Daniel Priestley - Key Person Of Influence

Full transcript: Daniel Priestley on London Real

6:06 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Daniel Priestley, who is the co-founder of Entrivo, which runs a nine-month growth acceleration program with offices around the world, working with over 500 entrepreneurs each year. I attended your Key Person of Influence event a couple weeks ago. I really enjoyed it. You guys have a real emphasis on publishing books.

6:27 I want to get into that later. I have been reading your best-selling book, Key Person of Influence. The reason it’s bent here is because I’ve read it cover to cover, which I haven’t really done in a book in a long time. I’ll be honest. I get a lot of guests that all bring me books, and I don’t always read them cover to cover. One of my guys here was like, you’re really reading that book a lot. I was like, yeah.

6:45 So I want to talk about that. You’ve also written Entrepreneur Revolution and your newly released book called Oversubscribed. I can’t wait to jump into this. Daniel, welcome to London Real. Thank you very much for having me on the show.

6:55 It’s a total pleasure having you. I think reading this book was like at the right time in my life when it seems to be really resonating with a bunch of things I’m doing. So I want to talk about this. I want to talk about your company, you as a young entrepreneur and every place that you’re from. But I was looking at one of your infographics on your website, and I was really getting a kick out of it. It was one about Richard Branson.

7:16 Oh, yeah. And it’s funny because it’s an infographic about Branson. I’ve actually got it right here. Everyone knows Branson as the guy who’s made it. And you had an infographic about what Richard Branson does.

7:27 You go to job description. Yeah, what’s his job description and what does he do during the day and what does he do? And it’s funny because you’ve got basics of things that he does, and one is like he pitches ideas and ideas pitch at him. He publishes content. He does.

7:40 Still to this day continues to publish, right? And let me go through a few other piece here. He’s actively creating, improving and sourcing hot products, and that’s something he is doing. He raises his profile even further. I was watching a YouTube video today, and the pre-roll was a two-minute ad about Richard.

7:55 It’s called Pitch to Rich or something, and it’s got footage of himself. And the last one was partnerships, putting together partnerships. Which is the whole Virgin Empire. Right, exactly. And so it’s funny how you show how someone who we think has made it is doing a lot of the basics that you are teaching people to do in Key Person of Influence, right?

8:15 Yeah. And I was just wondering if we could just jump right into some of those basics. I find no other better way to do it, which is something that we’ve talked about before, which is kind of the whole pitch, published product, profile partnerships. And how did you come about that? It just seems so congruent with you.

8:31 It seems to be what you’re about. Did it take you a while to figure this out? Yeah, so really you just want to know where that idea came from. Yeah, and then if you could tell me more. Yeah, so I was really fortunate.

8:42 I was spending a lot of time with really super successful people. In particular, I was running, speaking tours with these people, and I was traveling around London, traveling around the UK, and in some cases traveling around the world. So I was working with some of the world’s top entrepreneurs, people who had built multi-billion dollar businesses, and I’m touring with them. And I got that behind-the-curtain look at what they do. And I’m this young 20-something year old guy, and I’m spending a lot of my time with these top entrepreneurs.

9:17 And out in the world, all these entrepreneurs are focused on getting a pretty website, or getting the right business card, or getting some system that generates automated webinars, or something like that, and they think that’s going to be the game-changing thing. And then when you spend time with people who have built really successful companies, one thing funny is they often don’t have a business card. They’re not at all, a lot of them are not tech savvy, a lot of them are not as savvy as you would think.

9:46 But I started to distill what is the essence of these people. And the thing that I discovered was that above everything, they want to be well positioned within their industry as a key person of influence, and they want opportunities coming to them first. So if something really great is happening in their industry, they want to make sure that phone call comes to them. They want to be positioned with maybe 10 other key people of influence who might be entrepreneurs or leaders of other companies, and they want to know what’s going on, and they want to be part of the conversation.

10:18 And I suppose being part of the conversation is the driving desire for a key person of influence, to be really at the center of the conversation of their industry. So then you look at how do they do that. So traveling around with all these top profile entrepreneurs, you discover that they pitch things the same way all the time. So I would go and do radio, and I’d go and do TV and magazines, and you hear them saying the same thing over and over again, so repetitive.

10:45 And they have the way of pitching their business and the way of pitching their products, and they get it down to a perfect few sentences, and they just deliver that again and again and again. It’s very consistent, very repetitive, but you hear them 27 times a day pitching, pitching, pitching. And you also hear them making very snap decisions about others based on the way they pitch, and they can almost tune into, have you pitched this a thousand times, and if you have, I’ll know, and I’ll know that the idea is ready, and if you haven’t, I’ll know, and I’ll know that it’s not ready.

11:18 So that was one of the things I noticed. I also noticed the opportunity to publish content, getting ideas out of their head and into a scalable format, which is published content. I’m not necessarily about books, but I am about the idea that you generate intellectual property, intellectual property into a format that can scale. So blogs, articles, reports. I think one of the big things that I got to take away from your event was not just to write a book, just to write a book, but to write it, to use it to formulate your own ideas, and then you crystallize.

11:48 And then again, you said, you work for the book, this is like, you work for the book, the book doesn’t work for you, the other way around is that your idea isn’t to sell this and retire, it’s that this just ultimately is a vehicle that promotes you. Yeah, so first of all, if no one read the book, it would be worth doing. And it would be worth doing because two reasons. Number one, it crystallizes your ideas and your unique stories and your experiences and your insights.

12:14 And it’s through that writing process that you get to distill it and to crystallize your ideas. Secondly, weirdly, it frees up headspace to have more ideas. I don’t know what it is, but you kind of formulate some ideas about life and about business or about your thing. And you juggle these ideas mentally and you keep having them and you keep sort of dancing around them and looking at them in different ways. When you finally get them out and put them into a book, something shifts in your head where you go, those ideas are safe now.

12:42 They’re in this safe place, the book is there, it’s out, I can always go back to the book, and that is a marker in time of all my best ideas at that time. And then weirdly, your brain then says, all right, I’m ready for some new stuff. And you have another book or you have new ideas. There’s a lot of fear about putting your ideas into a book because you say, well, these are my best ideas. And if I just gave them away to the world for five pounds, then what would I be left with?

13:13 And what actually happens is your best ideas at the time, they get better and deeper and you end up with new ideas. Talk about that scarcity mindset, where you think I got to hold these back. I think you said it best when it was like a cookbook and Jamie Oliver shares his recipes all the time. He’s not proprietary about his content, so why should you be? Well, the idea is that most of, anyone over 30 grew up in this thing called the information age.

13:41 And we were told again and again and again that information is really valuable and that my dad, for example, he had cassette tapes on his office bookshelf and he paid hundreds of dollars for these. He had all these books and he really valued information and he would subscribe to reports and all this sort of stuff. And then when the internet kicked off, a lot of people were out there selling a report or selling an e-book or selling this thing. So there’s this residue in our heads that the information age or the information information is very valuable.

14:16 And the reality is right now, there’s not a lot of information that’s all that valuable anymore because it’s so readily available. Someone says, I’ve got a book with the blueprints for a stealth bomber in it and you go, I’ll look at that later. Or Richard Branson comes out with another book about how he built a billion dollar empire and you go, oh, well, that’s good, but I’ll look at that another time. And we’re just drowning in information. So a lot of people are really worried that if they share their information, then they’re not going to have any value left.

14:49 And the reality is that the most valuable thing these days is implementation, that it’s the process of making something happen. We’re all drowning in ideas, but we’re starved of actually seeing something happen, especially in our own lives. We want something to happen for us. We haven’t enough time to make things happen. There’s all these things we want to get done, all these ideas that we have, but actually getting them done or getting them implemented.

15:13 So one of the things we talk about, which leads into the third piece, productizing, which is share your ideas openly, share your information openly. Let people have that. Let people explore it. Someone who’s just starting up in their journey might put their own time and energy and effort into implementing it, and they were never going to be a customer or a client anyway. But for most people, they’re going to say, actually, could you do it for me?

15:36 So the reality of Jamie Oliver is that we buy his food porn, and we look at the pictures, and we look at the ingredients, and we get excited about this beautiful dish, and we think about how we could make it ourselves. But then we think, there’s a Jamie’s Italian just down the road, and I could go and have someone make it for me. Or we think, I’m going to go down to Sainsbury’s and buy the jar of sauce that’s already made. Right. So that’s an example of him productizing.

16:08 Yeah, he’s productizing. He’s free in free information, then leading to a product. Exactly. So he’s sure enough, if you want to buy the book and make it yourself, you can. But more often than not, what we want is things done for us.

16:19 And you said that many people don’t think they have a product. I think you had an example in the book about, maybe it was a plastic surgeon or a doctor who said, I’m just a doctor. And it was like, no, there is a product in there somewhere. Well, if you think about a product, a product is just a way of getting something done. And what people want when they’re buying something is, they want some sort of a result.

16:39 They want some sort of a transformation. So, you know, this microphone is a way of getting something done. It’s a way of capturing audio and someone’s productized that. But other people have productized it, and some people have productized it in different ways, different qualities. You know, there are services that are, you know, where someone could come out and capture the audio for you and then they go and do the editing.

17:02 So, but essentially what you want done is you want an end result of a video on YouTube. So, there’s multiple ways to get to that end result. And there’s solutions that are completely done for you solutions. There are solutions that I’ll do a bit, you do a bit, and there are solutions that I’ll buy the equipment and do it all myself. But essentially you want the same thing done, a video on YouTube.

17:23 So, the idea is that entrepreneurs need to really understand what is it that the end user, what is it that the customer, the client wants done in their life. So, I don’t go, you know, a accountant will say to me, well, people buy my time. And I go, they don’t buy your time, because if they turned up and you pulled out the Scrabble board, and you said, let’s play Scrabble for 300 pounds an hour, you know, no one’s going to sit there and say, oh, fantastic, I’m really happy with that use of time.

17:51 They’re going to say, what I want is I want tax advice. I want, you know, strategic advice around my business. I don’t want to play Scrabble. So, you get very clear about what someone wants. So, I say, you know, I say that to the degree that you’re clear about what people are trying to get done in the world, is the degree that you can create product.

18:11 Okay. I’m thinking about my own business as we go through here. Cool. And I would probably be asking you advice all the time, because I was just thinking, like, people when they watch London Real for an hour, an hour and a half, they’re not getting just, you know, me and a guest talking, they’re getting something. And that could be an inspiration or a motivation or, you know, something that they’re going to get.

18:28 And I guess that’s more of the product than it’s just a video. Yeah. I think people, well, I think it’s all in the name with you. You know, this concept of real, I think people have become very tired with the idea that, you know, that we see the veneer, we see the Donald Trump and the limousine and the jet and the helicopter and the Trump Tower and all that sort of stuff. And we see the you’re fired moments in the boardroom.

18:51 But there’s also part of us that knows that that’s a set. And that’s, you know, that’s a for show. And then the question is, well, what are the, you know, what’s he really like? And, you know, what’s what’s this person really like? So I think, you know, you’re offering an insight into some interesting people and what’s going on behind the scenes for them.

19:12 And, you know, as you say, in your sort of show reel or on your TED Talk, actually, where people get very sick of the sound bites and here you are doing an hour to two hours with someone picking their brains. You know, it’s a very different format that isn’t easy to access on mainstream media. You go behind the scenes and you really, you know, that person who wants to unwind and watch, you know, something that’s got a bit more depth to it, you know, then you’ve created that.

19:42 Right. But I haven’t created a product yet. So we’ll talk about that later. Now, let’s go on to the fourth P. Is that profile?

19:49 The fourth P is profile. Okay. So it’s about attracting opportunities that are right for you. So what I’m not interested in with profile is I’m not interested in the idea that you’re stopped on the street or that you’re on the front page of the, you know, Daily Mail or something like that. What I’m interested with profile is do you attract the right opportunities?

20:07 So, you know, if your business sells to CTOs, then the definition of a great profile would be that CTOs come to you. We don’t have enough time anymore to chase everything that we need. If we’re not playing somewhat of an attraction game, then, you know, we just run out of time. So the idea is that with the right profile, you know, let’s say that at any given time, only one in 10,000 people is the right person who wants to be doing business with you right now.

20:36 You know, how the hell are you going to go out and talk to 10,000 people as opposed to having the right profile where those opportunities come to you. So we want to be able to attract those opportunities with the right profile. Okay. And that can mean online presence, and that could be like a TED Talk or… It’s a few things.

20:51 Okay. So, you know, there’s traditional media, which is, you know, it’s a bit silly to even call it traditional media anymore. I think there were certainly five years where traditional media was behind the game, but, you know, these organizations are very savvy now. They’re integrated online, offline. You know, they caught up, and they’re well caught up.

21:11 So they’re just media, but they’re the big budget media, or, you know, what would otherwise be called traditional media. And then there’s social media. So, you know, what happens when I Google you is a great definition of profile. You know, you are who Google says you are. And then there’s winning awards and having the right associations, which helps with profile.

21:31 So there’s a few different aspects. And then there’s public appearances. So speaking at the right conferences, showing up in the right parties or the right places, you know, it’s all part of profile. And it’s funny, if you’re listening to this, you might be like, well, I run this tiny business somewhere here, but I disagree. I mean, you can raise your profile in your niche or your micro niche, and we’ll talk about that later.

21:50 But you can do it with a few steps or a few planning cases, right? Yeah, you can. And there’s no greater niche than what happens when I Google you. Right. Because, you know, let’s zoom right down to a situation where profile becomes very helpful.

22:05 Imagine I’m sitting there having a coffee with a big breakthrough potential partner. And the conversation is flowing, and they say, you know, we would love to do something with you, and I want to get you in front of the board, and I want to, you know, I want to vouch for you within the organization, and I want to make things happen, and I think this is going to turn into a great partnership. And, you know, the excitement’s there, and then on the way home in the cab, on the way back to the office, that person pulls out their smartphone, and they just Google your name.

22:33 And all that excitement is either going to build because, you know, great things come up. It’s going to turn to confusion because all sorts of random stuff comes up, or it’s going to turn to disappointment because nothing really comes up. So if you’re even talking about, you know, niching, the ultimate test for just niche is just the niche of your name. If you can’t win that, then there’s nothing much more that you can win. Right.

22:58 What happens when they pull up ayahuasca with your name? Then what do you do? Well, it depends on their views on that. True. They might call you back for a ceremony or something.

23:09 True. I know. I might get more kudos that way. But it’s funny because I am checking profiles of people all the time because I get tons of guest suggestions. I get guest ideas.

23:17 And I immediately go to Google, of course, and Twitter profiles. Like, I just, it tells me a lot about someone. It tells me if they’re engaged on, you know, a social media platform like that. Do they have followers? Do they have at least a decent profile?

23:29 Yeah. And I can tell a lot about a guest in two minutes. Oh, yeah. It’s so transparent. You know, you can even, even if they are on Twitter, some people have 100,000 followers, but not a single retweet.

23:40 Yeah. And immediately you say, well, what’s up with that? Yeah, that’s obvious, too. And if you Google your name, it’s danielprecy.com. So you’re just like, boom, right?

23:48 And Amazon, you know, the other benefit of having a book is, is Amazon is obviously a highly indexed location. And you talk about that another reason to publish. So let’s just get to the fifth piece, which is partnerships. Yeah. So the idea behind partnership is that my belief is that there’s no such thing as a self-made millionaire or a successful person who acts in isolation.

24:09 That success these days is a team sport. You know, the buzzword is obviously collaboration. And goals, dreams, ideas, growth stories, they become very plausible with the right partners involved. So if I said to you, look, I’m going to launch a brand new product and we’re aiming to get 10,000 buyers in the first three months, you might say, well, I’m not sure if that sounds credible or plausible. And if I said to you, well, actually, we’re partnering with Richard Branson and Virgin, and they’re going to package it in with every flight.

24:43 Well, you say, well, why only 10,000? Because with the right partner, the goal didn’t just become plausible. It actually became implausible that the number would be so low. So what most businesses are lacking is the right partnership. You know, the right celebrity with a product brand, especially a consumer brand, changes everything.

25:03 The right distribution partner changes everything. You know, the right product partner. So, you know, you mentioned before about you having a product. In many ways, you’ve got these 10 million views or 40 million views, depending on the different media that you operate. And in many ways, your product is distribution, and there are other people who have products that would kill for that sort of distribution.

25:28 So, you know, perhaps it’s not about inventing your own product or creating your own product, but it’s about having a product partnership in place. So Roger Federer is not someone who’s sitting there inventing tennis rackets or watches or champagne. He’s partnering with Moet, and he’s partnering with Rolex, and, you know, he’s partnering with Nike and all of those sorts of things. And all the big success stories, whether it’s Trump or Branson or all these, they break through partnerships all along the way.

25:54 All the way through. In retrospect, it might tell the story, you know, or in their biography that they did it all themselves, but it’s not really intense. Yeah, and you might hear some of them saying that, but if they’re, a lot of them, if they’re honest, you know, they’ll talk about breakthrough partnerships. Okay. And so those are kind of the five P’s there.

26:13 They’re very interesting. Also, it’s important in that order, right? There’s a syntax to it. So if you have a great pitch, a really honed and refined pitch, then the content for what you publish almost writes itself. If you’re unclear about your pitch and you can’t even verbalize what it is that you’re up to in the world, then it’s very difficult to write.

26:35 If you’ve got great published content, another word for published content is intellectual property, and intellectual property is the DNA of products these days. So underneath every, you know, underneath Google is an algorithm that’s intellectual property. It’s a form of intellectual property called codes or algorithms. And then if you go under other products, you have insights, and that insight is based upon some sort of intellectual property. So through the publishing process, through writing, you’re actually developing ideas into intellectual property.

27:08 You’re noticing methods. You’re noticing case studies. You’re noticing stories. You’re getting insights, and then you create great product. When you’ve got great product and you can demonstrate it and you can sell it, then it makes sense to invest the time, energy, effort, and money into raising profile, because all of that stuff does cost.

27:27 So having a PR firm costs money or hosting events costs money or attending certain events costs money. You know, so, you know, none of that makes sense if you don’t have a product. I know a guy who was a client of ours in the USA who he had the experience of going on Oprah. And for the week after the show, millions of people were trying to get in touch, Googling his name and all this sort of stuff. Obviously, Oprah moment, pretty incredible moment.

27:58 But then it instantly dried up. He described it like a rainstorm in the desert where it poured and then it evaporated. And he said, I wish I’d just had a product. If I had had any product, I would have been like a hundred grand moment. He said, if I had had a book or if I had had anything to sell, the amount of spike of traffic on his website and all of those things, he could have done something.

28:20 So that’s an instance of profile coming before everything else. Yeah, so he had profile before product and it didn’t work. And then finally, those partnerships won’t happen if you don’t have some sort of a profile. So you get all the way to the board, you know, and they want to do a deal with you. And then someone picks up their smartphone and Googles you and there’s no profile there.

28:42 And then the conversation when you leave the room is, this person seems a bit new, a bit green. They’ve got no profile at this. Why don’t we do some Googling around, some searching around and see who else we could work with? So they start looking around for who does have the profile. Right.

28:59 And there you go. And that’s why there’s a syntax to it. Okay. And this is, when did you finish this book? It’s quite a while ago.

29:06 It was five years. A key person of influence came out five years ago. Okay. And did you, I mean, as far as your company and, you know, the events that I went to and the kind of that mental program you do after that, did that come on the back of that book? Or was that something you were already thinking about?

29:23 It came around the same time. So I had this events company that we were bringing these top entrepreneurs from around the world into London. And I’d been cooking up this idea that technology leveraging personal brands was like going to be a big thing. And I just sort of, you know, I had this analogy that I would talk about called the singer and the microphone. That in order to be successful, you have to, number one, have a great singing voice and number two, be leveraged through technology.

29:57 But if you’re no good at singing, then no amount of technology is going to help you. In fact, it’ll damage you. You know, for me, if I started singing right now, people would immediately stop watching this video. We could try it. Right?

30:12 We’re not trying it. No. Kylie Minogue. No. But if I have a beautiful singing voice, then the people who have the technology will come to me and figure out how to amplify it.

30:26 So Alicia Keys, you know, she turns up in a little bar, let’s say, and she starts playing and singing very, very quickly. Someone’s coming along and saying, we’ve got to record this. We’ve got to get it out. We’ve got to distribute it. Now, what I discovered in 2009, 2010 is that everyone lost their mind about technology.

30:43 Everyone was sitting there going, we need to get a Twitter handle and we need to broadcast this message out to everyone and we need to get this stuff out. And it was the equivalent, what I would see, of having a bad singing voice and trying to sing badly into a microphone, the internet. And I thought, you know, the actual real money is not going to go to people who know technology because everyone’s going to know technology. It’s going to be entire technology companies in Eastern Europe and in India, and that’s going to become the easy and the commoditized piece.

31:13 The piece that will be decommoditized is what the hell are you talking about? And actually, the ability to give birth to an idea and actually make something worth talking about, it’s not going to be the actual broadcasting piece. So it’s the voice. And that’s where that idea came from five years ago. So the book came out.

31:34 We put together a prototype group of 40 entrepreneurs to see if we could improve their ability to communicate their message and if we could develop insights. And we also kind of became really fascinated in 2010 by the idea that the next big success stories were not going to be coders, 19-year-old coders in their basements. Okay. Because that ship has sailed or that thing has died? Yeah, because that was all about building the microphones.

32:04 Okay. But if you, you know, the thing that we discovered very quickly on this journey is you take someone who’s 43 years old, who’s had 20 years working in hospitals and working with particular conditions and parameters and all this sort of stuff, and they have deep level insights, deep, deep level insights about how to transform the system and what needs to happen and, you know, all of these insights. But they don’t know what to do with it, and they’re too busy to do anything with it.

32:33 So, you know, along our journey, we’ve just discovered so many really powerful, cool business ideas and insights, working with the last people you would think would have them. Right. And this is the micro niche kind of in a way. Yeah. So we’ve, you know, one thing you say in this book is that most people think they don’t have anything, but in fact, your entire history of your life is your asset, right?

32:59 Yeah. Which is hard for most people to think about. Well, so there’s five P’s in the book, but if there was a sixth, it would be perspective. So we lose perspective because it’s our own life. You know, if you were to watch a movie 24 hours a day, you know, you’d lose perspective of whether it’s a good movie or not.

33:14 It would just, you’d have your good days and your bad days. The description that I have around perspective is you climb a mountain and you start out and you see this amazing mountain. You climb, climb, climb, climb, climb. As you climb, you struggle, you know, you get frustrated. Sometimes you think, why am I doing this?

33:31 Sometimes you admire the view and you think this is great. And sometimes, you know, you get a breath of fresh air and it feels good. And then you get up to the top of the mountain and the one thing you cannot see if you’re on top of a mountain is the mountain. So you completely lose perspective of the mountain. And what we notice with a lot of entrepreneurs is they massively overlook their own story, their own insights, and what they’ve got a view of is what everyone else is doing.

33:55 So they’re standing on this mountain of value and all they’re thinking about is like, oh, I just saw someone who’s got like a taxi sharing app and I’ve got to drop what I’m doing and make a taxi sharing app. You know, I just discovered someone who, a friend of mine is making some money on Airbnb and they’ve got this like apartment and they’re renting it out and I’ve got to go off and do this Airbnb thing. And they’re just running around looking what other people are doing and they’ve completely lost sight of the own value that they’re standing on, which is natural because you lose perspective.

34:22 So, you know, one of the first things that we love to do with people is just to try and retune them into a bit of, you know, their own story, their own struggle, their own network, their own insights, their own case studies, their own methods, their own recipes, and actually say, look, let’s just detune you from what everyone else is doing and actually figure out what you know. How do you do that? So it’s a bit of a process. Part of the process is pitching.

34:51 So when we take people through the pitching architecture, they can’t really look at what other people are doing because they have to look at what their own story is. There’s a part of every pitch called authority, and it’s about your story, it’s your backstory, and all of those sorts of things. And we do a whole day with people, which is about perspective. And we actually go back to some of their… We actually… One of the first things we do is we look at some of their critical moments before age 10.

35:16 We look at some of the, you know, the peak moments in their teens. And we’re looking for themes. You know, we’re looking for some of the things that are those moments of joy, moments of frustration, turning points, moments where big decisions were made about life. You know, and it’s funny because, you know, a lot of people, whatever they’re doing now actually has a holographic resonance going back to like age 10. You know, you see these stories of…

35:49 You know, in Singapore we’ve got this guy who’s a chiropractor, and he’s out there telling people about how he does high-energy chiropractic and he restores high performance and all this sort of stuff. And when we did this activity with him, because that sounds like a good thing to say, you know, peak performance. And when we did this activity with him, we actually said, give us some moments like before age 10 where you felt pure joy and we made important decisions about life.

36:12 And he describes this moment of wandering down onto this pebble beach completely alone, alone on the beach, and feeling super grounded and super connected to nature and picking up a stone and just feeling this cold stone in his hand and feeling really, really in tune with the waves and the beach and the stone and all this. And he decided that that was one of the most amazing feelings to be centered and grounded and still. So we said, let’s change your pitch from peak performance to restoring people to a sense of grounded stillness.

36:49 Because no one’s talking about that. Right, right. And that’s something that resonates with him. And totally resonates with him. And people feel that congruency when he pitches.

36:56 Well, it was like the whole room shifted, where when he was talking about peak performance, the room is sitting there going, yeah, yeah, okay. We’ve heard that before. It’s a copycat, yeah. And then as soon as he talks about, he says, you know, we live these busy lives and what’s missing is a sense of grounded stillness. And when I do my chiropractic, I return people to that sense of grounded stillness.

37:24 And they walk out of my chiropractic session feeling completely grounded and still. And the whole room just went, how do I book a session? It’s powerful. Yeah. It’s funny, I had another guest on here recently called Ty Lopez.

37:39 And he has something called your Orwellian destiny. And he talks about these things. But some of the things are really funny. It was, what did you want to do when you were eight years old? What do you, what do you get complimented on that you’re good at?

37:49 That was like, that’s weird. You know, someone’s like, oh, you’re a really good cook or you’re really good this. Because that, that you can’t make up. What do people say you’re good at? And then it was a couple other things like, you know, maybe what have you done successfully for five years?

38:02 What type of business? Yeah. And then intersect these things together. Yeah. And that’s a way of tuning someone into their story.

38:07 So they get some perspective. And, you know, it’s just, it’s anything at all that gets you to that point where you go, you know, why am I looking around like I’m sitting on stories and inside. I mean, look at your story. Your stories strikes a chord with so many people, you know, working in a corporate environment, you know, ticking all the boxes, you know, what university promised, what my parents had, had, had said and, and sitting there with all these clients and all that and going, you know what, it ticks all the boxes and it’s just meaningless to me and it’s not ticking my box.

38:39 And, you know, you tell that story and that Branson moment, that, that Shalei moment that you tell and, and then, you know, people suddenly connect with what you do. And what’s, what’s amazing about that is that, you know, you’ve been sitting on that story the whole time and, you know, there’s the, I’m not saying you do this, but, but there’s the, you know, the easy trap to fall into where you start going, Oh, what’s all the, you know, you’ve got this steady stream of guests coming in and sitting in the chair and talking about all the cool stuff they’re doing. And it would be very easy for you to go, I need to go off and do that thing.

39:14 And I need to get involved in that thing. And in actual fact, the most powerful thing is just sharing this moment that you had in a ski Shalei. And that’s what, that’s what gets 150,000 people at last count to, to tune in on your story. Right. Isn’t that strange that we don’t even see that, that all of our IP is right within us and our story ends up becoming the product and it just could become, you talked about it, the guy that, you know, that talks about buying a boat and how it’s going to change your life.

39:40 And he, you know, he’s like, I don’t know anything. All I know is that I love to fix up boats and buy boats and tell people to buy boats. And then he ended up writing a book about it. Yeah. Honey, let’s buy a boat.

39:49 Great book. And so it’s just really fascinating. And I’m slowly starting to realize that my story has value, but I would have never thought I did. Because you lose perspective. Right.

39:58 Right. I want to get some subscribe soon, but how is business? What’s it like running this company where you, cause you bought a bunch of people on stage when I was at your event where you coach people for nine months, you turn them from, you know, this up into this, it must be challenging, it must be frustrating. It must be hugely rewarding. Yeah.

40:14 Is this, is it, did you get what you bought into, to, to, I mean, did you know what you were doing five, six years ago? Well, what’s interesting is it’s not me. We have a process and it’s a nine month process. And I’ve, I’ve gotten to the point where I just trust the process now. So people go through a set of activities and a set of outcomes and we break things down into lots of little steps and they work with some of the world’s most incredible and top entrepreneurs and leaders and none of them are me.

40:41 So I’m kind of, you know, where I feature in this is a friend, you know, someone who’s on a journey alongside them, but certainly not a guru or, you know, someone who needs to instruct them on what to do. It’s more an environment that’s going to bring out good stuff. So I just trust the environment. I believe that environment dictates performance and we have a great environment and outcomes, the performance and it’s, and, you know, we get famous on the success of our clients.

41:08 We’re not trying to get famous ourselves. We love seeing our clients do well. Did it give me what I wanted? On some days, yes. And some days I sit there and I go, this is totally mind boggling.

41:19 And I sit there and I go, I can’t believe that that business came out of this. And, you know, one, you know, one client’s just raising an enormous amount of money for their business at the moment. And, you know, we’re part of making that happen. And, you know, other clients are saying that their life has completely changed and we have people who have been able to go from working really nasty, horrible kind of jobs in businesses and now they’re living in idyllic locations like Thailand, selling products into countries all over the world.

41:46 So we have all of that. On other days I lose perspective. On other days I sit there and I go, you know, what am I dealing with entrepreneurs for? I should be getting, you know, a great corporate job. I don’t know, you know, I just lose perspective.

41:59 And sometimes I think I wish I had been a snowboarding DJ and, you know, wouldn’t it have been great if I had been better at snowboarding and DJing and I lose perspective myself. That’s good. That means you’re human. Totally. That means your story is even more believable, you know.

42:14 Now that you say that, it’s funny. There’s a part where, you were a really good speaker, by the way. I really did enjoy the event when you talked. But you put this kind of graph up. It was like this long tail looking graph and you kind of told the story.

42:27 It’s called The Entrepreneur Journey. And I never really seen it told that way. And I’ll probably play some footage of this on this clip or something. But it was this kind of thing where you say, you know, there’s these five kind of different regions where people are. And one is the startup where it’s just an idea.

42:39 One is the struggle when it’s like one to three people in the wilderness. Yeah, the wilderness. Yeah, maybe I’m in the wilderness. Then it becomes like a lifestyle business where you can kind of sit back and enjoy. And the percentages are dropping here, right?

42:50 Yeah, absolutely. It’s like 70% of them are in the struggle. In the wilderness, yeah. And then you get to this lifestyle business where it’s making good money enough to live pretty well. But it’s still not scaled.

43:00 Yeah, the lifestyle business. So I’ll talk you through the lifestyle. Yeah, I’ll walk you through it, please. So the predictable journey and entrepreneurship, I’ve interviewed 4,000 entrepreneurs. And it’s way, normally in groups of eight.

43:10 So this was for your first book, The Entrepreneur Journey. It’s just over the last five years. Okay. See, in the last five years, we’ve taken on 1,500 clients on the growth accelerator around the world. But we’ve actually interviewed over 4,000 people in order to get those 1,500.

43:29 And some of them, it’s just not been a good fit. So what we’re looking for, we don’t have a magic wand. We have to have a good starting point with the client. We have to have a good initial connection. We have to have a good buy-in.

43:41 So a few things have to happen in order for what we do to work. So I’ve interviewed all these entrepreneurs, thousands of them. I don’t know what I’ve been doing in my spare time. I’ve only interviewed about 300. Well, when they get all the way up to the other end, they come on your show.

43:57 So the journey is way more predictable than you think. And it basically goes that you start up and you think about that first product or that first client and what it’s going to be like to be post-revenue and you think, okay, great, I’ll start this thing. And for some companies that are planning to scale, that startup phase might last a year or two years sometimes. For some people who leave a job and they’re going to go off and start a business, that startup phase can be a week where they’re just buying some equipment and getting a business card and putting up a blog.

44:34 But it’s the startup phase, pre-revenue. And then you get your first customer, first client, and you’re in this first stage called wilderness and it’s the struggle. And it’s basically this stage where you realize, what the hell have I done? And you go, I’m going to have to win clients like every week. And how the hell am I going to win?

44:51 Or I was thinking about winning one client, now I’ve got to win a client every week or a client every month or a client every day, whatever the business is. And you’re sitting there going, oh, how am I going to feel like I’m on this treadmill? And then the reality sets in of how am I going to afford staff and people? I’m just going to keep this as like me and no overheads and I’ll really keep it small. And wilderness is about survival and it’s about the ability to survive long-term.

45:16 So if you think about the wilderness, there’s enough there to survive. There’s enough there to survive. You could survive there 20 years if you wanted to. You roam around looking for berries, eat the berries off one tree and then roam around and look for more berries. But it’s a stressful life and it’s not really sustainable.

45:31 You can do it, but it takes its toll. You can do it, but the feeling is survival. So the feeling is, I’m not getting ahead really, I’m just surviving. And then eventually we discovered that there’s this little, lovely little zone called lifestyle businesses. What everyone thinks is that the lifestyle business is going to be a one person business, but in actual fact, it’s three to 12 people.

45:52 So when you hit three to 12 people with a caveat of a hundred thousand pounds revenue per person or what would it be? $160,000, $170,000 US dollars per person. Call it $150,000 per person. When you hit this $150,000 per person and you hit this three to 12 people. Right, so 10 people, one and a half million dollars in revenue.

46:15 So yeah, it can pay the salaries and you know, for the founder. And you get a little bit of differentiation in the roles. So you’ve got, you know, this guy is off there selling and he just focuses on sales and that’s all he’s thinking about. And then she does the delivery and that’s all she thinks about, just making sure those clients are happy. And then, you know, what you do is you go out and front the brand and win the front end relationship and then sometimes you do some operational stuff and you kind of bounce between the roles.

46:45 But now you’ve got a little bit of differentiation. You’ve got that part-time admin person so no one’s worried about the admin. And then you’ve got this beautiful little team and you’ve got 150 grand revenue per person and you’re sitting there going, actually this is really good. This is great. And the feeling…

47:00 You can buy a kind of fancy car and… You can, yeah, you can lease a fancy car. Right? So you can sit there and you don’t feel like you’re surviving anymore. You go off and you get yourself a nice BMW or a Tesla and you sit there and you go, okay, this is great.

47:16 And you also discover that you can actually start at 10, finish at 4, you can take Fridays off if you want and all this cool stuff happens. Especially, you know, the feeling of that business is so cool because it’s like this band of rebels who love each other. And you’ve got these, you know, four or five people and you, you know, a typical lifestyle business. We go down to our favorite cafe on a Monday morning, we all have omelets and talk about the week ahead.

47:43 And then we all go off to our own houses or our hot desks and then we do cool work all through the week. This sounds like a movie. And then on Friday afternoon we all meet up at our favorite bar, we have a bottle of champagne and we talk about how cool it was this week that we, you know, we did this thing. Where’s the struggle, man? That doesn’t describe my work.

48:06 Well, it’s this lovely if you can hit lifestyle. I mean, you know, that’s the thing. I was really fortunate. I worked for an entrepreneur who had a lifestyle business and that was my first two years from 19 to 21. I worked under his wing.

48:21 We lived and worked in this massive mansion in this idyllic beach location. We sold products up and down the Australian coastline. Okay. Is that a bad place to start though? This was cool because I knew that that existed.

48:37 In fact, I didn’t just know it existed, I knew the blueprint. So when I launched my business at 21, we went from zero to $1.3 million in the first 12 months because I kicked off with four people on day one. It was me plus a brilliant sales guy and a brilliant what I call Swiss Army Knife, which can do 25 functions. And we had this great older ops guy who was well known and we had this admin person who was part-time and we kicked off with this great little team and burst into the tiny little niche market and we did $1.3 million in the first 12 months and we had maybe six people by the end of the year.

49:15 Okay. So you knew to scale over the struggle. I just knew the blueprint. Okay. I’d worked under the wing of this lifestyle entrepreneur for two years.

49:22 Okay. And you had a little capital or some equity to throw around. I literally started the business with a $7,000 credit card. A credit card story. You’re not another credit card story.

49:29 I just started on a credit card. I took out an ad in the paper back when ads in the paper were a good idea. I took out an ad in the paper and these days it would be like doing $7,000 worth of Facebook ads. But I took an ad in the paper. We generated a bunch of leads.

49:46 We sold to those leads and then we just did it every week. So every Sunday we had this ad in the paper. Every Monday we had 75 leads to call. We called them up. We made the sales and then we had a great time.

50:01 We started work at 10 and finished at four and we had breakfast and champagne. We partied together and we were a band of rebels and we were 22, 23 years old. So you can imagine we just had a great time. I was living in a four story townhouse, two cars. Okay. So this is the lifestyle business now.

50:20 And it’s funny how I was looking through your numbers on these things. They’re all like very accurate. Like you can really say about the revenue per head, what these businesses are. There’s going to be exceptions. For each country.

50:31 For each country but also for each business. So something like a restaurant, the numbers are going to have to be different because you’ve got a really high food cost and a high lease cost. I work off of the traditional professional services model business. So the most basic kind of what makes up most businesses that are in this wilderness zone wanting to be lifestyle is some sort of a professional services, some sort of a intangible, some sort of a, you know, we show up and we do something for someone and it’s somewhat productized.

51:03 Certainly by the time you get to a lifestyle, it’s productized. Okay. And tell us what happens after lifestyle. What are the two other stages here? So here’s the really, there’s three more stages and I’ll be real, I’ll expedite them because not many people get there.

51:16 But at about $2 million and about 12 people on the team, what happens is the entrepreneur or the partners get together and they say, we could scale this thing. We could be the next Richard Branson. We could be the next Mark Zuckerberg. You know, we maybe we’re onto something big here. And I have this conversation about, you know, let’s build a 10 million, 20 million, $100 million business.

51:42 So they take the team past 12, 13 people, 14 people, 15 people, and they start selling the vision of we’re going to be a big business. So by the time we’ve got the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th person, the people who are joining the company are thinking about this big vision, about this big professional organization that’s going to take on corporates and is going to win big business and is going to scale globally and all this sort of stuff. But the 12 guys at the beginning, they’re sitting there going, but what do you mean I have to book a time in your diary?

52:14 You know, we’re mates, we’re friends. We remember the good old days. We remember the good old days. We’re all together. Where’s the omelets and the champagne, right?

52:20 And starting at 10 and finishing at four and all this kind of stuff. Like, how good was that? So what happens is that there becomes this huge tension. And in the lifestyle business, all the energy goes into the client. It’s a given that we just love each other.

52:35 We’re a band of rebels. We’re a band of family. And we just love each other. And we’re just going to put all of our energy into the market and the clients. As soon as you go into the next phase called the desert, which is a very nasty little struggle.

52:46 So the wilderness, you can survive for 20 years. The desert, not so much. You now have overheads. You have infights. You have HR issues.

52:54 You have all sorts of weird stuff. Tom’s sleeping with Sally. You know, everyone’s not meant to know, but everyone knows. Someone’s stealing stationery out of the cupboard, but we can’t figure out who. And it’s just a horrible thing to even have to think about.

53:08 Someone’s going to establish themselves as a leader. And everyone else is going to go, you’re not the leader. Someone’s going to say that they’re a manager. And I don’t like being managed. I like flat structure.

53:19 Sounds like the office now that I think about it. It’s just this weird zone between 12 and 50 people. And half the people hate the growing up. They never had to book a time in the founder’s diary. That never happened.

53:35 And now they have to book a time. It’s disgusting. So they’re pulling the place apart. They’re wanting to bring it back down to the way it used to be and get rid of all these new fancy people who wear shoes. And then you hit 50 people and all that ends.

53:53 Right. And that’s the desert because you can’t survive there unless you get over that. You’re on the way up or you’re on the way down when you’re in the desert. And I see this with the desert. So you can only cross the desert.

54:00 You can’t survive in the desert. You can cross the desert. Right. And I see this with the tech companies in here for our other show, Silicon Real. I mean, getting from that 10 to the 70 employees.

54:09 That’s where you get. And that’s where you also have to time your VC rounds. Yeah, exactly. So normally to cross the desert, you need some funding and you probably need one or two acquisitions in order to cross in a timely way. I mean, look, you can always find the example of the company that just kind of like started up and then it was 50 people.

54:27 And that’s the final stage, which we call unicorns. But once you cross the desert, you end up in this next phase called performance. And performance is lifestyle is now behind us. We are a performance organization. We’re a performance company.

54:41 We’re 50 people and we are now a small company, small corporate. And we win business off the big guys and they hate us. And now we’re back to being a professional team. We’ve got a manager and a leader. We’ve got a board.

54:55 We’ve got a chairman. We got everyone’s got a job description. It’s grown up. It’s a grown up. We’ve got an onboarding process.

55:02 When someone joins, we got out. The leader has now had to fire 15 people. So now they’re used to firing and they can spot poor performance quickly. So they get rid of it quickly as opposed to letting it linger and linger and linger. So suddenly it’s a performance organization and the bank is willing to win loan money and the investors are willing to put in more money.

55:23 And someone’s inquiring seriously about licensing or franchising and all this cool stuff happens. And now you’re a performance business. If you’re the entrepreneur behind that, this is where you have a Porsche 911 and a Tesla and a big car and a chalet and all the stuff. Because you’re the entrepreneur behind a performance business. Mind you, you won’t own it all.

55:44 You’ll own maybe 30, 40%. Yeah, probably less. Because you had to do two acquisitions and you had to get some funding. Yeah. And maybe there’s some partners.

55:52 So all this stuff happens. You become a performance business, you’re a grown up business, you’re a professional business and now you’re in that different category. And then finally there’s the last category of business which is called the unicorn. And unicorn is what everyone’s obsessed by. So Facebooks and Googles are the biggest unicorns.

56:14 And then you’ve got salesforce.com and you’ve got Workday and all the Uber and Evernote and these kind of billion dollar start up businesses. And then to a lesser degree you’ve also got businesses that basically just grow double to triple digit growth for seven years running. More than 250,000 pounds per head. So four, five hundred thousand US dollars per head. And if you can do that, I mean you are a unicorn.

56:42 You are a very, very, very rare commodity. Most unicorns are normally started out of corporate. So typically if a new brand pops onto the market you could almost bet that it came out of a corporate. But not the ones you just mentioned. Well some of them, salesforce.com came out of Oracle.

57:02 But the others didn’t. Yeah, no. And so I think when you were at the event you said something like when someone pitches me a unicorn I walk away. I mean do you think that we have a media bias and we get really obsessed with these unicorns and everyone tries to get the next one? It’s no different to the lottery.

57:17 You know, once those lottery numbers are drawn and you see that person who won the lottery and then we become obsessed. What was their story? Oh, you know, they picked 27 because their mother’s birthday was the 27th of March and they also picked three because of the march and then they put their anniversary. Oh, that’s the key. I’ve got to put my birthdays and my anniversaries as my numbers.

57:38 I’m going to change my lottery strategy. You know, and it’s like wait a second. The lottery was drawn. They came out on top. There’s nothing to reverse engineer here.

57:48 They’re a lottery winner. There’s another way of saying that. They’re a statistical anomaly. Okay. So I’ll make that a very real statement.

57:56 We look at these entrepreneurs who have built billion dollar businesses. Right, and we’ve been talking about Branson so we’re supporting the media bias. Exactly. So let’s talk Branson, right? So let’s talk Branson.

58:04 Branson was at the right place at the right time in the right industry. You know, when music came along and he was in the right place to disrupt the industry, he had the right risk profile. I’ll absolutely give you that. I mean, something about Branson is totally comfortable getting himself through 30, 40 million pounds into debt in the 70s. Yeah.

58:22 Great book. I forgot the first book that he wrote, but it’s fantastic. Yeah, Losing My Virginia. Losing My Virginia. Yeah, and looking at the airlines and the battle.

58:28 Exactly. But here’s the interesting thing with Branson, right? If we’re going to talk about Branson being this amazing entrepreneur, and I hope he isn’t watching this. He might be. He might be.

58:37 But the interesting thing with Branson is that he sells the company for 500 million. He’s forced into the sale because on the other side of the world, someone’s floated and made this huge amount of money. They’re doing acquisitions and they’re buying up the music industry. So he sells for 500 million and he puts it into an airline and the airline kind of breaks even and kind of does its thing. And 500 million in 1992, a lot of money.

59:00 A lot of money. He had to sell to support the airline. He had to sell because of a seagull. A seagull went through the engine as they were trying to get their insurance and they were doing the test for the insurance and he was uninsured. The seagull goes through the engine.

59:15 250,000 pound bill. He’s 34 million pound in debt. Kootz is foreclosing on him. Lloyd’s is refinancing. British Airways is doing dirty checks.

59:24 Yeah, all of that sort of stuff. And it’s all too much. And then along comes the offer, 500 million to give us the Virgin Records. He sells the baby, right? And, you know, okay, he goes off and he’s got this 500 million cash.

59:39 So a lot of money in 1992. And then interestingly, nothing he does then works. So yes, okay, the airline kind of works and it washes its face. But it doesn’t work work, right? It’s not like this, you know, sort of thing that just goes up and up and up and up.

59:54 If you had to put 500 million pounds into property, he would probably have similar net worth today if he had just bought up all the houses in London or something like that. Yeah, London, definitely. But then he kind of like he gets into like a hundred different businesses. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t work. But he’s sitting on 500 million and he’s like tries Cola and it doesn’t work and he tries vodka and it doesn’t work.

1:00:18 And all this stuff doesn’t work. And then he goes into the airline industry in Australia and starts a discount airline in Australia. And it’s kind of going to work. And it’s kind of like got a bit of buzz, but it’s very small. It’s only a few planes and it’s, you know, they they pre-sell all these million tickets for $50 each and they raise $50 million that way and they’re kind of leasing a couple of planes.

1:00:41 And then 9-11 happens. And airline industry devastated and little does Branson know, but that there’s only two big airlines in Australia, Anset and Qantas. Anset falls over, leaving a 50% gap in the market. And Virgin goes, and goes, go, hi. Now, you can’t plan that.

1:01:00 He just literally, and then from there he sells out and makes another billion dollars, right? So he’s had some very, very lucky moments and he’s positioned himself very luckily. But, you know, what do you want to learn from the story? I mean, there’s some great stuff Branson talks about and he talks about building team and culture and he talks about, you know, all this wonderful stuff and stuff that I really buy into. Right. But the exits and lottery tickets.

1:01:25 But the 500 million pounds, right place, right time, right industry. Right seagull. Right seagull. Forced him to sell in a weird way with maybe the right time. Exactly.

1:01:35 And forced him to sell at the right time. Right. And had, you know, had he stayed in the music industry, you know, I mean, had he kept the Virgin music stores and held on to the Virgin stories, he had not been forced into the sale. Branson might have gone bust. Right.

1:01:47 Is that part of, is that the reason you present this entrepreneur journey graph? Are you trying to say a few messages here, one of them being, let’s not focus on the unicorns? Yeah. One of the messages is like, let’s not focus so much on the unicorns. It’s very difficult.

1:02:02 Statistical anomalies are very difficult to reproduce. They’re very, very good to reverse engineer once you see them and talk about all the moments that led up to them. Right. But they’re very hard to reproduce. You make movies about them.

1:02:15 Yeah, exactly. But what I am trying to say is that get yourself out of the wilderness into a lifestyle business. Right. Right. Because anyone can do that.

1:02:23 Right. The times that we live in right now, the fact that YouTube has spent a billion dollars making a platform that allows you to broadcast a message globally and have 10 million people watch it. And that doesn’t cost you anything. In fact, they’ll pay you to do it. That’s a very unique time in history that we live in.

1:02:37 So anyone can build a lifestyle business if they just make a few adjustments to the way they run the business and they learn from others who have done it. Not everyone’s cut out to cross the desert. Something will always break in the desert, always. And you will have a family issue. You’ll have a health issue.

1:02:53 You’ll have a personal finances issue. You’ll have a partnership breakdown. Something will break in the desert. And if you’re up for the challenge of getting over the desert and you can raise the money and the business idea is good enough, yes, you’ve got a shot at crossing the desert and having a performance business. But still, that’s only a small percentage of businesses as well.

1:03:11 In the same way, anyone could be a great tennis player at a local club level and call that lifestyle tennis. But not everyone’s right to have a shot at Wimbledon. Right. Which is performance tennis. So is this a way of you encouraging people to build lifestyle businesses?

1:03:24 Yeah. And what’s great is that if they’re a performance entrepreneur, if someone is genuinely up for a performance entrepreneur, nothing I say will change their mind. Right. They’ll go through the desert. I could tell them that their head will fall off in the middle of the desert and I’ll still go for it.

1:03:36 Right. It’s like, what’s the movie with Peter O’Toole? He goes through the desert in Lawrence of Arabia. Yeah. He has to go through it.

1:03:44 And that is probably the right person to go through the desert. The person who feels they have to. And they say, you know what, this is just something I feel cool to do. It’s a great graph. I’ll probably put some footage of that up while we were talking there.

1:03:55 It’s funny you mentioned YouTube because I had a debate with the BBC about a month ago and there was one of the guys there and we were debating back and forth pretty violently. But at one point I said, I’m not a religious man. Some people pray to different gods in the morning. And I put the YouTube logo up and I said, I pray to YouTube because it is my distribution platform. It is my hard drive.

1:04:13 It is my everything. And so it’s funny how you say that. And I don’t even think you were talking about London Real per se. It’s everyone’s free distribution platform. And with the ideas you talk about in the model and how your story and your microniche, like you said, there’s no excuse not to own that space.

1:04:29 And not to use tech to amplify that. I want to ask you a question. One of my staff members said before I even went to your conference, I even met you, he’s like, Brian, you got to write a book. And I was like, are you kidding me? What am I, a dinosaur?

1:04:41 I broadcast hours of content every week. My face is here. My face is there. I have conversations. It’s video.

1:04:47 It’s a new thing. I wasn’t really thinking about it. Then I went to your event and I read your book and I was with my daughter going home on the tube and I turned to her the other night and I was like, I’m going to write a book. And she’s like, oh, great. Here we go.

1:04:57 And so I’m wondering, first of all, how do you get time to write a book? I mean, you’re a busy guy. Everyone’s busy, but people who are busy write books, Branson writes books. And, you know, it’s a key part of their profile. When you were telling me there, it’s almost like a book converts your ideas into product.

1:05:13 It’s almost like a machine that you just kind of… It is, yeah. The missing piece with most product is the DNA of product, which is intellectual property. And the book is the process for identifying intellectual property for a lot of people, for a lot of people. You know, even if you go to Bill Gates, Bill Gates has written books and he wrote a book called The Great Road Ahead.

1:05:35 And even if you go before that, he wrote articles for PC Magazine where he had to condense his thinking about why the software industry should be an industry and why people should pay for it. And what that did was a few things. It made him figure out why is software valuable and why should people pay for it and what are the business models that might work around it. And he had to think about that. And then secondly, that those articles fell into the hands of a few people who believed strongly that he was right.

1:06:02 And then they came and joined in the early days of Microsoft. Interestingly, it also polarized some people and they said, ah, we don’t think so. We think it should be open source and we think it should be free and given away. And those people went off and formed other groups and organizations and did their own thing. But he didn’t end up having those detractors in his company because everyone who was in his company had read the articles and they were either on the page or off the page.

1:06:27 In the same way, anyone I know who’s written books will tell you that if you did nothing other than write the book for your team and your team read the book, I mean, it just aligns and galvanizes the culture of your organization. It’s a very, very powerful strategy for getting the right people on the bus. And it’s a vision statement and it shows you have vision and shows you’re a leader. Yeah, and it really shows that you’re dedicated to something because you’re not going to, I mean, well, very few people I imagine are going to write a book about something that it really don’t care about.

1:06:56 So it’s not an anachronism, the book, not at all. It’s the book is the book is just a, I mean, the book, if you’re talking about a book, a book is actually a product. Content is intellectual property and being able to generate it and get it out of your head and into print at a speed that’s a bit slower than speaking is a powerful tool and then to be able to reflect on it and look for the insights. Let alone if anyone ever buys it, that’s the last thing you should look.

1:07:24 I mean, I’ll give you some examples, right? So my book, Entrepreneur Revolution, you know, it pays me a couple of grand a month. Right. And it’s a relatively successful book. But the royalties are pretty, pretty, you know, they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re fun to get. Right.

1:07:41 But they’re not, they’re not going to change my life. The interesting thing is that the opportunities that have come off the back of that are massive. So at the very, very low level, I get constant invitations to go and speak at conferences for thousands of pounds for a talk. And it’s the strangest thing to like, you know, the other day I got asked to speak at a conference that was literally three minutes down the road from my house at a hotel. And I walked down the road and I get up on stage for 45 minutes and then a few thousand pounds gets paid to me and I walk home.

1:08:18 And it’s like, what kind of weird reality is that? And you raise your profile, right? Yeah, yeah. It’s like I go to a hotel and get paid a few thousand pounds. And my, you know, what sort of profession am I in?

1:08:29 And then I make all the right noises that they want to hear. But, you know, so you get speaking gigs and, you know, very valuable and lots of opportunities come from that. And then the other one is, you know, I got this guy who messaged me one time and he’d read the book and we connected, we chatted, I fell in love with his business, I got involved, I became a shareholder. And now that business is becoming a world leader at what it does. We got it funded, $5 million worth of funding at a $25 million valuation.

1:09:06 And, you know, that deal alone is worth thousands of book royalties. And it was just a guy who read my book on a flight and said, you’re the guy I want to talk to about my business idea. He became a fan for life. He became a fan. I became a fan of his.

1:09:24 And he knew from reading my book there was going to be a strong connection. He was right. And, you know, that’s been a big deal, you know. And that’s off the back of the book. Okay, so I am doing this on air. I’m committing to write the book.

1:09:37 How do I do it? Do I promise a thousand words a week to myself? What do I do? So when we do this with our clients, we put them in buddy groups and we try and get them to write intensely, not a thousand words a week. We actually try and get them to do 500 to a thousand words a day.

1:09:51 Okay. So we wrap some intensity around it. We play games with our clients where collectively a group of 50 people have to write a million words in six weeks. And if they don’t, they all, as the entire group, misses out on a bonus that we’ve offered them if they hit it. And if they don’t hit it, not only does the whole group miss out on the bonus, we also publish everyone’s word counts.

1:10:14 Okay. And they all do push-ups as well. Yeah, so it’s like this kind of really sort of like tapping into shame and humiliation as the writing fuel that people need. But it works and we get a lot of books. And it’s important to have a team or to have a coach or something because if I just go sit in a cabin, that’s what everyone believes, the way to write a book, but it’s not the way to write a book, right?

1:10:33 No, I mean, you know, I said before, environment dictates performance. And what most people think is the right writing environment is, you know, go off to the south of France and, you know, get up and write every day. And I’ve found that that’s absolutely the wrong environment. You know, you’re almost better off writing on an airplane in a cab, you know, getting up early, doing an hour before work, whatever it is. But something about being in your life does that.

1:11:03 The environment that dictates performance is actually the environment of accountability, the environment of having someone to balance ideas, the environment of having a process to work with. So all of those elements of an environment actually dictate the performance of writing a book. Okay, you still didn’t tell me how I’m going to do this, so… Well, the answer is you need to become part of an environment that would normalize writing a book. So as with anything, if you wanted to play better tennis, you need to join an environment that normalizes that result.

1:11:33 You don’t want to be part of an environment where it becomes abnormal to play better tennis. So the reason people become better at playing tennis when they join a tennis club is because they have regular conversations, regular games, and it becomes normal within the context of that environment to play better tennis. If you just said, I’m going to pick up a racket and try and hit the ball every day, pretty quickly you lose interest, no one’s playing with you, no one else is doing it, this environment isn’t going to normalize better tennis, this is a studio.

1:12:00 So it would be abnormal that you would get to play better tennis in a studio. So you have to ask yourself the question, in which environment would it become normal to write a book? You could join our environment where we get a group of people go through it, you could join a book writing group, you could put together a group, but you have to create an environment that would normalize the result. Okay, and it would change my life, it would be a big thing.

1:12:21 Yeah, like here’s another example, we talk about unicorns, let’s tie that back. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel came up with PayPal and X, which is online payments, they merged the companies and they created this incredible high performance environment called PayPal. And out of that came the founders of YouTube, came the founders of LinkedIn, came the founders of all these other iconic, something like nine billion dollar companies. And in the same way I had the blueprint for lifestyle business and then went and created a lifestyle business, these small group of people building a billion dollar company like PayPal, really rapidly, they A, had the blueprint for what’s required to do that up close, B, they actually created an environment where everyone of those initial PayPal guys were creating billion dollar companies, that became the norm within their circle.

1:13:14 If you look at the founder of Instagram, the founder of Instagram was Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate, in university. So there comes a time where within the context of an environment certain outcomes become very normal. And if you’re not part of that environment, you can’t expect that same result. So just because you’ve read all the stories and all the things and all the ideas and all that sort of stuff, you know everything about those people over there in that environment, if you’re not part of the environment, then it’s highly unlikely that that would actually happen.

1:13:46 Okay, so put yourself in the environment. And I should write a book. That’s important. You should write a book. Yeah.

1:13:51 What would you want to write a book about? Good question. I guess that’s the first question. Then you know if you really want to write a book. Yeah, well, I mean, would you write a book called Real?

1:13:59 I think it’s going to be called Becoming Real. Becoming Real. Yeah. But I don’t want it to be about everyone that I interviewed, because I think that’s a cop-out book. I think that’s an easy-to-write book.

1:14:07 I think it needs to be more. I think a lot of people love the TED Talk you did. There’s something very cool about that story. So that’s certainly a chapter. Okay, but stay away from fiction.

1:14:18 Yeah, I mean, that is a whole other thing. The types of stuff that we talk about is about unpacking intellectual property insights. I don’t know a lot about fiction writing. In my mind, that’s a whole other world. Okay, a couple more things.

1:14:31 I want to hear about your new book, Unsubscribed, but you didn’t answer me. How do you find the time to write personally? And then tell me about Unsubscribed. I find the time to write on planes. So flying around the world, we’ve got offices in Melbourne, Sydney, Singapore, London, and in the US.

1:14:51 So up until having a child, up until having a baby, I was just on planes a lot. And it gets to the point where you’ve seen all the good movies. And this has been my life for 10 years. I’ve always sort of done international business. So for 10 years, I’ve just done a lot of flying, and a lot of long-haul flying, London to Singapore, Singapore to Melbourne, 23 hours.

1:15:17 So for me, I would dose up on coffee, and I would write blogs, and then those blogs would form into more substantial ideas, and then they would become books. So the first one was mostly a set of blogs, which I then turned into a book, and then built the joining steps. And I saw the pattern, and created a book, and then I fell in love with having books. And I fell in love with what happened to me after having books, which was I created space for new ideas.

1:15:47 And I loved the fact that if I unpacked this information safely into a book, then suddenly this flood of new creativity would hit me in the next year. And I would go from thinking I’d put everything I had into a book, to suddenly I’ve got a whole new book arrive. That’s counterintuitive. I don’t even think you mentioned that in KPI, in the book. But it’s kind of like…

1:16:12 It’s probably an idea that I had after writing it. Of course it’s not in there. It reminds me a bit of Louis CK, who many years ago decided every year he would write a new hour, which at the time a lot of comedians didn’t do, and now they are. And so at the end, January 1st, he’s never using any of his old material again. Which is just a horrible discipline of your comedian.

1:16:30 If you’re a comedian, we used to go back to your bits that get lost, especially when you’re out there doing new material and no one likes it. But by doing that, he’s been able to create so much new content. And I bet there’s something about what you said once you get it out, and it’s no longer going to be there. You do your special, your one-hour special, then all of a sudden your brain starts thinking, okay. I wonder what next.

1:16:47 And I think that’s a great idea for new ideas. So you were telling me about this book when I met you at Skeen, and I’m really interested in it, about the phenomenon of oversubscribed. Why go for this topic? Is this something you’re familiar with? Well, it’s similar.

1:17:00 I mean, a key person of influence is a person who’s oversubscribed. They’re drowning in opportunity. Their biggest issue is not finding an opportunity. They’ve got people lining up to do business with them. And that is what a key person of influence has.

1:17:11 They’ve got so much damn inbound opportunity that their biggest deal is curating it. And I got to see that firsthand. And if you take someone like Branson, he has so much inbound opportunity. His biggest frustration is not knowing what to do with it all. He’s got full-time people who are feeling inbound opportunities.

1:17:33 He’s not doing much cold calling. You know, so… He always looks so relaxed. He does, doesn’t he? Yeah, yeah.

1:17:39 I think it helps having an island. Yeah. And we should try. Didn’t you guys announce your KP island? Yeah, we did, yeah, for April Fool’s Day.

1:17:48 One of my guys thought it was real. Of course. And he’s a really smart guy. And he said, Brian, this is a KP island. And I was just like, I just got it in the morning.

1:17:54 And I was like… It’s the first of April. Yeah, he gotcha. Yeah, I gotcha. I mean, one year for April Fool’s, we notified our whole database that we had successfully gone to the highest courts in Geneva and got the KPI acronym to stop meaning Key Performance Indicator.

1:18:11 No one was allowed to use it anymore as Key Performance Indicator. They had to use it as a key person of influence. And so many people thought we were for real. And another year we said we were going to do Ultimate KPI with Barack Obama teaching pitching and Branson teaching profile and Steve Jobs teaching product. And it was like two years or three years after Steve Jobs had died.

1:18:37 Oh, okay. But people were still booking in for this event. And anyway… I’m just tracing your profile again. Yeah.

1:18:43 So anyway, oversubscribed. Yes. So I became really fascinated by businesses where people are willing to line up, pay a premium, join a waiting list, any of those sorts of things. The reason I became fascinated by it is because in a world of such high transparency where any alternative product, alternative service, alternative solution is available, why on earth would someone line up? So why would someone line up at a cafe or a restaurant when there are…

1:19:09 Especially in London, when there is within two, three minutes other cafes and restaurants. Why would someone join the waiting list for a new product when there’s probably viable alternatives? Why would people line up out the front of Apple stores for a watch when there’s a Samsung watch already out there that’s proven that’s great? Why do people do that? Why do people lose their mind, so to speak, and line up?

1:19:31 And it was about what is it that companies are doing? There’s only a very small number of companies where people will behave this way. But what are those companies doing? So I traveled around the world and I went everywhere from Lake Como where there’s a pizza shop that people will line up down the driveway for, even though there’s hundreds of pizza shops in Lake Como or Italian restaurants in Lake Como. And handbags in Paris and Ferraris in Singapore.

1:19:58 And I basically went looking at all of these places where people pay premiums, join waiting lists and join physical queues and lineups. And I found it just fascinating. And I found it was a great indicator for a business that you could learn from or an individual that you could learn from. Did a lot of it link back to things in the KPI and those pieces? Yeah, I mean, absolutely.

1:20:22 One of the key things is that normally there is a key person of influence that people have fallen in love with. So that’s a big part of it. So most of these businesses or a lot of the businesses, especially the smaller ones, had key people of influence, the ones that were on the growth story. Obviously Ferrari had Enzo Ferrari a long time ago, but it’s a brand that stands alone now. But I was looking at the key person of influence phenomenon was fueling it, a remarkable product, something about the product that people had to tell people about.

1:20:57 They had to communicate. They had to post a photo and put it on their Instagram. They had to tweet about it and talk about it. They had to call up a friend and recommend someone to it. There was that referable, remarkable network effect, which I talk about.

1:21:13 There was this one thing in KPI, the book where you said, in order to start a business, you have to be prepared to be the face of the business. And then she said, a lot of people aren’t and they’re going to miss out. But then later you say, if you want to really get to the lifestyle business, you have to not be associated with the product. Or something like that. No, there’s a nuance.

1:21:32 And the nuance is that key people of influence attract and retain top performing people. And in order to have a great business of any size and scale, you have to have other high performance. So one of the reasons my first business worked is not necessarily because of my brilliance, but my partner’s brilliance at the time, Glenn, who is one of the most unbelievably good sales people. For a 21 year old, 22 year old guy at the time, he was just unbelievable at closing sales and doing deals.

1:22:03 And he would listen at the right time, talk at the right time. He was just that good. My ability to attract and retain people like Glenn and the people who build the business today are not me. So Callum in Singapore is an amazing guy who I was able to have him be excited to work with us. So if you’re not a key person of influence, you normally can’t attract and retain top talent.

1:22:31 You can’t attract and retain high performers. And even if you were somehow able to attract them in the first place, they’d take your ideas and they’d run. Because what the hell do you bring to the table? So you have to be a key person of influence to have people want to work with you. And that’s how you build some sort of size and scale.

1:22:50 And then the other thing that happens is that you become a key person of influence. And you actually don’t have to be in many places because your book is there or your brand is there or your YouTube video is there or your blog is there or the product that you created is there. And surprisingly, it’s a lot less effort being a key person of influence than being someone who’s purely functional. Right, right. What surprised you when you’re writing and oversubscribed?

1:23:16 It was funny because I saw one of your posts and it was like on preorder for Amazon and you were like, well, if my book isn’t oversubscribed, then it’s tough. What did you learn by writing it that you were maybe not expecting? Well, I mean, I learned that it works. The stuff in there actually bloody works. I pre-released the book on Amazon and we went all the way up to number one for every business category.

1:23:42 And it stayed there for like five, six days while we were doing the stuff that was in the book. And it’s like, wow, OK, well, you know, it just surprised me how it surprises me all the time how effective simple ideas are. So there are ideas there about celebrating clients. So what most businesses do is they’re off looking for prospects and effectively without verbalizing it this way, they would say that they celebrate prospects, they’re looking for leads and great businesses that are oversubscribed could care less about the prospects.

1:24:18 They celebrate the buyers, they celebrate the people who have already bought, they celebrate their clients and they turn their clients into aspirational people. So I’ll give the example in the book is at a nightclub in Mayorka where you buy a bottle of champagne and out comes this train of all the staff and they’re beautiful people in their little skimpy outfits and they come marching through the crowd and the fireworks are coming out of the steel bucket and the DJ kind of salutes you and then the bucket of champagne makes its way through the crowd net and the sea parts and they put it on the table and everyone’s like, wow, look at that guy who’s bought the champagne. And then everyone starts buying champagne because everyone wants the experience of being that person.

1:25:02 Now, these guys don’t go around saying, do you want champagne? Do you want champagne? You know, come on, we’re doing two for one at the moment. Buy champagne now. They’re not trying to prospect, they’re just celebrating the person who bought and they’re turning that person into the celebrity.

1:25:18 And I found that as like a really common trait with oversubscribed businesses. They turn the buyer into a celebrity. I mean, if you own a Ferrari, you’re the star of the show. Everyone looks at the Ferrari and then goes, I wonder who’s driving it? The product itself celebrates the buyer.

1:25:37 The great restaurants that are oversubscribed. You line up to get in them, but when you’re in there, everything slows down. They look after you, they let you linger, they let the conversation unfold, they don’t rush you. You know, they ask you whether you want coffee, then dessert, you know, all of those sorts of things. And they’re happy to let people line up and wait because they don’t rush things on the inside.

1:25:58 And then restaurants that lose their mind and go, oh, there’s a lineup and then rush the people inside the following week, they have no line. Right. And we talked about this briefly because we just had our first live event with Dampania at the Ritz and we had a waiting list and it was like, uh, sold out in six hours and it was like five times oversubscribed. And you were in, you said, Brian, the mistake most people make is then they, they double the number of attendees right away.

1:26:20 And I was laughing because I was like, yeah, we, I didn’t make that mistake. It was always going to be just this number. And, uh, and I guess that goes into this pattern of things that they could do, which is what an economist would tell you to do. Yeah. Yeah.

1:26:33 Well, I mean, a good economist would know. Probably not. A good scientist would know that you can only make profit when you’re oversubscribed. So when demand outstrips supply, the price goes up and if you raise supply to meet demand, the price levels. And if you raise demand supply too far, the price falls.

1:26:53 So what most businesses do is they get, you know, they have a limited capacity to take on 10 clients. They do their marketing and they get 15 people interested. And what they do, they make this classic mistake. They take on all 15 and then what happens is they don’t have 10 happy clients and five unhappy clients who were, who, who were the extra five. They have 15 unhappy clients who didn’t get what they thought they were going to get.

1:27:18 And now 15 people are saying, Oh, that wasn’t so great. And then it’s the beginning of the end. So as opposed to you know, you can take on 10 clients, you take on 10 clients and you start a waiting list for the other five. You look at, you pull yourself into those 10 clients. You give them everything you said that you would give them and then some.

1:27:38 And then they’re running around saying, I got such great value. And the five people on the waiting list are going, you know, this is an interesting business. They wouldn’t take my money. You know, and they’re sitting there going, you know, they’re probably told, told five people that they’re on a waiting list, right? So the energy is building.

1:27:56 And then especially you tell these five people, the reason we’re not taking you on is because we know we can only look after 10 and we’re going to give ourselves 100% to those 10. And then when we’re done, we will then take a look at what you want us to look at. And it’s a very different way. And then the price stays high, the quality stays high, the story stays clean. And the business becomes an oversubscribed business.

1:28:21 Is because of this book, everything in our lives is going to start becoming oversubscribed. Thanks to Daniel. I want to go down to like the post office and they’re going to be like, oh, sorry. We want to deliver a full and remarkable experience to you, but we can’t do that right now. We need you to wait outside.

1:28:36 And this book is going to be like in the window and I’ll be like, okay, thanks. Yeah. Hopefully I don’t have it. I can’t wait to read this. You know, I really want to check it out.

1:28:43 You know, we’ve got a, I got a new section. It’s called, it’s called the bonus section where I want to find out your success secrets. It’s kind of rapid fire, but I just want to find out some of your ideas, thoughts, habits. So go with me on that. Success secrets.

1:28:57 Um, Daniel, I always ask a few questions at the end. You probably know these are coming. I’m going to hit you with them anyways.

1:29:27 If you can make a phone call to the 20 year old Daniel, uh, and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him? Uh, enjoy youth. Uh, you started as an entrepreneur at 21, right? Yeah. You hadn’t really gone.

1:29:40 Okay. Um, I would probably at, at, look at 20, at 20 years old, I was full on about wearing suits and BMWs and Ferraris. And if I could get the right watch, get the right car and all those sorts of things. I was so in such a rush to frigging grow up. I mean, I, I really wanted to have finances settled and all that sort of stuff.

1:30:01 Thank God I had some really bad influences on me. Some people who just took me out partying and, you know, I think, you know, thank God I had people who, who made me be a 20 year old, but you know, my, I’m so, so glad that I, I fooled around and I, you know, all that sort of stuff, but there’s so much for a 20 year old, there’s so much time to make money and make success and do businesses and statistically great companies are started by 37 year olds. So if you’re 20 year, yeah, yeah.

1:30:30 So big, big businesses statistically are started by two 37 year old males. That’s the statistic by and large. There’s plenty of great women coming up who will catch that statistic up, but 37 year old, two 37 year olds start big businesses typically. So you’ve got 17 years, enjoy the youth. Um, uh, you know, but I, I don’t regret much.

1:30:52 I really don’t. I’ve had, I’ve been so freaking lucky that I was born in the right time and the right place, had the right mentors, had the right people around me, had the right parents, had the right siblings. And I just freaking lucky. Um, had I been in any other time in history, I’d be some factory fodder, uh, you know, product of a shitty schooling system or product of a shitty farm. Uh, you know, yeah, you have these great talks on YouTube.

1:31:20 The jackpot. Yeah. You have a great talk on YouTube when you talk about the industrial revolution and what it was like, but there was also, you know, 40 and 50% unemployment and, you know, hard, hard, hard places. And, and you, there was no access to capital to be an entrepreneur then you couldn’t do it because it’s just, had I been, had I been bought any other time, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t live the life I’ve lived. I mean, I’m born in a tiny little town in Australia and I’ve traveled all over the world.

1:31:45 I’ve made stupid amounts of money. I’ve spent stupid amounts of money. I’ve had stupid amounts of fun. Um, I’ve been fortunate to have great relationships. Um, you know, both short and long and friendships and all this sort of stuff.

1:32:00 I’m just, I’m just freaking lucky. I’m really lucky. You’re an Australian in London. I’m an American in London. What is the relationship between British people and Australian people?

1:32:11 So, well, they think we’re all convicts, right? And we think they’re all, um, stuck up posh problems and nothing, you know, never the twain. Yeah. Um, but, uh, I think, I think, uh, British people secretly love Australians a little bit and an Australian secretly love Brits. Cause they admire your capital.

1:32:31 It’s a sibling rivalry. Okay. And they admire your entrepreneur spirit. I mean, when you see entrepreneurs in England, a lot of times they are Aussies. I mean, you know, you guys have a, well, without taking too long, I have a theory that something about Australia and the fact that most of the population explosion happened in a gold rush and the fact that it was like California, it attracts something about the way Australian grew population.

1:32:55 Yes, there were some criminals at the time and those people were probably entrepreneurial people just trying to survive. You know, I mean, I have ancestors who, um, who stole some tools so they could get an apprenticeship and got locked up and thrown away and sent down to Australia, you know, so this is, these are enterprising people, you know, that, that you, you might have some empathy for. Um, but ended up with, you know, with that. So I actually think Australians do have a very entrepreneurial gene and the, the Australia is a long way from anything.

1:33:25 People who go to Australia and emigrated to Australia, something about those people, they’re up for an adventure. They’re up for an opportunity there. They believe in their optimists. They believe in better. And there’s a culture that comes out of Australia like that.

1:33:39 And to the Brits, they do love you in a way. Uh, sometimes we serve the drinks. They always look down. They always serve their drinks. All right.

1:33:46 That’ll be, that’ll be a different show. Um, best advice you’ve ever received in your life, business or personal? Uh, I mean, it’s gotta be something around. Um, I know I wrote something on that sheet, didn’t I? It might’ve been, you know, income follows assets.

1:33:59 I don’t know. So income follows assets was, it was great business. Um, and then, you know, some of the best advice has been around, um, gratitude. And then there was an experience I had where within one year in 1996, 97, I think it was 97, it must’ve been 97, 98. I had two people pass away and one was my grandfather and one was a family friend who was about the same age.

1:34:26 And, uh, you know, my grandfather had really been a product of the industrial revolution. He, um, worked for one company for 40 years in one factory. Um, and, uh, and I remember his eulogy and it was, it was, there was a lot of great stories and a great stories about family and fishing and golfing and his life. And then at the same time, this other guy, um, passed away and he, he’d been an entrepreneur and he’d traveled all over the world and he’d done all these things he’d brought.

1:34:53 He’d been part of the team that brought the Beatles to Australia. Um, and he, you know, created concerts and all this sort of stuff. And it really, um, reading two eulogies of people that I cared about, it really brought home this idea that, uh, we get a few little laps around the sun. That’s it. Um, if you’re really lucky, you might get 80 laps around the sun.

1:35:13 And you’ve been dead for 14 billion years to get here and you’re going to be dead for 14 billion years after, and you’re going to get these little tiny little 80 laps around the sun. And, um, and, and also nothing you do here will matter that much. You know, there are very, very few people who will be remembered. Um, and you know, you’re just this little dot who’s got this little moment of consciousness and it’s worth, um, it’s worth valuing that and it’s worth being excited about that.

1:35:41 And it’s worth not worrying so much about, you know, the backstory or the Ford story or any of that, but just trying to be present and, and, and, uh, and keep it real. Take risks, enjoy the moment. Yeah. Yeah. We’ll take, take risks because there’s not really a risk.

1:35:58 What’s the risk? You, you, as soon as you acknowledge that you’re going to be dead, you’re going to be forgotten, uh, nothing you do is really going to matter that much. Or not matter that much. Um, you know, I mean, God, think about it. There are us presidents who are completely unknown to 99.9% of all Americans.

1:36:18 They wouldn’t even know the name, right? And they had people who were the president of the USA at the time. So nothing’s going to matter that much. Um, we’re part of a fabric of humanity. Nothing really can remove you from that fabric.

1:36:31 Um, you might think that you’re a sparkly little button, but actually you’re just part of the fabric of humanity. And it’s going to keep moving and, um, and, and there’s not that bigger risk. There’s not that big a downside. There’s not big, that big an upside. Um, you know, uh, and then from, from that place, you then have to, you know, figure out what you want it all to mean.

1:36:53 I love it. Good stuff. Last, last question to the 20 year old that’s listening out there who wants to, you know, become a key person of influence, you know, what should I do? What’s their first start? What should, what should the one last thing to stick in their head?

1:37:05 Read the book. Read the book. There’s not much I can say other than that. Really read the book and then write a book, read the book, write the book. Yeah.

1:37:13 Write a book, write a book. Yeah. Pitch, pitch your little heart out. Believe that you get what you pitch for. Um, nothing’s going to come and land in your lap.

1:37:22 Go out and pitch. You get what you pitch for and you’re always pitching. Right. Get it. So always be pitching.

1:37:28 Well, you are always pitching. Right. When you sit there, when you sit there and say, I’m a startup. Right. You’re actually pitching.

1:37:35 I’m too early to talk to you. Right. People who pitched that they’re a startup end up being in startup for way longer than they should. Most great startups never pitched that they were a startup. They pitched that they’re up to something and that they’re getting on with it.

1:37:48 And it was irrelevant where they were just at that particular time. And the way they, the way growth businesses pitched themselves, even in startup is very, very different to someone in startup who pitches that they’re in startup. So you can’t switch off pitching. You are always pitching. You’re pitching that I’m unsure.

1:38:02 I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m too early. I’m uninvestable. And you don’t even realize you’re pitching. Right.

1:38:08 You’re pitching with your posture. You’re pitching with the decisions you make, right? Yeah, exactly. You’re pitching yourself in your own brain. You’re pitching yourself.

1:38:14 You’re pitching yourself in and out of it. So you get what you pitch for. You’re always pitching. You’re constantly, you’re, you’re, you’re the one who’s, who’s, uh, steering the ship. Stop waiting for someone to come and pitch you.

1:38:24 Go out and pitch the world. Go out and pitch something, something great, regardless of how you feel about it in the moment. Go pitch something great. Awesome advice. Daniel, thank you so much.

1:38:34 I hope everybody gets out and does a pitch right now. My pitch is taped to the bathroom. I love it. And that’s so the men that are using the toilet in a certain way have to read it. I was going to put down one down for the women as well.

1:38:44 Yeah. But it’s important. It’s important to do because, uh, yeah, I mean, you are, you’re always pitching. You’re pitching yourself and pitching your brain. So, um, thanks so much.

1:38:52 I really have enjoyed reading this book. I really like you, Daniel, because you’re really congruent. You know, everything you say, I believe and I see and you feel it. And yeah, and so. Oh, thank you very much.

1:39:02 That’s it. That’s always a good sign. Likewise. I get that from you too. Thank you.

1:39:06 And thanks for watching the TED talk and for, and for being supportive of the shows and I really appreciate all that. So how do people find the books is Amazon the best way is a Daniel Priestley.com Amazon is by far the best way. So there’s the three books, key person of influence, entrepreneur revolution and oversubscribed. Right. And, um, yeah, Amazon Kindle, all of that.

1:39:25 So audio books, um, all that. Right. And I, and, uh, as we agreed before this show, I’m going to mention this now, so if you’ve been listening to us, if you tweet out the best quote from this, this episode, I’m sure income falls assets is going to be one of those. Uh, we are giving away five copies of the book. So tweet out the best, uh, quote that you’ve heard.

1:39:42 It could be me, but probably will be Daniel and, uh, we’ll be watching them on Twitter and we’re going to post five books, uh, to anywhere around the world. So thanks so much for that as well. I can’t wait to read it oversubscribe. I’m going to read it tonight and start getting more things oversubscribed. I forgot about like the fundraising.

1:39:57 Of course, it should be oversubscribed. All that stuff. You should be thinking about an oversubscribe mindset and all that stuff. So there you go. If you’re listening to us on iTunes, you can see the extremely good looking pair of gentlemen that we are on YouTube, which I pray to every morning.

1:40:11 Like my distribution platform, you should be on YouTube too. If you’re watching this, right? Get up there, put your pitch up there and, uh, and get involved. Daniel, as we say on London Real, it’s about the journey. I wish you all on yours.

1:40:22 Thank you so much. Thank you.