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#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 to $1M- The New Rules for Building a Thriving Business

Modern Wisdom

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  • Digital Economy Ascends, Industrial Declines
    • We are currently transitioning from the declining industrial revolution economy to the ascending digital economy.
    • Most people suffer economic decline, while a small group thrives by leveraging digital technology. Transcript: Daniel Priestley Because people can’t get ahead. So like if you want to get into like, so here’s my thesis. My thesis is this. The Industrial Revolution lasted a couple of hundred years and we had this rise of the Industrial Revolution through the 1800s. Then we had the peak Industrial Revolution through the 1900s, and then we invented digital. We invented two things. We invented finance and digital technology. And with those two inventions, we just completely have crashed the Industrial Revolution system. And we have a new system that’s in ascension, which is the digital system. And what’s now happening is that you have people like myself who have digital businesses and living the best life ever. I can live and work from anywhere. I’ve got technology. I can run a pretty fun and affluent life. I would not trade places for any other time in history. This is like the best time ever because I’m surfing the wave of this digital ascension. And then you’ve got people who followed the rules, went to school, went to university, they became skilled labor, and now they’re trying to sell skilled labor into the workforce and That doesn’t pay off and you can’t get a house and you can’t start a family and everything’s overcrowded and nothing works. So the industrial revolution system, the moment that we are in time right now is the industrial revolution system is in decline and the digital revolution is in ascension. And some people or a lot of people, 80, 90% of people are on this downward spiral and a small group of people are on this upward spiral. And we’re just living through a time of transition. This is not the first time this happened. In the late 1700s, we invented the steam engines in the UK, right? Silicon Valley of 1700s was York. So we invented steam engines and we invented pumps and we invented tractors and plows and all this sort of stuff and factories. And we created the factory production method. And there was this time of about 50 years from the late 1700s to the early 1800s where huge numbers of people were displaced from their jobs. Charles Dickens writes about kids on the streets, Oliver Twist. There’s the tale of two cities, revolutions, French Revolution comes along. So essentially this industrial technology, you had 80, 90% of people who were living and working on farmland and had agricultural related jobs. And then machines came along and did those agricultural jobs. They got massively displaced. They went to the cities, they bred and they were described like rats. In the UK, they put them on boats and sent them to Australia. This is where I’m from. And they end up trying to get rid of people out of the country. There’s too many people and they’re not productive and we need to get rid of them. So lot of people were displaced because of technology and it took 50 years, they call it the Engels pause, 50 years for the economy to start to sink back up again, like two generations. Basically you have the industrialists and all those working in factories and running factories and running technology, and they’re making tons of money. They become wildly successful. And then the people, the peasants who are displaced and they, you know, abject poverty and outbreak of disease and all this sort of stuff. But it took 50 years to start normalizing that again. (Time 0:07:33)
  • Test Ideas with Waiting Lists
    • Generate at least 10 ideas, then choose the best three to test with campaigns.
    • Use waiting lists, WhatsApp groups, or online assessments to validate at least 150 interested people. Transcript: Chris Williamson A lot of people got lots of ideas, very few people launch businesses. Daniel Priestley So the first step is ideation, which is to come up with not one, but 10 ideas. You must look at 10 different ideas because when you come up with one idea, you become fixated on it and you become obsessed with it. And when you say, I’m going to come up with 10 ideas and then I’m going to talk about it with a few people and see which are the best three that we think could go for. And so you start with 10 ideas and there’s a few ways to approach an idea. Number one is noticing a problem. So it’s like, I’ve figured out something that’s wrong in the world. There’s an unmet need. There’s a problem that’s not solved. There’s something that’s not as good as it could be. So that’s the problem window. You can come through that. The next one is passion. So you could say, I just love right? I’m massively into snowboarding, so I want to do something snowboarding related. And then the third one is payment, which is that I’ve noticed a bunch of money floating around X. So ultimately the business needs all three of those things. You need to solve a problem, you need to stay passionate about it, and you need to get paid. But you tend to start by noticing from one of those three angles. So you’re going to sort of like kind of evaluate those 10 ideas based on how passionate, how big a problem is this, how much money could this make, right? So you kind of go through those ones. Then what you do is you pick your favorite three and you launch one of two or three campaigns. So campaign number one, is my favorite, is a waiting list campaign. So this is where you set up a landing page and you just say, we’re going to be doing X, Y, and Z. If you want the information, join the waiting list. And essentially, so like all I need, let’s say I want to come in and compete with your brand here. I just need a graphic designer or chat GPT to mock up what this might look like and create a few basic designs. I put that on a landing page and say, we’re launching a new drink that is all about focus and mental clarity and blah, blah, blah. If you’re interested to know more, please join the waiting list. Answer five questions to join the waiting list and go in the running to win $500 worth of product or something like that. And you want to ask, you know, obviously their name and email address. You want to ask, you know, about what they currently do in that particular space, what they’re looking to achieve, what their biggest barriers are, what their budget might be. So you ask a few questions and then they join the waiting list. My rule is if you can’t get 150 people on a waiting list, then it’s game over. That idea is dead. So 150 is the minimum that has to be on the waiting list. And it shouldn’t be like every waking hour to get those people. It should just be, I can DM some people. I can drop this into a group on Facebook. I can circulate it amongst some friends. I can do a post on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever. So it’s like, yeah, pretty easy. I’ve got my first 150 people on a waiting list. This idea can progress. Another way you could do this is a WhatsApp group. So you just launch a WhatsApp group. You say, I’m going to be launching a new fitness challenge. All the information will go into this WhatsApp group. If you’re interested in fitness, join the WhatsApp group. Once again, you’re trying to get 150 people into a WhatsApp group. Or the third one is an assessment, take the assessment, an online assessment. Basically, it’s just free to take an assessment. So if I said I’m launching a new fitness business and I’ve created a fitness assessment, start with that. Take the assessment to see if you need this fitness business. So launching a quiz or an assessment, launching a WhatsApp group, launching a waiting list. These are the three first tests and we’re conducting 150. (Time 0:31:38)
  • Chaos Laps for First $10K
    • Focus on refining four key elements: concept, audience, offer, and sales.
    • Consistently generate leads, book appointments, present value, and close sales to rapidly reach $10k/month. Transcript: Chris Williamson Chaos. Daniel Priestley Yeah, I remember that. Chaos is concept audience offer sales. So you’ve got to have a good concept. So it’s a concept that has a nice hook. People understand it. It’s like, so for example, a drink that helps you to focus. That’s a great concept. It’s like, okay, this is, you know, this is going to do X, Y, and Z for you. It’s all on the side of the can. It’s great, right? So, or AI chatbots for financial planners, customer success agents for financial planners. Okay, cool. That’s a cool concept. Okay. Why would they need one? Because of this and it has to be regulated and it has to be there. Okay, cool. And you know how to do that? Yep. So we need a good concept. Audience is getting in front of people. So literally face-to or on the phone or on Zoom or getting their attention in some way. So audience or attention. Offer is constructing a gold, silver, bronze offer. So a bottom tier, mid tier, high tier offer. And giving people the choice of being able to do one of those three. Being able to make that offer visual. So it’s on a brochure or it’s a landing page or it’s a slide deck. And then sales process. The ability to get into a little rhythm of generating leads, booking appointments, presenting your value and making the sale. So we call that laps. So chaos laps. So when we’re getting our first 10 grand, it’s chaos laps. Concept audience offer sales. How good are those things? How do we improve those four things? And laps, leads, appointments, presentation, sales, are we able to smash out activity? (Time 0:41:31)
  • Team Building Stages
    • Build a complementary team starting with a two-person scout team: one focused on sales, the other on customer delivery.
    • Grow to 4, 8, then 30 people to stabilize and scale, avoiding team sizes between 13-30 due to dysfunction. Transcript: Daniel Priestley That you should hire so the like teams develop two four eight thirty right so a two and this military. This is how the military do it as well. So the two person team is a scout team and a scout team is really looking at two questions. Can we, can we sell it? And can we build it? Can we get a customer? Can we look after a customer? So on the scout team, you’re just trying to have one person who’s really focused on, can we sell this? And one person who’s really focused on, can we create a happy customer? And so the first team is those two people answering that question. Now it could be that it’s your business and you’re really, let’s say you’re technically skilled at something. Let’s say you’re an IT services company and you’ve got amazing IT skills, you want to bring on a salesperson who says, can we sell this? Or you might be really extroverted and really good at selling, but you’re not quite sure if you can actually technically build the thing. You want to bring on a technical person who’s, can we actually look after customers if we get customers? So you’re essentially looking for your complementary opposite. Are you going to be the salesperson running around figuring out whether we can sell this or are you going to be the delivery person figuring out whether we can make customers happy? So those are the first two. Once you’ve figured those two questions out, you jump to a four-person, what we call fire start team. So a fire starting team is four people and you’re going to have someone who we call a key person of influence. You’re going to have a salesperson and a delivery person and what we call a Swiss army knife. Swiss army knives can do 25 things, but badly. And that’s what you want. You want that high agency generalist. Let’s call them that high agency generalist. And the Swiss army knife is a high agency general tool. So you go to this four-person little team, and this is about launch campaign, getting your first sales, getting your first customers through the door, you know, holding everything Together with sticky tape and, you know, like just doing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then you’re then jumping up to eight person team. And this is what I’d call a stable core team. Um, at this point you’ve got a lifestyle boutique. If you run this well, you can do a one to three million pretty easily. Um, you can be highly profitable, have your weekly team meetings. Everything runs really smoothly. You’ve got eight people on a team and you can actually just stay there for years making a ton of money. Everyone’s having a great time. Um, provided you don’t go over 13, provided you never have the 13th person on the team. Um, so eight, you can go eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, but never 13. Unlucky 13. Unlucky 13. Why? Disaster. What happens at 13? The 13th person splits the team. So up to 12 people is one team. The 13th person divides the team into two or three. So as soon as you hire the 13th, you now have a sales team, an ops team, a finance team, right? And now they don’t talk. The 13th person introduces just this, we’re too big to be small. We’re not big enough to be big. It’s just a world of awkwardness once you’ve got the 13th person. Chris Williamson Okay. And then 30. Daniel Priestley And then, yeah, if you go to 13, you might as well go to 30. Yeah. So at 30, it gets good again. So from 13 30, it’s too big to be small and too small to be big. The business is not going to work on either. It’s going to work as a six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12 person team. It’s going to work as a 30 to 150 person team. It’s not going to work from 12 to 30 people, uh, 13 to 30 people. So too big to be small, too small to be big. You’re not, you, you have this old original crew who are the family who got roped in and they were the ones who used to be there, you know, 11 o’clock at night, 5 o’clock in the morning. We used to be friends, man. 16, 17, 18 people, two of them start sleeping together. So you get these relationships and it gets awkward and weird. Unfortunately, at around 17, 18, 19, 20 people, one of the original crew who was like so useful, that was your Swiss army knife in the beginning days. This person held the company together. They bleed the brand. They are so loyal. And then now they are so like a bottleneck and they’re just not good enough. Chris Williamson Because you’ve hired people that are at a higher skill level than they are and they haven’t been able to keep up. Daniel Priestley And they just don’t fit anywhere. And they go through six months of not being a fit and they’re just feeling like an outcast and they keep pulling the whole, I was there at the beginning, man. And you’re like, I know, man, but like, I need you to either sell or this, you know, cause the company’s turning into specialists now. So now you’re going from generalists. Raise your game. Yeah. You got to raise your game. They may or may not have it in them. Like you might, in the early days, you might’ve just taken the neighbor’s teenager and like brought them on board and they were amazing, you know, but they’re just, they’re just not Up to the game now. So there’s like what tends to happen is there’s like a great shakeup and the great shakeup is like, you know, you go from 21 people back down to 15 and, you know, it’s a dark time. But then if you can press through to 30, you end up with an executive team, sales team, ops team, delivery, development. You know, now you’ve got this really tight unit at 30 people. You’ve got executives running teams of teams, and now you are smashing it. Now you’re doing 10 million plus, you’ve got a million of profit or more. (Time 0:46:12)
  • Outsource Tasks to AI Agents
    • Outsource repetitive, time-consuming tasks to AI agents for efficiency.
    • Use AI tools like vibe coding to build custom applications quickly without programming knowledge. Transcript: Chris Williamson What aspects of business should we be outsourcing to AI right now? So anything that you would outsource to the Philippines can now be outsourced to an AI agent. Daniel Priestley There’s some big breakthroughs in AI. So there’s something called agents, which is essentially an AI that can grab your credit card details. So I was with Stephen Bartlett the other day, and all he did was told an AI agent to get us three bottles of water. And it looked online, found a local DoorDash facility, ordered three bottles of water, got his credit card details, punched in the credit card details, ordered the three bottles of Water to come to this address. And then in walks a dude with the bottles of water. Yeah. And all he had done is asked an AI to go and organize the three bottles of water um and it just magically happened like so that’s the ultimate amazon one click it is but this is for everything You could say go and build me a list of 150 potential clients just go through websites of people who might want this and find their contact details use linkedin if needed all right so boom Go go and you go do that. And there’s also something called vibe coding. Vibe coding is the ability to build applications by just talking about them. So I had a go at vibe coding the other night and I said, I want an application to run the pocket money in my household. I’ve got three kids. We’ve got about 10 chores per week that we want to do. There’s a certain amount per chore. I want an application that can manage all of that. And it just codes it up. And it’s an amazingly cool application. It even gave it a name and a brand, Cash Kids or something like that. Kids Cash with Ks. And then you could add kids. You could add chores. It had a little mini database. Payout system, and it like took 15 minutes and it just coded it up itself. So we are now living in a new world. Like this is, the tractor has plowed the field for the first time. (Time 1:11:20)
  • Price by Exclusive Demand
    • Raise prices based on demonstrated demand and supply tension with transparent scarcity.
    • Target exclusive niche or luxury markets where customers highly value your offering. Transcript: Chris Williamson How do you know when to increase the price? Daniel Priestley Price is always a factor of demand and supply tension. So demand and supply tension is that you have so many people who want something and a bunch of them can’t get it and they miss out. And ultimately, people just randomly put up prices, but you have to start with demand and supply tension. So for example, when you launch a waiting list with 100 people and there’s only 10 spots available, that pushes the price up of those 10 spots, especially if there’s any what’s called Transparency of demand and supply tension. So transparency is where the market can actually see that you’re in demand. A queue outside of your nightclub. Yeah, there’s a queue out the front of the nightclub. And when people are worried about will they get in or not. So that is transparency of demand and supply tension, and that pushes prices up. So any opportunity to create that transparency. What are the best ways to create transparency? Waiting lists, social media followings, live events or events where people can see that other people are either at the event or on the Zoom call, launches, pre-registration lists For drops. You can even just tell people. Like for example, one of our businesses, we launched a product or service and to get that you had to do an online assessment. So we just told people, well, 7,000 people took the online assessment. We can only take 350 clients. So we’re going to select who we want to work with. If you get selected, then that’s good for you. So that was just telling people and showing them,, you know, we, we did, we, they know they filled in the online assessment. Um, and we were completely truthful. In fact, we can screenshot the actual, how many people filled it in. So we can actually put that on an email and say, look, 7,000 people filled this in. Um, we can only take 350. Uh, Glastonbury Music Festival does this beautifully for 364 days of the year, you can’t buy a ticket. You can only pre-register. Then they tell you how many people are pre-registered. They say 1.2 million people have pre-registered for tickets. We only have 136,000 tickets available. They go live tomorrow morning at 5 a.m. Don’t miss out. And people just get up at five o’clock in the morning and buy a Glasto ticket. So that’s transparency of demand and supply. There’s one other trick, which is being very selective about what you call an ICP. ICP stands for ideal customer persona. So an ideal customer persona is where you select a type of customer who gets extraordinary value from what you do and you become exclusive for them. So for example, you may, have had Esther Perel on the show? No. So you know who she is though, right? So she’s a marriage couples therapist, but she’s exclusively for billionaires. Like you have to be a billionaire to sign up for her marriage therapy. Now, because her ICP gets so much value, like think about it like this. If you’re a marriage couples therapist, a 22-year who’s single sees zero value in you, a 31-year who’s in a new relationship and it’s honeymoon period sees little value in you, and a 52-year billionaire who’s about to go through a divorce that will cost $40 million in capital destruction and $8 million in fees sees an extremely high value in a marriage therapist, Couples therapist, if they can fix the thing. So when a billionaire has trouble with their marriage, they go to Esther Perel, they pay quarter of a million bucks and they want serious dedicated service and she’s exclusive for that Market and she’s positioned herself for the market. So in every single audience, there’s three categories within the audience. So there’s what’s called the mass market. They’re just interested in price shopping. There’s the niche market or niche market, which is interested in passion, community, story, experience. So they’re interested in value, whatever that constitutes for them. They’ll pay more for value. And then there’s the luxury market. And the luxury market is the ultra high end. They’re interested in pedigree, exclusivity, those kinds of things. So one of the best ways to push prices up is to become exclusive for either a niche or a luxury market. As far as spending power goes, inside an audience, 1% of people have 15% of the budget, 9% of people have 45% of the budget, and 90% of the people have 40% of the budget. So the top 10% have 60% and the bottom 90% have 40%. So basically what most businesses do is they target the mass market because there’s lots of them, but they don’t realize that the 90% of people only have 40% of the budget and it’s the Top 10% who’ve got all the money. So if you can reposition yourself as a key person of influence for these passionate people up here and be exclusive for them, you’re going to end up earning a lot more money. (Time 1:13:31)
  • Use Free Content to Justify Price
    • Provide free content as a low-entry alternative to justify higher prices.
    • Recommend other resources if you can’t personally serve a client, maintaining goodwill. Transcript: Chris Williamson So we’ve talked about pricing, hiring. What about firing? How do you know when to let people go? I hate this. Daniel Priestley I hate firing. Look, here’s my answer. My honest answer to this is that I have brought on amazing ops people to run my businesses. And by the time we get to the point where we need firing, I have an ops person who does firing. (Time 1:20:53)
  • Delegate Firing to Ops Expert
    • Delegate the firing process to experienced operations personnel for objectivity.
    • Follow HR protocols carefully to avoid legal issues during performance management. Transcript: Daniel Priestley This. I hate firing. Look, here’s my answer. My honest answer to this is that I have brought on amazing ops people to run my businesses. And by the time we get to the point where we need firing, I have an ops person who does firing. Now, can have that conversation. I hate it. It makes my gut turn. Um, and I’ve, I’ve got a script and I know how to do it, especially in the UK. Here’s what sucks, right? What sucks in the UK, as soon as you’re in a firing situation, there’s all these rules you have to follow and you can’t actually just have a sensible conversation. You can’t actually just say, Hey, look, here’s what’s really going on. You did this. We can’t do, you can’t have this. Like as soon as you go talk to a HR lawyer, because most companies have insurance for HR and in order to be insured, you have to follow their scripts. So what really sucks is that you may want to say, look, here’s the issue, right? Here’s the actual thing. And here’s what might work. I mean, and in certain situations, you know that someone’s going to get fired and you’re going through the process that the HR is giving you. And you’re just like mentally going, like resign, like you want to resign. So I will give you a massive, like written positive thing, but we can’t keep you. You know, we’re going through a process. This is the time that you should resign rather than be fired. But you’re not allowed to say that. You’re not allowed. It’s constructive dismissal. It’s all these kinds of things. Chris Williamson Constructive dismissal. Daniel Priestley Yeah. Yeah. So if you suggest that someone resigns, that’s constructive dismissal. Chris Williamson You’ve contravened something. Daniel Priestley If you’ve done something that, if your performance is at a point where, like you might really like the person, but the performance is just not there. And unfortunately, you just can’t go on any longer. So you now have to either make the role redundant or you have to performance management, manage them out of the business. What sucks is they may have been great for like three years, but now they’re just the lowest performer in the business. For the business to move on, you’d need to performance manage them out of the business. And to stay on the right side of your insurance, your HR insurance, you now have to go through the scripts. So this is meeting one, we’re assessing the performance. We’re going to be going through a process over the next two weeks to just assess where you are with your performance. And if we discover that the performance is an issue, then we may need to look at disciplinary issues and blah, blah, blah. So you have to follow the script. And you’re sitting there going, like, the decision’s been made. You know, like, seriously, just get out. Chris Williamson Dancing through this weird sequence we both have to keep on doing. Daniel Priestley Yeah. And I got sued once. I had one of my co-founders was not getting along with one of the long-term employees and they were really locking horns all the time. And she came to me and she said, look, I’m just fighting with this guy all the time and it sucks and I’m really frustrated and blah, blah, blah. And like, just gotten off of a long flight from Australia back to the UK. So I was so tired. And I said to her, look, here’s the problem. This is a co-founder, a director of the company. If you really object to working alongside him, I hate to say it, but you probably need to find somewhere else. If you’re unhappy, you should find somewhere that makes you happy. And we can support you as long as that takes. We can help you find the right thing. But if you’re unhappy here because you cannot work alongside this guy, unfortunately, he owns the company and he’s a director of the company, right? Like he’s not going to go. You need to find something that is your next move. So I just said this, 18,000 pounds. So I settled that for 18 grand because it was constructive dismissal. Chris Williamson Yeah, that’s a painful business call. Okay. So your best advice is to have a prophylactic in between you and the firing process. Daniel Priestley Yeah. So I get to the point of having an ops person and a good ops person, that’s just what they do. No emotion. Just done it. Like, let’s say they used to run a Starbucks or a pub or a McDonald’s or they used to run a travel agency or something. They’ve done this a hundred times or dozens of times before. That’s why you hired them because they know how to run the business. So, you know, typically they come to you and they say, hey, look, so-and is not performing. You know they’re not performing. Why are you keeping them around? Because they were there at the beginning. You kind of like have to have this kind of, oh, I’m sorry. And they go, look, unfortunately, this is like, we need to get someone in that role who can perform because they’re not, they’re dropping balls. Okay. Well, what do you want to do? Like, I want to performance manage them out. I want them out. I want to get someone proper in. Okay, fair enough. And then they go and do it. Okay, so you’ve got a hired gun. (Time 1:21:00)
  • Prepare Business for Life-Changing Exit
    • Prepare your business for sale with a stable 30+ person team, recurring revenue, and proprietary assets.
    • Present documented forecasts and org charts to achieve life-changing valuations. Transcript: Chris Williamson All the way through the different processes and then the final point of I’m going to exit this thing. Have you sold a business? I exited my events company, which involved impossibly trying to work out what it was worth, where there’s zero assets beyond the brand equity and the contact. And I was a key person of influence within that. And I was taking that. Daniel Priestley How big was that business? Chris Williamson We would have been doing probably somewhere in the region of a quarter of a mil GBP. Daniel Priestley Yeah. So that’s not going to be a life-changing exit. It’s very common that that is a slow handover type deal. So what you do is you vendor finance for that one and you say, look, the business is worth one times revenue and you go, so you’re going to pay quarter of a million and it’s going to be over Five years, 50 grand a year for five years. And I’m going to help hand over over the next 12 months. And then if you can’t pay the 50 grand a year for five years, then I get to take the business back in whatever form it’s in. So it’s secured against the business. So that’s kind of a, these are these micro exits. Mind you, you can be on the right side. You can be on the other side of that. You can buy a business like that and it’s epic. Like you can buy a business that’s doing a few million by just vendor financing it in and almost nothing down and the business can afford it. There’s a lot of people now who want to retire and, um, and you can buy their business for, for nothing down. Um, so that’s totally a thing. Once you get to a certain size, especially when you hit seven figures of profit, um, and, and then again, if you hit 5 million US dollars of profit, you then get proper exits. And proper exits, what they’re looking for is three things. They’re looking for a core team of people who won’t leave when you leave. So normally that’s 30 people. And they know that four or five or six might leave when you leave, but it’s not, the whole business isn’t going to fall over. So it’s not founder dependent. So you want to have 30 people on a team. They’re looking for what’s called recurring revenues. They really want contracts in place for recurring revenue. So subscriptions, memberships, service level agreements, those sorts of things. And the final one is called proprietary assets. So it could be the brand, the database, it could be intellectual property, it could be channels to market, you know, those types of things. And when you can present that and you can present a document that shows these are our proprietary assets, you can present a forecast of this is our forward looking revenue that is contracted. And this is our org chart of our 30-plus people who are going to stick around after I leave, then you get wildly high valuation, and it’s life-changing. So it’s a life-changing amount of money all in one hit. You typically can earn more than most people earn in their entire career in one sale. And mind you, we hear about the billionaire ones. We hear about the, you know, Mark Zuckerberg sold a company or whatever. But there are like every day of the week, non-newsworthy, there are people who sell a company for 12 million or, you know, 6 million or 22 million. You know, these ones don’t even make the news. So you can have these kind of events where you sell the business for a multiple of revenue. Um, you know, one of, one of my businesses, we just turned down an offer for 35 times profit. Um, and we turned it down. Um, so, you know, if you do, why’d you turn it down? Uh, cause the business is going like that. Um, and we set expectations around a certain level that we would sell the business. So like there’s an actual number that we want to hit, which is like we’re slightly off. Um, and because I’ve been on a journey with these investors and we don’t, I don’t need to sell the business, but keep writing it. Yeah. I keep writing it and just hit that number and then we’ll probably do the deal. But, but imagine getting 35 years worth of profit in one year, like in one go, like it’s life-changing. So you can have these kind of exits that are profound. And all you have to do is prove that the team won’t leave. Here’s the org chart, that the contracted revenue is going to keep contracted and that you have proprietary assets. And if you’ve got those three things, you then can basically put those into a set of documents. And once again, going back to the 30, the 30 people, you pitch that business 30 times, and you’re going to sell it for a life changing amount of money at that point. (Time 1:25:50)
  • Balance Fun Types for Fulfillment
    • Balance type one fun (enjoyable in the moment) with type two fun (enjoyable in hindsight) for business fulfillment.
    • Build in small wins and meaningful projects to maintain motivation and enjoyment. Transcript: Chris Williamson Do you ensure that running a business is fun? How do you ensure that you enjoy the process? Because I imagine that you’ve worked with people and seen people, and maybe at some point it’s been that person yourself, where you have reached a string of miserable successes. And in retrospect, you think, well, I got the outcome, but the actual process of getting there was kind of sucked a bit. And then you think, well, I’ve got the money, but does that compensate for the amount of time that wasn’t enjoyable? What are the things that predict running a business is an enjoyable experience? Daniel Priestley Yeah, there’s type one and type two fun. So type one fun is enjoyable in the moment and type two fun is enjoyable when you look back on it. So, um, and you need both. So like type one fun is being at a party, uh, type, uh, two fun is doing six to nine months work on a particular difficult thing and then getting it done and achieving a launch or achieving An exit, for example, might be horrible to like selling a company. It might be six months of really difficult conversations and difficult decisions. And then you look back on it and go, that was such an amazing life-changing thing. So it’s good to recognize there’s type one and type two. So you say, well, which one am I lacking? Am I doing something that’s meaningful that I will look back on and be really proud? In which case I need more type one fun in my life. So then build in type one fun. So take the team out often, have slow starts to the morning, incorporate travel into what you do. You know, take the team to comedy clubs. Just do those sorts of things. Allow yourself the gift of, allow yourself a bit of love language. Like for example, the other day I spoke to an entrepreneur who he’s been working in his business for three years. He’s never taken more than two and a half thousand dollars a month out. The business is like climbing up into the 500 grand sort of a year territory i said to him i said did you play nintendo as a kid and he said yeah and i said can you imagine what it would be like If you started mario and you have to play 15 levels before you discover one box that has a coin in it like you’re not going to stick with that like the like mario works because all the way Along, ding, ding, ding, ding. It’s like you’ve just starved yourself of dopamine. I said to him, you know, what’s something that you want to, like, what’s something that for you symbolizes success? He said, oh, this particular watch. I said, well, how much is the watch? And he’s like, $150,000. I said, well, that’s ridiculous. That’s a sell the company watch. I said, let me look at the watch. And he showed me this of the watch. And I said, okay, it looks a bit similar to this IWC watch, which is similar. And we had a look at that one. And I said, this one’s four grand, right? I said, what kind of watch do you have now? He’s like, there’s no watches. I’m like, so you’ve created a game where you only feel like you win when you get to the point where $150,000 watch is doable. So let’s make the game more fun where you get a four grand watch along the way. And it’s, and it’s very similar to the one you want. And as soon as he was like, oh, cool. And he says to me, what do I have to do for the watch? I said, well, let’s do these five things, which you can do in the next like five weeks. And if you, if you do this, this, and this, if you sign that, then you get to buy the watch and he’s like oh this is great so suddenly the it was amazing to watch the lights come back on like He went from like not like like being really down in the dumps and i’m like well you’ve put yourself here because you’ve created a game that feels unwinnable let’s create a game where You get a win in a few weeks from now. So like his love language was obviously gifts, but it could be that your love language is getting a massage or it could be that your love language is doing some travel. So you’ve got to figure out what would keep you in the game. So that would be type one enjoyment or the opposite could be true. Your business might be giving you a lot of type one enjoyment. You’re a nightclub party promoter, but you don’t think you’re going to look back and be proud of yourself. There’s a lot of hangovers going on. So then you go, okay, I need to link this to a charity. I need to raise money for a cause. I need to use my influence to do something of great meaning. I want to partner up with a foundation. Want to use some of the money that we’ve got to do a fundraiser or this sort of thing. And then you start saying, okay, in what ways could I bring in type 2 fun, like where I feel like I’m playing a more meaningful game. (Time 1:36:21)