesses buying and selling, starting and scaling, and writing.

Speaker 2: 4:27

So, going back to that first business you set up, which I think you said was a million, then three, million ten million in terms of turnover. I mean, did you know what you were doing back then?

Speaker 1: 4:37

I did a bit. I had worked for two years for this guy called John and I was just super lucky that I was employee number three for john and he had no business name, no bank account, no offices, any of that sort of stuff. So we rock up at his house, um, and we're starting a business, and he's got this big thing out on the table, uh, which is the yearly planner, and we're basically putting our first campaigns in and we're going to try and do this by this date and this is what we're going to do, literally this is what we'll do on Wednesday and this is what we'll do the following Thursday, and kind of map out the whole year. And that business took off. So I went, that business went zero to six million in two years and we went from no employees to 60 employees in about two years.

Speaker 1: 5:22

So it's it's pretty like it's a little bit monkey see monkey do, and it was the ability to kind of go through a startup journey without risking anything myself and to have that experience of being under a mentor's wing every single day. I mean, we were working crazy hours, you know, 60 hours a week, being a direct report to an entrepreneur, and then that kind of gave me. You know what I needed to know. Two years in I had a conversation with John about can I get shares in his company? And he said no. So I went off and started my own and you know, I copied what I'd learned and started a fast growth company.

Speaker 2: 5:57

I was going to ask you that actually because I'd seen in a couple of the other podcasts you'd done you know you tell the story where you asked John for some equity. I mean knowing what you know now about running businesses and building teams and, and I guess, maintaining loyalty. Do you think you made a mistake not giving you that equity?

Speaker 1: 6:15

um, well, certainly not the way I pitched it. Uh, so we were loading boxes into the car and I was telling him that I wanted equity in the company, so anything that's a big decision like equity or something like that. If I had the maturity, I would have put together a slide deck and I would have explained what I'll do for that equity. I wouldn't have felt entitled to it. I would have said you know, this is what I intend to develop for you, and here's the extra side of the business. Is there a way that you can structure it that would work for you, work for me? So there's lots of ways I could have approached it much better. Given the way that I approached it, I think he would have been crazy to say yes, it was a ridiculous immature entitled way of going about asking for equity in a business.

Speaker 2: 6:59

Well, I guess it was the best mistake he ever made for you. So I first heard your name in the context of this key personal influence book a few years ago I forget why, and I'm glad you brought this fresh copy because my copy is very well read, very well traveled and probably doesn't even say key personal influence on it anymore. But I mean, I'm a massive advocate for personal branding, you know. I mean I've been working on building mine over the last few years. But one of the things I always talk about with personal branding is that for all the people who say, oh, I don't want to do that thing, I'm not into personal branding, I would say you will have one anyway.

Speaker 2: 7:36

You know, we have a personal brand, whether we like it or not. You know whether that's a CEO of a business, whether it's the receptionist. You know that to me, that personal brand is just your character traits. You know what you know and, as in how people see you Now, whether or not you want to be seen in the way people see you and whether or not you've amplified it enough.

Speaker 2: 7:54

I guess is a different question, but we all hear about people talk about personal brand, personal brand all the time now. But I mean for me. You know, your book, and particularly your methodology, came out long before the words personal personal branding even really existed, certainly long before it's been bashed all around the internet.

Speaker 2: 8:10

I mean, how? How did you, I guess, come to know and understand all the things that you've written about in the book? And and am I right in saying that it was very much? Well, I know it was very much before anyone was talking about it now, but I mean, did people understand branding at all back then? Or were you really the first person to put this in words?

Speaker 1: 8:29

I wrote the book in 2009 and the book came out in 2010. So it's really early, like no one was talking about it at the time, not in a serious way and not in a structured way. The thing that I noticed was so I believe, that US presidential elections tell us the big trends that are coming In the same way that Formula One tells you kind of the technology that's coming in cars. Us presidential elections tell you the technology that's coming in marketing. So in the 1930s, franklin Roosevelt started this thing called the fireside chat, which was a radio conversation, and then national radio overtook print and then in 1963, jfk had a televised debate with Nixon and that signified television as the big technology. And then fast forward to 2008,. We've got Obama everywhere, which was a social media campaign, and it won him the election. His engagement on social media was the thing that gave him an edge in 2008. And for me that signified that the big thing that's happening is this social media revolution, that it's no longer a toy. It's not something that kids do. It's actually a proper, serious way to win a presidential election thing that kids do. It's actually a proper, serious way to win a presidential election.

Speaker 1: 9:51

So I was really deeply up to my elbows in trying to understand how does this work, how did he do it, how did he use it, how could, what could we learn from it? Um, so I started kind of delivering little mini talks and workshops about it and started to kind of unpack it in some slides and wrote some blogs and articles about it. Basically said you've got to position yourself as a key person of influence. You've got to build your reach. This is going to be more important than your company brand, more important than your product brands basically had. The opening line of the book is something like in every industry, there are key people of influence. Their names come up in conversation. They can get more things done, they can launch products, they can raise money. They have have more fun. You know you need to become one of these key people of influence. So I was really kind of gunning for this idea that you should push a personal brand as one of the key strategies for your marketing.

Speaker 2: 10:38

And, but prior to learning about it and studying it from then, I mean, did you see yourself as a key person of influence? I mean, did you have a brand and I guess some of those traits anyway not massively.

Speaker 1: 10:48

Uh, I was an event marketing and promotions business, so I I had the business that I grew was an agency that specialized in running events and we would launch new products and services into new markets.

Speaker 1: 11:00

It was nearly impossible to do that without a personal brand at the front. So this is my experience of seeing personal brands we used to like. We used to partner with, maybe, a software company and say, okay, who's the best person to capture everyone's attention so that they'll show up and see the launch? Or we'd do something in like financial services and we'd try and find the right speaker for everyone three, four, five hundred people to show up so that we could launch, you know, this new financial services brand. So I'd been doing this for 10 years and I knew exactly what worked. I knew the type of person that would work on a stage. I knew the type of person that could attract an audience, make sales, you know, create a buzz. So I was behind the scenes picking these people and I had a checklist as to what I was going to pick and I used the checklist as the formula for the book.

Speaker 2: 11:52

I remember seeing it for the first time in action or first time I saw it anyway, probably around just before you wrote the book, actually about 2008,. 2009. Jordan Belfort, he'd just written the book. The movie hadn't happened, but he just he'd just written the book. And the book was out and I remember my mate saying to me oh look, you know you won't believe it Jordan Belfort's coming to talk in Leeds.

Speaker 2: 12:13

I'm thinking what the hell is he? He was coming to the Metropole Hotel, which was this, you know, small little hotel with a tiny function. I'm thinking, what the hell is he doing there? So, because it's a free talk, let's sign up. So we signed up to this free talk. Obviously, we found out afterwards that he was effectively being put on by some liver puddling property developer to say, you know and in the run-up to the talk, we'd be getting email after email of, you know, quite ironic at the time that, uh, jordan belford was recommending these various investments. But you know, please buy this, uh, liver liverpool property for, you know, 20 below market value, but it's, you know, the the concept is great, you know, drags us all in. We sit there, let's listen to jordan's speech and then, when he jumps off stage.

Speaker 2: 12:52

We get pounced on by uh, by salesmen to buy all these various property developments the old bite and switch so, in terms of key person of influence, one of the things I wanted to ask you about is what I see almost is the opposite of key person of influence. One of the things I wanted to ask you about is what I see almost is the opposite of key person of influence. Because you know, people look at branding and influencers as a, I guess, as that key person of influence. It's like, oh, this person on Instagram they've got this massive following. You know that they're a key person of influence.

Speaker 2: 13:21

But to me, 99% of these people, let's say they've got influence because they've walked off a tv show and people know who they are, but then they don't have any of the other, then any of the other traits, the skill sets, you know, the, the depth to a business or everything behind it. And for me, that you know they're absolute lost opportunity. And you know most of these people will never actually do it because I guess they've got the uh arrogance for want of a better word of thinking thinking that they've already got to the end of the game because they've got the celebrity. But they have, but they haven't got all the substance behind it. Um, I don't, I know what I'm saying. I'm sure you can probably translate.

Speaker 1: 13:56

I think it's the difference between being an influencer and being a key person of influence. So an influencer has got a big profile. They've got you, you know, 100,000 followers, a million followers, tens of millions of followers but they don't have all the other things you know. And a lot of the time now we see influencers who are just good looking people and they're just you know. They've got great bodies and they've got great, you know, looks and they've built up hundreds of thousands of followers just by you know, being good looking on Instagram. But it doesn't translate into much much, you know. It doesn't translate into having a business or having actual, real influence. In many cases, a lot of these people can't actually sell product or sell anything into the marketplace, not of anything you know, sizable with substance anymore. So it's it's important that we see the distinction between a key person of influence and I, you know, an influencer, an influencer can between a key person of influence and a uh, you know, an influencer, an influencer can become a key person of influence. They can start with that profile and build it out and strengthen it and actually, you know, build something from it. But also you can start with something else, like you'd start with a business or a product and build out your influence. Um, you know, tim cook of apple has become a key person of influence because he's had to. He's had to follow in Steve Jobs' footsteps. Ryan Reynolds has started as a Hollywood actor with a huge profile and he's become a key person of influence because look at his business empire and the way that he mobilizes resources around the businesses that he's got he's on track to be a billionaire.

Speaker 1: 15:21

So what we're really talking about is not someone who's an influencer. We're not talking about photograp someone who's an influencer. We're not talking about you know, photographing your breakfast and your gym routine and your abs and all that sort of stuff. We're talking about, you know, being a business person who leads with their personal brand, who builds a relationship with people using digital assets, who uses their brand to attract talented people around them, who uses their brand to have joint ventures and partnerships. So we're just we're talking a lot more like a Richard Branson, or we're talking more like a Tim Cook, or we're talking like I mean, realistically, pick any major business. These days. Ceo has a brand If they're a fast growth business. That's how it is.

Speaker 2: 15:59

And obviously you talk about the CEO having a brand and I assume this book was written with the audience being CEOs and entrepreneurs CEO having a brand, and I assume this book was written with the audience being CEOs and entrepreneurs. But I mean, do you think it could be, and should be, applicable to all people within a business? I mean, should everyone try and become a key person in their own world little world, and I guess just a bit more context. I mean we talk about looking my, my business is. We often do like LinkedIn, training and and I always get a lot of pushback from from most people and I'm always saying to them listen, you know, this is, this is not just for me. This, this is, this is more for you, you know one day you're going to want to leave me.

Speaker 2: 16:33

Uh, you know, one day you're going to want to, you know, achieve something different, and the best way for you to be able to do that is is to have some kind of brand. You know, you don't need to be a business owner. You, you can be anyone in a business and have and have some kind of profile yeah, it's good to capture the a little bit of the brand equity.

Speaker 1: 16:48

I don't necessarily think everyone needs to have a brand like. I'll give you a great, great example. My co-founder in score app is a guy called steve. Steve is a brilliant technology developer and he's really good at developing technology platforms, recruiting talented tech tech people. He's really good at developing technology platforms, recruiting talented tech people. He's really great at managing them and getting them to be, you know, super creative and he's good at fixing any errors that happen.

Speaker 1: 17:17

If he's distracted with lots and lots of inquiries and lots and lots of people who want him to be, you know, on a podcast, he's not going to be able to do the thing that he does really really well, which is behind the scenes. His perfect year is he meets 10 new people and they're all developers. But there's a reason that he and I are in business together because we're playing a team sport. I don't have to worry about the tech, he doesn't have to worry about the podcasts. So we go really, really well together, but we own a company together. So the value of what he does and the value of what I do ends up in the value of the business. Now, a lot of people. You know a lot of people. They're not in that situation.

Speaker 2: 17:58

So if you're in business with someone who's got a whopping big brand happy days, You've found that person, but provided you own equity in the company one of the things I heard you say the other day on a podcast was well, I wrote it down it's a key personal influence that shouldn't be running their business, and I actually recently heard heard someone else saying that you know, a good CEO doesn't do any work, which I presume. I presume the two things are probably heading in the same direction. I mean, if you are a true key person of influence, is that ultimately where you will get to that, that all all the, the kind of day-to-day tasks are delegated and your, your job is there as a promoter, a connector, a figurehead?

Speaker 1: 18:38

yeah, I think the value proposition of a great ceo is someone who can bring in great, talented people, create alignment within the team, promote the business, open doors, create demand. For whatever it is that you do, you know the hardest thing in business is demand. Every business is a relationship between demand and supply. So if you think about a business that should be very, very profitable but isn't very profitable is an airline, because everyone in an airline thinks about how planes take off and land on time and it's all about supply side. It's about safety and capital allocation and all of the things that go into the supply of running airplanes. You take a business that is focused on the demand generation. Take Rolex, for example. They're very, very focused on how to make sure Rolex is the number one brand. They have all the top athletes and all the top sports events and all that that they work with and they're very focused on the demand creation. Now, if you take any business, the demand side is way harder than the supply side.

Speaker 1: 19:43

For a long time in the industrial age. If you could build it, people would buy it right. If you could, if you could create a pair of scissors right, you could smelt the steel somehow, pin them together and sharpen them and all that stuff. Whatever you do to make scissors, if you could make a pair of scissors, people would buy the pairs of scissors, right? That wasn't the problem it was. The hard thing was making it. Fast forward to today, you go on amazon and you type in the word scissors. You're going to see 150 different versions of scissors. You're going to have clothing scissors and craft scissors and kid scissors and colorful scissors versions of scissors. You're going to have clothing scissors and craft scissors and kid scissors and colorful scissors and giant scissors. You know little tiny ones that fit in the purse, right, you're going to get that like thousands and thousands.

Speaker 1: 20:21

The hard thing is not making something. The hard thing is selling stuff. So the CEO or the founder or the entrepreneur has to be on the demand side. Now this is the biggest error that all entrepreneurs are making. All entrepreneurs get into something that they love the idea of doing the work. They go oh, you know, I want to be a coach. Why? Because I like the idea of coaching people. Okay, that's great. How are you going to win coaching clients? You know oh, I want to run health retreats. Why? Because I love the idea of running a health retreat? Okay, but how are you going to fill the health retreat? So it's the demand generation side that's hard. That's what stops people, that's what makes businesses fail. It's almost never the case that a business is flooded with demand. Everyone wants to buy from that business and the business goes bankrupt. It's always the case that they're very good at the supply of what they do and they can't sell it.

Speaker 2: 21:11

And in today's world, where there pretty much isn't any new products. Everything's already been done. How does someone create that demand? How do they create distribution?

Speaker 1: 21:23

It's personal brand. It is having a relationship with the marketplace. There are certain things like for me personally, if I launch a piece of software, which I've launched a piece of software just a couple of weeks ago, there's a few thousand people who will show up to a launch event just to see what, what's dan launching. If someone who doesn't have a personal brand launches the exact same product, very few people will show up and and and talk about it. And if someone with a bigger brand than me launched the same product, they'd get a better result again.

Speaker 2: 21:55

But short of telling that business, that new business, that they need to have a figurehead with a personal brand, what kind of unbranded methods of lead generation are out there now that work in a cost-effective manner? The ones that don't rely on that? So, for a business that hasn't got a figurehead, who's got a personal brand? Who can? Who can drag some people in on day one? You know what? What works in today, in today's oversaturated market?

Speaker 1: 22:23

there's not a lot you know you can take. You can take most marketing campaigns and if you strip it away of the personal brand, at the moment the the cost per lead goes up exponentially. So if I put, when I say personal brand, we don't even need someone who is well known, we need someone who is the founder who talks to camera. All right, if you let I run a lot of facebook ads and instagram ads and all that sort of stuff. We spend, I know, about 100 grand a month on different ads across the different businesses. So I know exactly that if you have a company branded ad or the founder's face on the ad, like you can halve the cost of the ad. The cost per click just drops. If you have a founder who's talking to camera and doing one of those little shorts and you boost that, you're going to get leads for four or five pounds, versus if you have a company branded thing, you're going to get leads for 15 pounds. You know like it's going to be three times as much.

Speaker 2: 23:21

And I've been reading a lot lately on Facebook ads or, you know, google ads et cetera, that unless you've got more back end sales, unless you've got lifetime value of that customer, that it's almost impossible to get profitable on the front end. I mean, is that something you'd agree with?

Speaker 1: 23:38

Oh, totally. Businesses are an ecosystem and anything that's overly simplified doesn't work now. So you know, you could take any product and you can say you know, we run ads for it, we generate leads for it, it, and then we sell that product. That won't be profitable. You have to have an entire ecosystem. So if you take someone like Gordon Ramsay, he's got books, tv shows, restaurants, all actual products that you can buy on the shelves, so he's got an ecosystem of products and services. So anywhere he's generating leads, he's making, he's making money. You know for me, services. So anywhere he's generating leads, he's making, he's making money. You know, for me, I've got eight different companies. Some are software, some are services and agencies, some is education and training. Um, you know, it's all of it working together as one nice ecosystem that makes the whole thing work do?

Speaker 2: 24:26

those eight businesses all feed each other as well. They all have some kind of relationship.

Speaker 1: 24:30

Yeah, exactly At the heart of all of it is this idea that we develop entrepreneurs who stand out, scale up and make positive impact, and pretty much everything relates to that theme and it all just works nicely together In a small business. I just talk about four products. I basically say you need a gift, something you can give away for free. You need a product for prospects, which is a first product that people can buy cheaply, easily, quickly, just to test you. You need your core product or service and then you need your what we call product for clients, which is the ongoing journey. So it's those four products in an ecosystem.

Speaker 1: 25:07

So when I've bought businesses, I often buy businesses that have a core product that's strong but they're quite weak in the other areas. I get the founder to write a book and that gives me a gift or a product for prospects. We create an introduction workshop. That gives me a gift or a product for prospects. We create an online video masterclass. We put that on YouTube, we get a series of really nice podcasts out and then we create a continuity subscription product on the back end. So we'll basically build out the four products. I've bought several businesses where I've bought them, when they're doing about a half a million of revenue by the end of year one of owning it. We can be at 1.5 to2 just by building out the product ecosystem.

Speaker 2: 25:48

And are you normally buying them and then wanting to retain the existing owner as that figurehead to help build him out into a key person of influence?

Speaker 1: 25:56

We can or we can, we can. If they want to leave, that's fine too. We've had a couple where we've bought businesses where the founder has gone off to do something else, but I've also bought businesses where we've actually bought the business and kept the founder and they're you and they're loving being part of the group and if you've replaced a founder with somebody else, are you bringing that person in to be a visible figurehead?

Speaker 2: 26:20

I mean, you don't spread yourself thinner and thinner by making yourself the figurehead of these businesses.

Speaker 1: 26:25

So, depending on the business, some of the businesses are just genuinely downstream from what we do anyway. So it's not super important because because we we do have a figure ahead upstream and then there's just a like an unbelievable flow of business that's just coming down. So, for example, there are certain businesses that only need a dozen clients a year and they're making millions. You know, average value of a client is 80 to 120 000 like tech businesses, it services and that sort of stuff. Um, so with those businesses, you know it's totally fine to just have a team who operate that business really, really well and if they're downstream from what we do and we can find those clients, we can find those clients for them.

Speaker 1: 27:06

Um, but then there are other businesses that I've got, like rethink press, where lucy and joe run rethink press, lucy mccara joe yeah, joe's brilliant lucy mccara is extremely well known as as the expert at book writing, um, so they've stayed on, uh, they've joined the group and they've stayed on as the figurehead role and and lucy does an amazing job of that and does that so using that business as an example?

Speaker 2: 27:30

does that bring its own customers in there? Because I would have imagined that it's almost um, just gets like gifted all its customers who come in. So people come in and read key personal influence or join your kpi program and it says I need a book immediately.

Speaker 1: 27:42

Go to rethink yeah, that's exactly how it happens. We get thousands of people coming in and and they go off to rethink and publish their books and write their books. And we just created some software called BookMagicai which helps people write their book using AI and then go and get a rethink press deal. Yeah, as I said, the hardest part of every business is getting customers. It's such a noisy world right now. Everyone's in competition with everyone else in the world. Everyone got handed a megaphone called social media, so customers are overwhelmed, they're confused. They need, you know, they need support. Um, they, you know, they. They don't know where to look, um, they're constantly hearing conflicting messages. So you know, that is the hard part about business.

Speaker 2: 28:24

If we, if we can master that, we can pretty much, you know, run any business that makes sense I mean, you say it's such a noisy world right now, but presumably it will only get noisier and noisier and noisier, or do you think there'll be any parts of noise that could disappear?

Speaker 1: 28:40

no, no, it's going to get way worse because of ai. Ai generates a plethora of content. Now someone who's noisy has a megaphone called social media and they have an automated noise machine strapped onto the back of it called AI, and it's just the AI plus the social media is going to flood the market with. You know, and I'm not even talking about like AI, that is just automating a message. But even you take someone who's a good, you know speaker or influencer, just the ai writing them scripts, you know just having that script writing done faster. If you take a youtuber, if they can get more ideas faster, you know, get them executed quicker. And if they can edit the videos and publish the videos and improve the videos and do all the thumbnails faster, you know we're just speeding up.

Speaker 1: 29:35

What's happening at the moment is, you know you've got to. It's a bit frustrating. You know you're kind of like playing devil's advocate for the person who hasn't even started To a degree. It's already too late for them. They're already too far behind. They'll never catch up. They're in real trouble and they need to join the team of someone who's got a brand. They need to go and be a direct report for an entrepreneur who's got traction. They need to roll their company into a group of companies, they need to do something to jump onto a moving bandwagon fast.

Speaker 1: 30:03

And then you've got people who could go either way. They're either going to get dragged into running their business and fall behind, or they're going to say I've got to embrace this AI stuff, I've got to embrace this personal brand stuff, I've got to build myself a brand and build a moat, and they could go that way as well. And then you've got people who already have a bit of a brand, like yourself, and now you can turn it right up. You've got the tools, the technology to go from talking to thousands of people to tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands, to millions. And you can do that. If you get it right, you can do it all in a year or two. We go from talking to a small circle of people to talking to quite a large circle of people.

Speaker 2: 30:42

Well, you've bought businesses and you've started businesses. Do you have a preference? Or for someone out there who hasn't done either yet, would you advocate down one particular path?

Speaker 1: 30:53

Yeah, I really enjoy buying businesses. Buying a business is great because you know it's about the same amount of effort to go from zero to half a million, to half a million to two million, whatever energy and effort went into getting that business to the first half a million worth of sales. Apply that same energy and effort again and you'll be at two million. So you know, and then take a two million pound business and apply that energy and effort, you'll be at ten million. The other thing too is I love having fresh eyes on a business, because when you're in a business and you've been doing it every day for years it's like being too close to you know, know, well, it's like you've got a really nice watch, but how long have you had it? A year or so, a year or so, I bet. When you first had it you looked at it like 50 times a day and then now you don't even think about it. You just put, put it on in the morning and you know you've just gotten too close to it. It's the same with the business. When you've been in a business for years, you wake up and you just don't get all that excited by what the business does. You know someone writes you an email and says you know that business really helped me and you go, oh, that's nice. But we get those emails and you know you've also got one where people complain a little bit oh, I didn't get this, oh, okay, I've got to fix that. So you kind of get caught up in the noise of the business.

Speaker 1: 32:10

Now when I come in and I've got fresh eyes, I see the business and go, wow, this has got incredible intellectual property. We could tell more stories. We've got so many excited, happy customers. We should get them talking. We should capture their video case studies and put them out. So you know, a lot of the time businesses are sitting on hidden intellectual property. The rethink press business has essentially spun out the thinking behind the book magicai business, the so technology that I bought. We spun out score app, which is now got 6 000 customers in 150 countries and one scale up of the year. So every business has got intellectual property that could become software, media or technology intellectual property, all of that sort of stuff. Um, ultimately what I love doing now is building tech tech companies are.

Speaker 2: 33:03

You know, software is where it's at, software ai enabled, sas products um, because you can build it once and sell it over and over and over again yeah, you can build something pretty powerful for a couple of hundred grand.

Speaker 1: 33:16

Now I know people hear a couple hundred. A lot of people like, oh well, where would I get a couple hundred grand? Well, there's plenty of investors out there. Um, you know, if you've got something sensible, uh, you can spin out some technology for a couple hundred grand. Maybe you know expensive tech at the moment $500,000, $600,000. And then it's like having a house that you can rent but it has unlimited bedrooms. So that's the power of software. If I buy a five-bedroom house and I want to rent out each bedroom once I get to five, that's it. I can't rent anymore.

Speaker 1: 33:50

If you came to me and said, hey, I want to sign up 10 000 customers, uh, to score app, I'd say, okay, here's the usernames and passwords, let's sign them up. Um, you know, we literally have an automated system that just sign them up. So it's like this house with an infinite number of of bedrooms and for roughly the same cost as what it costs to build a house. You build software and that software can scale globally and a house, you know a house might be worth I don't know a couple of million. The software company can be worth tens of millions and what is scorecard the app?

Speaker 1: 34:24

So, 2015, I wrote this quiz called the key person of influence scorecard and I said answer these 40 questions to see if you need a personal brand or to test how big your personal brand could be. And um, and I launched the key person of influence scorecard and this thing just took off 90 000 people filled it in. We made 20 million worth of sales off the back end. Um, and it was such a simple system. People would fill in the scorecard online, they'd get their pdf result and then they'd book a time to talk to one of our sales people and our sales people would say hey, it looks like you need some work on your pitching. And they go yeah, I do, can you help me with that? And it was like it's such a easy, seamless thing. It's like if you go to a doctor and they give you an x-ray and they say, oh, it looks like your arm's got a fracture. Oh, can you help me with that? Right, can we fix it? So this was such a successful campaign that we did it three more times.

Speaker 1: 35:17

I did the oversubscribed scorecard, I did the 24 assets scorecard. Each time we did it, people just loved it and I was like this is brilliant, this is such a great marketing campaign. Then some people started to notice what I was doing. I said can you build me one of those score cards? So we built a dozen of these and they cost about 10 to 15 grand each. And in the process of building you know a dozen of these score cards, we basically boiled it down to a blueprint as to how to do it really, really well. And then we said, hey, we can turn that into a software platform. So in 2020, launched software platform took us nine. 2020, launched a software platform Took us nine months to sign up our first 200 customers. We now sign up 8,500 customers a month on every four minutes, five minutes.

Speaker 2: 36:02

The customer and it's B2B the customer being a business who wants to create a scorecard.

Speaker 1: 36:06

Yeah, so a scorecard campaign is a quiz or an assessment that people can set up for their own business. They can use AI. So it used to be that you had to do a lot of brainstorming. Now you just ask the AI. It'll tell you what concept, it'll tell you who.

Speaker 2: 36:20

This is all plugged into the it's all plugged in.

Speaker 1: 36:22

Yeah, it takes you six minutes. We could literally build you a scorecard for your podcast right now and six minutes later you'd have a full scorecard and people would be able to take the stripping off scorecard and and they could, they could do that we. We also use the technology now to launch waiting list campaigns. We do it for employing people. So we actually have are you ready to join our team scorecards. We have scorecards for booking a strategy session. We're about to launch some scorecards for real estate, you know, uh, so essentially, are you suitable, you know? Are you ready to move to dubai? Um, are you, you know, are you suitable to to to uh buy a dubai villa, those kind of things, uh, expressions of interest and inquiries, all of that. So it essentially sits on top of this software, uses ai to build it and, yeah, they're incredibly powerful campaigns. Most landing pages get four or five percent conversion. Uh, traffic to filled in form. We get like 35 to 45 percent. People love these assessments and what?

Speaker 2: 37:29

what's the motivating factor for people?

Speaker 1: 37:32

it's personalized, so when you fill in a scorecard, you're going to learn something about yourself. It's immediate, it's fast.

Speaker 2: 37:39

So I really I'm going to feel like it's something about me. I'm not just going to feel like it's a sales tactic from the person who's giving it to me.

Speaker 1: 37:47

Have you got a hobby at the moment?

Speaker 2: 37:49

Paddle tennis.

Speaker 1: 37:50

Great. So if there was like a, are you ready to improve your paddle tennis scorecard? Answer 12 questions to find out if you could improve your paddle tennis game, you go, oh, okay, cool, and it's going to ask you a series of questions and at the end it's going to say here's three ways to improve your paddle tennis game. And because you're loving this paddle tennis thing, you're happy to fill in a scorecard or an assessment to see if there's a way to improve. And away you go. So people love it because it's immediate, it's fast, it's based on their own needs's, hyper personalized. It gives them personal feedback. The results change based on how you fill in the scorecard. So, might you know? You might say are you a beginner, intermediate, advanced? Oh, you're advanced. So you know, here's your advanced strategies, your advanced tips, uh, and you're getting stuff that's purely and simply based on who you are and what you do and going back to one of the problems we were talking about earlier, in that every business needs to be able to generate demand.

Speaker 2: 38:50

Once you've created the card, do you teach people how to actually get people to land on it in the first place?

Speaker 1: 38:57

Yeah, so it's in the book Scorecard Marketing. There's nine good ways in there, and then we've got another document that's 29 different ways to launch your scorecard. The platform itself uses AI to generate daily posts for LinkedIn and all the social media X and Facebook. It's got things like QR code generators, so if you give talks, you can just use them up there. It gives you ideas on custom-built email campaigns that you can run to your existing list. It gives you ideas for ads that you could campaigns that you can run to your existing list. It gives you ideas for ads that you could run if you want to run some ads. Yeah, so all of that.

Speaker 2: 39:31

I'm struggling to concentrate on the next questions now because I'm already running off of my mind.

Speaker 1: 39:35

You're thinking about what's cool for you.

Speaker 2: 39:37

For what I can use on a couple of my businesses.

Speaker 1: 39:40

I mean it's like turning on a tap. You know, because if you're getting 10 times the response or five to 10 times the response of any other marketing campaign, you know for the same energy and effort you get four or five times more leads. And then you can also score the leads. You can see, based on the responses, whether it's a good lead or a bad lead. You know, because if I ask most salespeople people, would you rather 100 unqualified leads name, email, phone number or 20 highly qualified leads that are filled in an application form and you can see exactly that they're the right type of person?

Speaker 2: 40:15

most sales people are like I want the qualified leads, because the unqualified leads are a total pain I mean we're talking about sas businesses and obviously unlimited growth on these technology companies as part of your business model. Do you also have a kind of a consultancy slash done for you type thing as well, or do you try and push everything?

Speaker 1: 40:34

on. So ScoreApp is its own tech company and the AI makes it phenomenally easy. But, with that said, we still have people who go. Please just do it for me. So we do have a done for you division, um, and we're about to. In fact, by the time this podcast goes live, we've got um a what's called a, an agency directory. So we've actually selected 30 agencies that are affordable, um, and they can build for you. These are people we've seen them build stuff starting at like 500, 600 pounds, you know, going through to 5,000, 6,000 pounds per build.

Speaker 1: 41:10

So if you're a bigger corporate kind of company, you might want to spend six, seven grand on a campaign built for you, and if you're a small business, you might want a person who works from home who knows how to build these, for 500, 600 quid. So we've actually got a good you know 30 different options. We might take that up to some more, but we've basically got a directory of people so you'll be able to just click and pick someone from the directory, but it's very easy to do it yourself. We've got 80 templates. You just drop your name and logo onto the template, you put your photo in there and away you go like it's one of these things that if you were to try and explain instagram to someone who'd never seen it and all they'd ever seen was a end result of someone's instagram you go oh, that's so hard. How would you do it? How would you upload it if you've used instagram? You go, it's pretty easy. Actually same as setting up a scorecard campaign.

Speaker 1: 42:03

I'm gonna be on it tonight yeah, if you can if you can, if you can run your own linkedin profile, you can run your own scorecard, build your own scorecard, but you can get someone else to do it if you want let's talk about people.

Speaker 2: 42:14

Um, you've got eight businesses, you've started them, you've you've bought them. I mean the the bane of my life, as I talked about for 20 years, is recruitment and retention. You know, I mean I've been through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of staff to get, you know well, probably a core of four or five that I might shed a tear if they left. And you know another couple of handfuls of modest ones. And you know as much as I like to complain that 90% of the world are morons, I do also blame myself for not being good enough at being able to recruit the 10% of the world that aren't morons. Talk to me. What am I doing wrong?

Speaker 1: 42:53

Well, the first thing is I'm passionate about this topic because I don't think business is something you can do without a team. You need a team of people. People say, oh, productivity hacks, how do you stay productive? It's like I just have, you know, 100 people working. Um, you know, if you've got 100 people who work seven hours a day, that's 700 hours a day. You know, going into the development of a business. So building a team is everything and um, I've you know.

Speaker 1: 43:20

The other question I get a lot is like oh, you know, how did you get started with no one on your team? When you're just starting out, I said I've never had no one on my team started every single business I've started with a team. Um, if I'm going to play a game of football, I'm not going to run onto the pitch and then try and recruit people after the game starts. I'm going to run onto the pitch with a team of you know, people. If it's five a side, I'm going to run on with five people because, well, I'm going to run on with four people. But you get the idea right.

Speaker 1: 43:47

I think businesses, you know it really is a team sport and it's about bringing people onto that team as soon as you possibly can. If you didn't do it from day one, do it ASAP. What people make as a big mistake is when they're a small business. They're trying to look for people who are talented and good and amazing people. You're not going to get them. They already have jobs at Microsoft and Google and better, more interesting places than you can offer. Especially, I think your background was more nighttime businesses Leisure, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 44:23

So there's not that many people who want to work a night time job. So you're not going to get, you know, you're not going to get someone quit their job at microsoft to come and work in the evening at your job. Um, so the you know the thing is you need to learn how to work with young people who don't have experience but they're passionate. You need to learn how to work with someone who needs a lot of flexibility. You need to work with the neighbor's teenage kid who wants to do a little bit of work experience. Um, you have to. As an entrepreneur, you have to be able to rope in whoever you've got available and see if you can put them to work. Um, and sometimes it lasts and sometimes it doesn't, and that is just par for the course. That is just. There is no white, you know knight in shining armor who's going to ride on in and fix everything doesn't. And that is just par for the course. That is just.

Speaker 2: 45:04

There is no white, you know, knight in shining armor who's going to ride on in and fix everything doesn't exist for small businesses but that is at the beginning of the journey, presumably, as, as time goes on and you're more established, you've got more money, more exciting, you can be a bit more.

Speaker 1: 45:18

Yes but I don't obsess over it. And the reason I don't obsess over it is when I was a teenager I worked at mcdonald's and a group of 16 17 year old kids ran a 2 million dollar a year restaurant back in the 90s so it's probably 4 million 5 million now and today's money. We used to run a multi-million dollar restaurant. The oldest person was the store manager, who was 23 or 24. Most of the stuff was on the shoulders of 15 16 year olds. Right, we couldn't even tidy our bedroom, but we could run. Yeah, we could run a mcdonald's um.

Speaker 1: 45:51

When I got out of that, I did nightclub party um, nightclub party promotions and I worked around bars and and all of that sort of stuff. The manager of any nightclub is about 32 33 that's the general manager of a nightclub. All the bar staff are in their 20s, all the you know everyone's in their 20s and we're running a multi, multi million dollar business. That business needs marketing, it needs um service, it needs cleaning, it needs security. Uh, you've got all sorts of dramas happening, you've got all sorts of things going wrong and somehow we solve all of those problems. So I, because of my background, I just don't really believe that you need some phenomenal. You know albert einstein, iq, cindy crawford good looks. I don't think you need any of that stuff to run a successful business. There are people within a mile of here. There are people running coffee shops and restaurants profitably and they're not those types of people but I guess that's using the mcdonald's example.

Speaker 2: 46:50

I mean that's testament to the, to the skill of someone in the mcdonald's food chain they built yeah who builds the systems, so so the 15 year olds can run it yes, and that's your job as the entrepreneur isn't it and also, you don't have 75 000 restaurants you've got.

Speaker 1: 47:07

You know, you've got a business that you're starting with, so you're still pretty hands-on with them. I'll also say this I've hired some corporate people. I have actually had phenomenally talented quote-unquote people join my team. They can wreck your business. If you want to talk about someone who has the power to absolutely do damage. It's someone whose previous job, you know, was a big, big corporate. They come in and they go. Oh, you know I dialed two and no one showed up from IT to set my laptop up. You know, they come in and they go. Oh, I've got three suggestions we need to hire this person for 150 grand a year and we need to bring in this consulting firm for 150 grand a year and we need to put in this health and safety policy that I noticed is missing, that no one ever needs. You know the stuff they come up with.

Speaker 2: 47:53

I mean, I've I've been been there too many times but I I have, uh and had an econ business luxury fashion econ business which had always been run as a as a very kind of hands-on entrepreneurial business for many years. I bought it with the with the view to get, you know, to scale it up, went and took on a couple of key hires who you know that they were going to be. I guess the the tipping back points on these, you know ex harrods ex selfridges, you know, like very, very senior, knowledgeable people, I mean all the all.

Speaker 2: 48:25

the day job was was how much cost can we pile on this and how little making any turnover difference? Making a profit was not even on the radar, it was just how can we add all these people and jack up the overheads as much as possible?

Speaker 1: 48:40

Because they think about supply side. They don't think about demand side. They're set in their ways. They've always been protected by the shield of the big brand, all of that sort of stuff. So I'm very wary of people who are skilled and talented and experienced. There's this interesting thing that the founding fathers of the USA interesting thing that the you know the founding fathers of the usa yeah, hamilton, and you know all of the um tom, uh, thomas jefferson and all of these guys at the time they founded the usa, the declaration of independence and all of that. The founding fathers were, I think, 21 to 34. They were all in their 20s and early 30s and they founded the USA.

Speaker 1: 49:28

Like, there's a lot to be said for not knowing how things work. There's a lot to be said for rolling up your sleeves and kicking the door off the hinges, and that's the type of people, the people I love to bring onto my team. They're just go-getters. They don't know what they don't know, know, but they're willing to figure it out. You know those sorts of people I've always done well with. I've always done well with young, hungry, excited.

Speaker 2: 49:52

You know fun people on my teams and I've always, uh, had to work really hard to make the experience people, not blow the thing up I had a zoom call last night with a young guy that I just I didn't know he was a young guy until I'd gone on the zoom call. It's about the third time this has happened to me lately. So I mean, you know, I I have a newsletter that runs on beehive and uh, so I wanted some expertise on that and booked a few consult calls with a guy. Comes on the call, the guy's like 16 years old, um, and does something else I've forgotten.

Speaker 2: 50:22

And yesterday I was looking at some viral Twitter threads and ended up on this account which said if you want me to write viral Twitter threads for you, you know, book a consult call. So I looked at the one that works fantastic. The virality was unbelievable. Book a call with this guy. His little face pops on literally another another 17, 18 year old Chinese guy. I'm like you guys are getting younger and younger and younger, or us guys are getting older and older, but yes, I mean there is that, I guess, but I just find it.

Speaker 2: 50:52

I mean, for me there's kind of two takeaways. One, that I'm so impressed with the hunger of some of these younger people, the technologies they're embracing, to be able to do what they do I mean 17, 18 years old. I've paid him 750 dollars to do you know, to do a job that he'll deliver on tomorrow yeah, you know. I don't know how many of those he's doing, but you know if he does the job earning himself some nice money. He was telling me about a 13 year old.

Speaker 2: 51:18

He was working within uh, he was part of a ghostwriting agency before working with a 13 year old who's now on her own doing 30 to 50 000 a month um, awesome, and I mean that's you know, I guess the opportunities out there for people you know, with ai and just, I guess, with social and the global distribution, is unbelievable. The flip side is it's so easy as an older person to discount anyone younger, particularly materially younger, and and and it's it's. It's so stupid ultimately that the opportunity you're going to miss out on by having the arrogance to think you know he's younger than my eldest daughter, what the fuck can he do for me when these are the people that will ultimately change your business?

Speaker 1: 51:57

Absolutely, and I mean that business that John started, that I was 19 years old. I worked my guts out for those two years and made a lot of profit for John. I have a way of scaling teams similar to the British military. So I actually learned my team scaling strategy from the British military Not that I was in the military, so you're out there fighting for us. No, I just looked at how they did it, because the British military has had 400 years of unbroken service. So they've figured everything out. So they start everything with a two-person scout team. So two people. So the smallest team is a two-person scout team. Two people go looking at things. Then they have a four-person fire team which is an immediate short-term concern, and then they have an eight-person section which is the building block uh, block unit within the military. So eight people on a section, Corporal, Lance Corporal and six grunts, as they say. Then they have a 30-person platoon and then 150 people in the company. So they actually have a way of scaling up teams.

Speaker 1: 52:59

I've found this absolutely works with business. So when we have an idea, two-person scout team gets assigned to it. One person is figuring out can we sell it, One person's asking can we build it Right. Two simple questions Can we sell it? Can we deliver it? Four-person fire team is running a launch campaign. Eight-person section is running a seven-figure revenue with a six-figure profit and a platoon runs a eight-figure revenue with a six-figure profit and a platoon runs a eight-figure revenue with a seven-figure profit and basically we just go boom boom, boom boom. So all of my businesses are in a state of being either a two, four, eight or 30 and we just move them along and how do you find those people and do you move them around as well?

Speaker 2: 53:41

So the two people that start off looking at the supply and demand side once that business is going, I mean, do they stay there forever or do you flip them into another project?

Speaker 1: 53:51

Nine times out of ten, a two-person scout team is actually already on another team anyway. So they're already part of a section or a platoon somewhere else in the business and this is their side project. So we assign this as a side project to to free up some time for them to go and look into something and they can either then join the team that starts that opportunity or, you know, scaling that opportunity, or go back to where they were. Um, but yeah, I mean, how, how do I find people is? I'm just always on the lookout for great people. Um, you know, ev, everyone I meet is a potential person to come and join the team.

Speaker 2: 54:27

How often do you incentivize people with equity, and when is the right time for you to do it?

Speaker 1: 54:33

Do you know? I've found that equity is something that only if people really want equity bad enough to sacrifice income or take some sort of a sacrifice for equity, otherwise it almost is meaningless. 90% of all the people I've ever worked with have seen no real value in equity.

Speaker 2: 54:55

Because that equity never sells, never materializes, yeah they can't take it to the shops.

Speaker 1: 55:00

You can't go down to Selfridges and buy something with equity, so you can't use it as a deposit for a house. So the vast majority of people just don't see much value in it. I've found that most of the people on my team they want quarterly cash bonuses. They're excited about quarterly cash bonuses. They're excited about annual bonuses. They're excited about perks. You know like we're going to take the whole team, you know, on a trip or something like that.

Speaker 1: 55:31

Most people like the idea of just earning more cash. If they want to buy equity, they can buy equity in any shares in the world. So equity for me is about when we launch a new business, especially a software business. I will raise money from experienced angel investors who understand software and who validate the valuation, who validate the business plan with their involvement, and they're there to open up doors, but they're not working inside the business. There is occasionally a senior executive hire that we want to bring in and their normal rate might be 140 000 a year and we might say that we'll do 50 grand worth of equity if we can get you cheaper, because we need the cash at the moment. Um, and if they're, you know if, if they're loving what we do and they're the right type of person, they might take that deal I noticed you were talking about your podcast the other day, about that.

Speaker 2: 56:25

You're a fan of seis and you know like to. You know chip it up into 20. Lots of 12 and a half k do you have? Do you have um like an existing investor base that you repeat on very on various projects, or do you use your key person of influence status to go out raising your investment both?

Speaker 1: 56:43

I've got, um, I've got a group of probably 40 investors who are all successful entrepreneurs, post-exit loads of money, loads of experience, and they tend to snap up anything I'm doing as quick as I can, but what I tend to do is just to hurry things along. When I launch something, I will put on an investor Zoom call and say I'm launching a new project. If you're interested, I already know who's going to invest, but I like to stack like 80, 90, 100 people on that call so that everyone feels the feeling of oh my goodness, lots of people are interested in this.

Speaker 1: 57:21

And then I'll say fill in an application for shares and tell me how much you're willing to invest. And most people put something like twenty to fifty thousand. But then I cut everyone back to twelve and a half thousand and I say I'm gonna take on these selected twenty at twelve and a half thousand each, which is the SEIS round. And what's interesting is most people are trying to get more money out of investors and most people who try and raise money for a business they think they're gonna get one angel who puts in quarter of a million. That never happens.

Speaker 1: 57:55

Most angels want to put in maybe twenty, thirty, forty thousand and they want to be in with some other angels. I want as many. I want more angels because they're all. Each individual angel is someone who can open a door and someone who can help in other ways. So I'm looking for like 20 30 angel investors, ideally. But but the the thing that's most angel investors find strange about when I launch a project is that I cut them down in how much they can put in. So they've said to me they're willing to put in 25, 35, 45, and I'm saying you can put in 12, 12 and a half, and they're like oh, okay, I wanted to put in more than that.

Speaker 2: 58:35

Does that ever close any doors for you where people go? Oh, I can't be bothered putting in a smaller amount.

Speaker 1: 58:39

No, people fight. Are you kidding? People fight to get. They don't want to miss out.

Speaker 2: 58:50

They're just annoyed that I won't take more money. Well, listen, I'm conscious of time and I could talk for you for hours and hours, and hours and hours. Uh. But if I've just got one thing, one thing to pick before we have to wrap up, I want to talk to you a bit about education, which is something that has fallen more, more on my radar lately.

Speaker 2: 59:01

I've got two kids. I've got one who's about to be 18 and getting shipped off to uni in September, and I've got one who's now 13 months old. And you know, on my elder daughter, she actually goes to the same school I used to go to, which caused her a few problems when the teachers recognised her. But she, you know, during her, let's say, teenage years, there was quite a lot of skills, whether that's through books or other courses, I wanted to try and push her into as a teenager. She was never really interested. A mom never really helped me in pushing them onto her either, so I kind of had to stand back and let her do whatever she's wanted to do, which you know.

Speaker 2: 59:39

Fortunately, she's gone down a very good path and I'm very proud. But I feel I've got my, got my new one now that I can use as my guinea pig and in my head still, I want to homeschool her because I want to give her the curriculum that I want to give her, which you know. To be clear, I haven't particularly decided what that is yet, I just know there's roots that I feel that she could be better sent down. I mean, obviously you're a guy with kids. You're a guy who's?

Speaker 2: 1:00:06

educated, old and young. You know what's your views on the educational system, how it could be better fixed, and you know, for somebody in my position, what do you think are the three, four, five key skills and topics? You should be starting on the youngsters.

Speaker 1: 1:00:21

Can I give you a long answer to this?

Speaker 2: 1:00:23

Lock the door.

Speaker 1: 1:00:25

The next one's not coming in. So to zoom out like three, four hundred years, right? So imagine we're looking at the last three, four hundred years, you had the agricultural age, and in the agricultural age we didn't need very much skilled labor, you just needed people, and they had to go out and plant seeds and pick fruit. Um, didn't matter if you're einstein, didn't matter if you're george clooney, you just go out and pick, pick the fruit, right, but we didn't need much skilled labor. In the industrial age we found a use for capital and we found a useful skilled labor, but we didn't have much of either. So we had to have new systems called capitalism systems. We had to have new systems called labor creation systems.

Speaker 1: 1:01:02

The schooling system was responsible for producing this new asset that we needed called labor, and the whole job of the schooling system was to create component labor for factories. That was the original idea. Reading, writing, arithmetic was what a typical factory owner needed in order for them to be able to put someone to use. And then we kind of like, we had blue color factories. We then needed a lot of white color factory work where we had uh, you know, people like lawyers and accountants and auditors, and you know all those kind of people. So we had to have quite sophisticated systems. Right up until, say, the year 2005, 2010. If you did any form of education, there was a job waiting for you. Um, and if you just kept going with education, there was a better job waiting for you. And it was so ridiculous that if you studied history, geography, archaeology, any nonsense you could walk out and get a job, you know, in an agency, or you could get a job you know, all these like banking jobs.

Speaker 1: 1:02:05

They were stacked with people who studied geography and history and all this kind of like this stuff that had nothing to do with banking. But they're like oh well, you've been through the educational system, you know you can come in and work at WPP in an agency. You know you can. You might have studied rocket science and we'll get you doing something over here. That's mathematical, because you know it's all the same.

Speaker 1: 1:02:26

What's happened, uh, since digital, especially now that we've got ai, is that we don't need very much capital anymore. Right, a tiny amount of capital can build a global business. We also don't need much labor. A 25 person, 30 person team can be serving six, seven, eight, nine, ten thousand customers globally. I know 10 people who work in youtube channels and they have 100 million views a month, right. So this is unheard of in the industrial age. We don't need much skilled labor, we don't need much capital, right? So if we go the four factors of production land, labor, capital, enterprise agricultural age was the land, was the most important. Industrial age was capital and labor, and now we're moving to a world that is enterprise. So the only skill that really gets paid at the moment is the ability to take something to market. It's the ability to recognize opportunity and mobilize opportunity. So it's the what you'd call the enterprise skill.

Speaker 1: 1:03:23

The schooling system is not at all set up to teach enterprise. It doesn't. It punishes you for all the things that enterprise does. So, for example, if you're disruptive, you're labeled a disruptor, and that's a very bad thing. As soon as you're an entrepreneur, being a disruptor is a very, very good thing. If you get the smart kid to do your maths homework, that's a bad thing. If you're an entrepreneur, that's called having a CFO. Right, it's completely different worlds. So we have to just start by recognizing the entire purpose of the schooling system. Going back to the year 1806 was essentially to create factory workers, and the world just doesn't need factory workers anymore. It's not going to be a. There's no social contract for someone who comes through that system anymore like there was. So, provided you know that there's no social contract, you can make decisions based on the idea that there's no social contract Send them to school or homeschool them. It doesn't really matter if you have to follow the government curriculum. It's all based on factory work.

Speaker 1: 1:04:24

The benefit of sending them to school is that they connect with people. They make friends. But when they come home and say, oh you know, I failed my geography exam, uh, you can say, well, that's all right, chat, gpt will write that in the future anyway, you don't need to worry too much. Is it more important that you made friends? More important that you settled that dispute between two friends that you had? More important that you organized a sporting match and got people to come and play right? So there's those skills that are that are happening around a school environment.

Speaker 1: 1:04:56

So I wouldn't necessarily throw out the school environment completely, because I know a lot of people are doing that. There's a lot to be said for the musicals that they're putting on and the way that you've got to work together to organize it. There's a lot to be said for the musicals that they're putting on and the way that you've got to work together to organize it. There's a lot to be said for the sport games that happen, sporting games a lot to be said for, you know, the interpersonal relationships that they have to figure out in in schooling system. But that's the important stuff.

Speaker 1: 1:05:19

It's no longer all the stuff that computers can do for us, anything that's skills-based, like even computer programming complete waste of time.

Speaker 1: 1:05:30

Can you know, being a computer programmer, you know a computer program is someone who translates an idea or vision into code, and chat gpt can now translate an idea into code and there's plenty of people who started computer programming and all that sort of stuff. So, like all of the things that you would think if people who studied computer programming and all that sort of stuff, so like all of the things that you would think, if it's at all a set of skills, it's not really of any use. There's going to be plenty of those people. Well, with the exception of plumbing, electricity, blue-collar skills, we're going to have a shortage of people who know how to fix things and put a roof on a house. So the only skills that I personally rate are blue collar skills that I think will not go away for a long time. But, um, but yeah, no, it's the, it's the other side of things, it's the, it's the enterprise skills that are the valuable skills now well, if I don't teach you to fix a toilet, I'll teach.

Speaker 2: 1:06:25

I'll teach you marketing and ai and and AI and she'll be well on the way. Listen, dan, it's been an absolute pleasure having you here. I really hope we can do. I was going to say around two, but we did it. We did around one many moons ago during during the COVID days. But listen, thanks a lot for finding the time. I know you're here in Dubai and hopefully I'll see you again sometime in the future before you do go.

Speaker 2: 1:06:44

I know, obviously, as a key person of influence, people will already know who you are, but for those that don't just give yourself a little shout out for where they can come and find you?

Speaker 1: 1:06:51

Yeah, so all the books are on Amazon. I'm very active on LinkedIn at the moment, so if anyone wants to admin on LinkedIn, that's where I post quite regularly and I post a weekly video on YouTube as well. You can check out dentglobal or scoreappcom or bookmagicai if you want to have a look at some of the businesses. Perfect. Thanks a lot again. Cheers.

Speaker 2: 1:07:12

Thanks for listening to Stripping Off with Matt Haycox. I hope you've enjoyed listening to this week's episode, but please remember to subscribe or to follow and please, please, leave a review, if you can leave a review. That's how we move up the algorithm, that's how we get to the top of the charts and that's how I can keep bringing you bigger and better guests that you'll love each week. Have you got any suggestions for guests? Have you got any burning questions you want to ask? Well, slide into my dms on social at stripping off with matt haycox.