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The Money Making Expert- The Exact Formula for Turning $100 Into $100k Per Month! 10x Your Income Without Working Harder! The Waiting List Hack That Will Make You Millions!

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

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  • Validate Ideas with Waiting Lists
    • Test business ideas quickly with a waiting list.
    • Gauge interest and gather valuable data before investing heavily. Transcript: Daniel Priestly So what we have to do is go make contact with other people and see what they say and see what they think. So we have to conduct tests where we fail fast and fail cheap if we fail at all. So here’s an example of what I like to do when someone has an idea. I say set up a very simple waiting list landing page and essentially let people know I’m thinking of starting something in this particular space or we’re launching something in this Space later in the year. If you’re interested, join the waiting list. Now that waiting list concept, essentially, if people will join the waiting list, and if you get hundreds of people joining a waiting list, it’s a pretty good indication that it is a Good idea. If you launch a waiting list and you message 3,000 people and say, I’m launching this thing, do you want to join the waiting list? And no one joins, then it’s a good indication that’s not the idea, right? Because we have to have a good marriage between what we’re passionate about, what we want to do and what the market wants. There’s 6 million businesses in the UK, 30 million businesses in the USA. And that basically means there’s a lot of businesses doing a lot of things that already exist. So the market might not have an unmet need. The market might say, hey, I already have a great cupcake supply. There’s already someone who makes great coffee in my neighborhood. We don’t need another one. Okay, fair enough. Let’s have another idea, right? You can always have plenty more ideas. So you’ve got to test. The faster you can get on (Time 0:07:00)
  • The Role of Passion in Entrepreneurship
    • Passion fuels perseverance during challenging times in business.
    • True passion stems from aligning your origin story, mission, and vision. Transcript: Steven Bartlett Interesting. The other point you said within there was about, you said there’s kind of two things, what you’re passionate about and what the market wants. Now, on the point of passion, it’s so cliche, people say, follow your passions, do things you’re passionate about, etc. How role, how important do you think the role of passion is in actually succeeding at any of these ideas? So if I’ve got four ideas, cupcake business, floristry business, soccer business, and I don’t know, AI business, what role does my own intrinsic passion of any of these areas matter In the chances of success? Daniel Priestly Passion matters a lot because business is hard and you have to stick with it through the downs. So the reason passion is valuable is because you are going to go through valleys and they’re going to be painful and they’re going to be, the gratification is going to be very much delayed In any business journey. So passion is the thing that gets you through. It’s not the thing that you ride high on. It’s the thing that you get through the hard times with. I have a very weird definition of passion. I kind of like tried to strip it back to its bones. And I look for an alignment between origin, mission, and vision. So I essentially say, what is your origin story? What’s your background? I want to see that you’re doing something that aligns to what you’ve always been doing. I want to see that this goes back to age 10. For me, when I ask people about why you’re doing this thing, I want them to start the story a long time ago. And I want them to tell me about little wins that they’ve had along the way that have led to this moment, which is why they’re starting this business. To me, that’s great. Because anything that we keep coming back to as a recurring theme is what we’re meant to be doing. So for me, I’ve going right back to age 10, I have experiences throughout my teenage years and going back to age 10 that were about business as a force for good. And it goes right back to a garage sale that I did when I was 10 years old. We had a house fire. It was a horrible experience, but it turned into a positive experience because I set up this garage sale and made some money and something bad happened and I turned it into something Good through business. And for me, there’s this recurring theme that all of my little wins line up to these themes. So the origin story is really powerful. The vision for the future is what do I want to see happen in the future? If all of this goes well and other people are doing it too, what would this look like in the future? What would 10 years from now, 20 years from now be if we were celebrating? What would we love to be celebrating? And then the mission is what is the most high value thing that I could possibly do that’s in alignment with that vision? So essentially, if there is a strong alignment between origin, mission and vision, something happens you carry yourself in a different way. You sit differently. You speak differently. You’re in this alignment. Other people pick up on it. They want to quit their job and go and work on your team. They hear about the vision. They hear about your origin story. They hear about the mission and they go, oh, I’m going to leave what I’m doing and come and join that. And that’s the magic of entrepreneurship. So for me, that’s passion. It’s not about like superficially, I like snowboarding or, oh, I’ve always enjoyed baking a cake. It’s (Time 0:11:09)
  • Vending Machine Venture
    • Steven Bartlett secured vending machines for his school at 16.
    • He simply emailed companies, demonstrating a resourceful mindset. Transcript: Daniel Priestly Shocking because it’s so simple. Steven Bartlett And, but it’s so resonant with me. There’s two examples I’ll give. The first I’ve talked about many times was when I was 16, 17, in sixth form, saw Carly Stokes sat in front of me, who was a girl in my school. I think she was head girl, but she was picking the vending machines we were going to get in the school. And in my brain, I thought, we have 2,000 paying customers here. Surely there’s a vending machine company that would love to put these machines for free and give us a cut. Went to the computer room, sent five emails based on Google search rankings. By the same day, and Mr. Sprinkle, who was our head of Key Stage 5, has confirmed this on live TV, someone showed up with a tape measure to fit the machines. Because one of my emails had gone to a former student who was now the CEO of a vending machine company, and he had been looking to give back to the school. Example (Time 0:21:37)
  • The Art of Pitching
    • Craft compelling pitches using the CAPSTONE framework (Clarity, Authority, Problem, Solution, The Why, Opportunity, Next steps, Essence).
    • End your pitch with the essence or emotion you want to evoke. Transcript: Steven Bartlett The pitch is the keys to everything you want to be, because if we were saying that it’s really conversations that stand in the way of where you want to go, and it’s the pitch that is essentially The key to wherever you want to go, what are the attributes a perfect pitch? What are the fundamentals of being an exceptional salesperson pitcher? Daniel Priestly Well, you’ve seen some great pitches on the den. A lot of bad ones too. Yeah. So here’s what I look for. Clarity is the base level. You just don’t want to confuse people. Authority is the ability to communicate that you are worth listening to, that there’s something about your background or what you’ve done or the data that you’re possessing or the Mentor that you’ve got that gives you some sort of authority to be talking about this. So clarity and authority, defining some sort of a problem that the customer has or some sort of problem that exists in the world that needs solving and that you’ve identified an insight Or a solution for that problem. Then the why, which I would say is about communicating why you care enough about this that people would buy into you as the person to drive this forward. You then want to define the opportunity. What is the bigger opportunity for anyone who gets involved? The next steps. What should someone do next? And then the emotion or the essence that you want to leave people with so that they remember you based on that essence or that emotion that you made them feel. So that’s the great arc of an inspiring pitch. Steven Bartlett What was the last one there? Was it the emotion? Daniel Priestly So clarity, authority, problem, solution, the why, opportunity, next steps, and the essence. And it spells out capstone capstone so that’s how i remember a great pitch i’ve i had to come up with a way of remembering this because i was pitching so often i had to be able to come back To okay how do i pitch this so the essence that’s the one i wanted some more definition people remember you based on how you made them feel so you want to think how do i want to leave people Feeling? What’s the emotion that I want people to remember? Steven Bartlett When I’m pitching? Yeah. (Time 0:27:29)
  • Securing Camera Equipment
    • At 18, Steven Bartlett obtained £10,000 worth of camera equipment by emailing Samsung.
    • He offered to display their logo, solving their problem of returned cameras. Transcript: Steven Bartlett I’ve been thinking a lot about, you know, some adjacent subjects to what we’re talking about here. But this idea that if you just asked five times more than you’re currently asking, your life would change. The secondary example i was going to give after my coffee um machine example from when i was 16 was when i was 18 and i was completely broke and that’s when i was shoplifting those chicagotown Pizzas to feed myself and i need i started i was starting this business called wallpark and i needed camera equipment i sent 20 emails to camera companies saying hey i’ve got um this website I’m going to launch we’re going to record videos on campus i need some cameras. If you lend us the cameras, we’ll put your logo on all the videos we make on campus. Within 72 hours, Samsung had sent £10,000 worth of camera equipment to my front door in my side. I got an email the day after the cameras arrived and it said, these are returns. Send them back when you don’t need them anymore. And I’d solved someone’s problem for him because he had returned cameras in a warehouse that he didn’t know what to do with. He sent me £10,000 worth of camera equipment for free within 72 hours. You just asked. And I go, oh my God, like when you’re at the bottom and you have nothing to lose and you have an internet connection and a Gmail account, why aren’t you sending out 20, 30, 50 emails a day Asking? (Time 0:30:12)
  • “With or Without You” Energy
    • When making requests, project “with or without you” energy.
    • Show confidence that your venture will succeed regardless of their involvement. Transcript: Steven Bartlett Have to say a lot of people send me messages I get um many thousands of messages a week across my inboxes LinkedIn Instagram the podcast etc and because I’m exposed to so many thousands Of messages, as I’m sure you are, you get to see the variance in a good ask versus a bad ask. Yeah. Now I want to drill down on that. What are the core components of a great ask? The best ask has with or without you energy. Daniel Priestly With or without you energy is the energy that you have when this is going to happen with or without you. So essentially, when you say, we’re going to be doing this filming, and do you want to send some cameras and we’ll put your logo at the bottom? It’s happening with or without you, you can be the company that gets the logo or not. But it is happening with or without you. The worst asks are, I desperately need this to happen. And if you don’t say yes, no one will ever say yes. And therefore, I’ll give up. So if I think about the best asks that come through, something is going to happen. And it’s going to happen whether I’m involved or not. And I get to choose whether I want to jump onto that or not. And (Time 0:32:33)
  • Building a Balanced Team
    • Business is a team sport, and solopreneurship is unsustainable.
    • Build balanced teams with diverse skills (visionary, implementer, connector, financier). Transcript: Steven Bartlett I’ve come to learn, especially over the last couple of years, about the importance of people. You talked about people at the very beginning of this conversation, hiring people, finding the right people to join you in your mission. How central to being successful in both business, but just more broadly in life, is assembling the right group of people? Daniel Priestly So business is a team sport. There’s no getting around it. I don’t believe in solopreneurship. I don’t believe that you can be a one-person entrepreneur. I think entrepreneurs are team players and that they assemble teams. They put together teams of amazing people. Sometimes they put together teams of ordinary people at the beginning and then they become amazing people. So I’m a believer that two-person co-founders or a founder plus an assistant is a great place to start. Four-person campaign teams, eight-person core teams, 30-person performance teams. So I love the British military’s approach to team building. So in the British military, they have two person scout team, four person fire team, eight person section, 30 person platoon. So they go two, four, eight, 30. And I’ve used that myself in my own scale up approach, where if there’s a new idea, we put two people on it. Once it’s proven, four people are on it. Once it’s up and running, eight people are on it. Once it becomes a business that has its own standalone value, 30 people are on it. So it’s two, four, eight, 30. And that’s been a British military learning that I kind of went, well, if they’ve done 400 years of HR experiments, why wouldn’t I just learn from how they organize their teams? Steven Bartlett Is there anything you’ve found that is consistent across all of the best people you’ve hired, worked with, co-founded a company with, partnered with? Daniel Priestly Is there any consistent thing? I’m always looking for complementary energies. So here’s what I’m looking for. In the deck of cards, there’s four suits. So you’ve got clouds, so head in the clouds, spades, doing the work, hearts, connecting with people, diamonds, money, finance, data. So I always look for a balanced team of someone who’s visionary with someone who’s a spades person doing the work, implementer, someone who’s hearts connector with someone who’s money Or data. So I’m looking to try and perfectly balance my team with the four suits. And I’ve seen visionary people who get nothing done because they don’t have an implementer around. I’ve seen amazing connectors who don’t have anyone balancing them out. So they never retain any of the money that’s flowing around them because they’re an amazing networker. People are doing deals around them, but they’re not involved in any of it. So for me, it’s the connection between those four (Time 1:07:11)
  • Income Follows Assets
    • Increase income by accumulating assets, not just saving.
    • Invest in skill development, especially negotiation and sales, early on. Transcript: Steven Bartlett In a cost of living crisis in the UK and many countries around the world are either in or on the brink of recession. So one of the most popular questions we’ve had at the Diary of a CEO in the last three to six months is about money, people’s concern about their own money, spending, finance and saving. If I’m someone out there now that has, I don’t know, $100 or £100 worth of disposable income every month, or if I have £1,000 or £10,000, what should I be thinking about as it relates to Creating more money and making myself financially free? Daniel Priestly The first thing is you just want to earn more. People massively settle for how much they could earn. So the first place to, I think, to invest is in yourself. But here’s the first principle. The first principle is income follows assets. Income follows assets means that the more assets you have, the more income you’ll earn. If I want rental income, first I need a house. If I want dividend income, I need shares. If I want to be paid as a brand ambassador, first I need a brand. So essentially, the more we can accumulate assets, the more easy and effortless the money flows. So we have to figure out what assets could you accumulate and what assets could you formalize and own. I wrote a book called 24 Assets and I listed out all the different digital assets that are new economy assets that people could have, things like brand and positioning, things like databases, Things like company culture is an asset now. So I talk about how do you formalize those things? If someone’s just starting out and they’ve got 100 a month, to be perfectly honest, trying to invest 100 a month or any of that, it’s not going to do anything. It’s not going to change your life. But if you put that into your own skills and your own development, let’s say you don’t have negotiation skills. Well, there are courses that you can take for $100 that give you negotiation skills. (Time 1:09:57)
  • Stages of Business Growth
    • Grow businesses through key stages: Chaos (Concept, Audience, Offer, Sales), Team Building, Digitization, and Scaling.
    • Focus on increasing revenue per person by developing digital assets. Transcript: Daniel Priestly Let’s talk about that journey then. Yep. Steven Bartlett That journey from got an idea, want to start that ice cream business, that Chile and basil ice cream business, whatever. Except for tens of millions. Exit for tens of millions. I get off the ground. People love my chili and basil ice cream. What is the journey that an entrepreneur goes on from zero up until they exit? So there’s key stages. Daniel Priestly The first four stages where everyone gets caught is called chaos, concept, audience, offer, sales. So you have to develop your concept. So it’s a good concept. You’ve validated it. You’ve conducted some experiments. You’re aligned to it. Other people are excited about it. Audience is that you engage an audience, waiting lists, dinner parties, scorecards, quizzes, discussion groups, all of those are great audience builders. Offer is that you construct a packaged up offering so that people can buy something and that audience can now act on something and buy. And then sales, which is the ability to talk and discuss with your interested parties to close deals, to actually get sales across the line and to do that predictably and reliably. So for sales, we establish something called a rhythm of laps, leads appointments, presentations, and sales. And we measure our pipeline every week, how many leads, how many appointments, how many presentations, how many sales. So those are the first four things, concept, audience, offer, sales. And that should get you into the six figures of revenue just by doing that. The next thing is about team building. You’ve got to establish a key person of influence who’s got a personal brand, who’s the leader of the company, who’s going to embody the brand. And you’ve got to build a team of eight people around them. A general manager, marketing and sales, finance admin, IT, media and operations, those kind of roles. And essentially, you now build this core team of eight. And the key person of influence job is to engage bigger and bigger audiences. And so they get out there and tell the story of the business. They get on stages, they pitch, they publish content, they raise their profile, they do joint ventures and partnerships. So they’re leading from the front while the general manager or ops director is making sure things don’t fall apart behind. Once you hit about eight people, you now have to digitize absolutely everything of value in that business. So now you go through the whole process of digitization of the value. So you’re getting ready to scale. Steven Bartlett Which means, for example, moving physical relationships to a CRM, some kind of database or… Daniel Priestly Building a CRM, formalizing your intellectual property, building a brand, a company brand, formalizing your organizational culture, getting into really good investor relationship And documentation governance. So all of these are developing systems, developing assets of the business, having online marketing and sales systems, having an online way of generating a lot of leads reliably, having An online way of making customers mostly happy most of the time. So you’re basically trying to build as many assets as possible. What you’re trying to do at about 8 to 10 people is raise revenue per person. So let’s say you’ve got 10 people with $100,000 per person, so you’ve got a million of revenue, 10 people times $100,000 million of revenue. If you can add assets and get it to go to $1.1, $1. 1.3 million, now you’ve got 130,000 per person. So what you’re trying to do is add as many digital assets as possible to get the revenue per employee or the revenue per person up. Once you see that the revenue per person is going up, now you can add people because the more digital assets there are times by the number of people, now you’re going to be successful. Now, the really hard jump is from 12 to 30. From 12 people to 30, you’re too big to be small, too small to be big. Very difficult time in any business’s life. And what you have to do is go through a transformation of a small team of rebels and misfits to a professional team that’s manufacturing value. A lot of people have to go. Unfortunately, some of the earlier people who were there because they could breathe and had a pulse and all of that sort of stuff, they unfortunately have to go find a new startup. And you now have to go and bring on team members who come through recruiters with a proper process and who they go through an entire process of how they join the team. They’re onboarded correctly. And now you transform into a more valuable professional organization. Once you hit 30, you’ve got a five person executive team plus a non-executive director and an advisor. And then you’ve got some teams of teams. And now you’re doing 10 million of revenue, 3 million of profit. (Time 1:20:18)
  • Winning vs. Being Right
    • Prioritize winning over being right and hire “overlings” (people better than you).
    • Great leaders, like conductors, assemble talented individuals, not underlings. Transcript: Steven Bartlett Everyone can relate like i don’t mean to share this without asking him but i’m sure like he’s in control of the edit so he can take it out if he doesn’t like it but did you think i was gonna Do it jack turned around to our team the other day and it was i’ve actually spoken to so many people about this moment since he said it jack said you know what um jack’s run this podcast from Zero so zero subscribers to where it is now it’s five million subscribers jack turned around at five million subscribers and was like i’m not the best in the world at doing lighting so What i’ve done is i’ve gone out and i found someone who’s the best at lighting and they’re going to teach me they’re going to redesign my set five million subscribers he’s getting someone Else to redesign a set so that the lighting is amazing it takes a certain kind of person to put winning over ego i love that yeah you know what i mean and yeah i think about this so many yeah Jack probably didn’t know the profoundness of that moment to me but someone who is applauded from everyone, you’ve got the best, you know, whatever, for him to go, do you know what, there’s So much I don’t know. Daniel Priestly He role modeled humility and he role modeled the idea of winning is better than being right. Yeah. And overlings, not underlings. A great company is great because you bring in overlings, not underlings. So an underling is someone who’s not as good as you are. And an overling is someone who’s way better than you are. So it’s that confidence to bring in the overlings. All of my businesses have been great because overlings run them. Everyone who is in my organization is way better than me at the thing they’re doing. And I feel like the conductor in the orchestra can’t play all the instruments and probably maybe is okay at one instrument, but actually their ability to bring in the best in the world At that instrument is what makes them a great conductor, the ability to enroll people. So (Time 1:27:33)
  • Management Buyouts
    • Management buyouts of “boring” businesses offer significant opportunities.
    • Acquire declining businesses from retiring Baby Boomers and revitalize them. Transcript: Daniel Priestly The first thing I’d say is that there’s value to be made at every level. If you’re watching this and you know you’re not a founder and you’re sitting there going, all the people who make the money are the people who start from scratch and get something off The ground and look at Daniel and look at Stephen. Those guys are the zero to one guys. Wouldn’t it be great if I was one of those? But I’m not. Well, actually, that’s not true. The truth is that there’s incredible wealth to be created if you can take something from two to 20 million. There’s amazing wealth if you can take something from 20 to 200 million. Do you know, this is worth mentioning, one of the biggest opportunities in the world right now, there’s two major opportunities in the world, but one of the biggest opportunities in The world at the moment is baby boomers who want to retire. And a typical scenario is you get someone who’s late 60s, early 70s, the business had a high watermark of a couple of million. And now it’s dropped down to maybe a million or high six figures because the person’s semi-retiring. And because the business has been on decline, it’s almost unsaleable. The person wants to retire and they just want to hand over the keys and they just want that business to go to someone who’s fresh. And what they’re willing to do is to do a vendor sale exit. Cody Sanchez, she talks about this. I’ve done deals like this. And actually, Jeremy with the 100-foot yacht, that’s how he does it. So you essentially, you buy a business that the person wants to retire and you take over that business with fresh energy and you bring it back to its high watermark. So there are so many people who what they would be suited for is not starting with a blank sheet of paper like me, but they would actually go and find, you know, Bill and Sarah who want to Retire and they want to do a deal where they get paid out over five years to hand over the keys to the business. Steven Bartlett Let’s zoom in on this because a lot of people don’t understand the concept of like a management buyout. So I see Bill and Sarah, they’re running a laundry mat. Daniel Priestly Yeah. Well, here’s a real life example. A real life example from a friend of mine is called Kit King. And basically he approached someone who had that business. They built it up to, I think a few million. And then the guy was ready to retire. When he walked in, the orders would get printed out and put onto a spike. And spike number one was like, this is an order. And then when it was fulfilled, it goes onto the fulfilled spike, a piece of paper. And then, you know, this young guy comes in and he digitizes the business and he gets all the automated order thing flowing, cost about 25 grand to get in a specialist who could do all of That. And then he basically re-engaged the team. The team were totally unengaged. I think there’s about a dozen people and they’d not had a team meeting in ages. They’d not, there was no vision for the business. They’d not gone and spoken to customers in forever. And then he comes in, goes and talks to customers, starts hosting some online events, starts sending out messages, starts digitizing, builds a bit of the brand. And that business has, I think, grown like 500% in like two years. It’s massively successful. But he started with something that had been going for 30 years. In that example, you don’t necessarily need any money. No, no, no. Steven Bartlett This was no money down. So you can create a multi-million pound business, theoretically, starting with zero money. Daniel Priestly Remember that money is just a database. So it’s a database of the value. So what you do is, like, if I want to buy a house, I go to the bank and they lend me the money to buy the house. If I want to buy a business, the person who already owns the business is probably the most likely person to see the value in funding the business. A bank probably won’t, but the person who is selling it, let’s say I go to Bill and Sarah. I say, look, there’s no question. Your business is worth 1.2 million. I don’t have 1.2 million. I have a little bit of money that I’m going to invest into the business to grow it. Can I pay you the 1.2 million over six years, seven years? And what we will do is this is my business plan. You will be the board members, chairperson of the board, and the business will be the security for that loan. So if we screw up and we can’t make our payments, you take the whole business back with everything that we’ve thrown at it, everything that we’ve done at it, you’ll be able to take it back And sell it to somebody else if we skip our payments. So you’re securing the purchase of the business with the business itself. You’re doing a business plan where it makes sense that the business could make the payments. Now think about it from Bill and Sarah’s point of view. They’ve got this thing that’s driving them crazy. They want to retire. They want to go south of France. They want to go spend time with the grandkids. And now someone’s coming along and saying, yeah, we’re going to pay you 120 grand a year for the next seven years. And if we don’t, then you get your business back. And if we don’t, you get the business back. And if they believe you, which is the key part, if they believe in your ability to execute because… And if there’s no one else offering anything else, they believe you and there’s no other options, it’s a great deal. Now, here’s a crazy thing. 65% of the value of all business equity in the economy is owned by baby boomers right now. So if you were to take, if you were to throw a dartboard at all the valuation of every company in the UK or the USA, there’s a 65% chance that you hit a baby boomer, right? So it’s, it’s, it’s incredible. Now, all of those businesses have to be passed on somewhere. Now, all of these young people, they all want to have the latest psychedelic startup, although like that. And they’re like, oh, I don’t want the elevator repair business that does 8 million a year. It’s like, go get involved in that, right? So that’s a huge opportunity. Steven Bartlett The arbitrage and the opportunity here is boring businesses. Daniel Priestly Boring businesses that you can bring something to it. You can digitize it. You can make it interesting. You can create a culture that’s exciting. The thing about a boring business. Boring boomer business. Boring boomer business, right? Steven Bartlett I said that first. That’s my next book. Quick, get the URL. I said that first. Trademark. Yeah, could you guys grab the URL? Wait a second. I’ll get my back. Daniel Priestly So the boring boomer business, the BBBs, you know, a business can be exciting. It can do a boring thing, but still be an exciting business. The way you run the team and the culture, the money that it spits out can be exciting. You can use that business to sponsor a charity. You know, I’ve got a friend and a client called Sebastian Bates. He’s got an amazing martial arts school that’s in the UK and Dubai called Warrior Academy. And he’s used all of his, he’s very profitable. He’s now set up martial arts schools in Kenya, Nepal, all of these different areas that are struggling areas now have a martial arts academy. He set up his own charity and he’s basically doing martial arts schools for kids who have never had anyone look out for them. They’re often street kids and homeless kids. They come into martial arts and they get taught life skills and martial arts and confidence and character. But the point is, is you can take a boring business and the way that you run it, you can launch a charity associated with it. You could hire young people who are coming out of prison and give them a second chance to get started. And that could be part of the excitement of the business. There are so many ways to make a boring business an exciting business. Most of the times Bill and Sarah have given up on that. They’re just, you know, they’ve been doin… (Time 1:29:16)
  • Crucial Skills for Wealth Creation
    • Two crucial skills for wealth creation are sales (demand creation) and deal structuring.
    • Leverage AI tools like ChatGPT for drafting and refining deal structures. Transcript: Steven Bartlett Key skills here. The first skill is sales. We’ve talked about that. You have to be persuasive. And the second key skill is even understanding the structuring of that deal, you know, and those are two very different things, but they’re imperative. What I’ve come to learn over the last five years is the people in my life that are the best wealth creators have those two skills. They understand how to structure a deal and they understand how to sell the deal. Yes. Daniel Priestly Yeah. Sales is sales that demand creation, doing the deal and structuring phenomenal skills. And everything that you want is on the other side of a structure that exists. So with ScoreApp, 2022, AI comes out and I go, oh my God, AI changes the fundamental nature of this business. We need to be on AI. I thought the first thing I want to do is bring someone onto the team who is an AI expert. So I approach Professor Andy Pardo, who’s the head of AI for Warwick University. And I say, we’re setting up an AI advisory board. Would you like to be on our AI advisory board? Here’s how much we pay per year. And would you like to join the board? And he’s like, yeah, I’ll join the advisory board. So he comes and joins our advisory board. He starts making some recommendations about how we adapt to the AI challenge. We didn’t need anyone else. That was absolutely perfect. He brought with him a team of researchers who came in and worked on the back end of our system as well. But what was interesting is that that happened in two weeks. So from two weeks, we went from no AI integration to having Professor Andy Pardo, who’s a PhD of AI, who’s got 25-year background of AI, as our advisor because we set up an advisory board. So I just knew what structure to structure it as. So had I said, can you help me? I need to figure this out. Yeah, you wouldn’t have. But how do you, someone that’s at the very start of their journey, they don’t understand all these. They don’t know structures. I mean, it’s hard because in theory, you go talk to a CFO and you basically talk to an experienced CFO who’s done a lot of M&A and you just say, well, actually, do you know what’s even wild? Today, you don’t even need a CFO. You go on chat TV. Act as a CFO. Explain to me what structures I would use to do this. How would I structure a deal with this? Explain to me, I would like to buy a business, an existing 20-year business. I would like to buy it so that I don’t have to pay anything upfront and that the owners of the business finance my new ownership of the business. Act as a CFO and advise me on how to do that transaction. And what’s amazing is ChatGPT will do a good job of that or it’s a good starting point. Draft the heads of terms. Steven Bartlett You can ask ChatGPT to do it. Daniel Priestly Yeah, draft the heads of terms for that deal review the draft of heads of terms to see if there’s any omissions or mistakes would you have changed now that you’ve seen that would you do Anything differently yeah i would change this you can send the email draft an email yeah to the finance director of this company proposing that we acquire the business with no money Steven Bartlett Down (Time 1:37:33)
  • The AI Revolution
    • AI is transforming business, and we haven’t fully grasped its potential.
    • AI will divide society into creators who leverage it and consumers who are used by it. Transcript: Steven Bartlett Asking for a meeting yeah isn’t it crazy that we live in this new era where the possibilities in terms of communication storytelling persuasion and the cost of um a sale have completely Completely changed dynamics have shifted ai is changing everything we haven’t realized yet have we if you think about how we’re behaving no no no we haven’t quite realized the potential Daniel Priestly Of the technology we have we are like on the movie the titanic when they hit the iceberg and they’re all just like dancing on the thing and someone says oh it’s an unsinkable ship and the Guy with a white face uh says it’s made of steel it will go down it’ll sink when i first saw ai do what ai does i had that moment of like oh no, this changes everything. We’ve just hit an iceberg. This is a fundamental general purpose technology that is going to change everything. It’s going to change every industry, top to bottom. Everything’s going to have to reorganize itself around an AI landscape. But we’re all pretending like it doesn’t exist. We’re all pretending like this thing isn’t doing what it’s doing. But yeah. There’s one thing that AI disagrees with you on. When I say AI, I mean Sam Altman from ChatGPT. Steven Bartlett You said earlier business is a team sport. Now he has a WhatsApp group, Sam Altman, the founder of ChatGPT. And in that WhatsApp group, he’s got a bet with some friends that they’ll be the first ever one person billion dollar company soon and they’re guessing on the date of the first ever one Person billion dollar company because with AI the team sport becomes you and a large language model like a chat GP2. Daniel Priestly I think that it’s directionally correct what he’s saying the one person AI business will be beaten by the 10-person AI business. And like, yes, it probably will happen. Like, assuming it, of course it will happen. There will be a person who creates something using AI and it will be a standout thing. But to replicate that again and again, having what we will see a lot of is five-person teams with a CEO, CTO, COO, CMO, CFO who work together as five people doing the work of 500 people using AI. That’ll happen definitely and that’ll reproduce. But to a degree, business is always going to be a team sport that essentially five or six people will always be one because they’re talking to each other and they’re covering different Angles. And whatever AI strengths, AI is very good at content, but not context. And having five people who share a context and create a context together, then the content can happen using AI. AI without that context, it doesn’t know what to do. So it doesn’t have any purpose. Right now? Yeah, to a degree it can start to, it still needs a first mover on what is the context? Why are we doing this in the first place? Right now? So, well, that’s the one person. Yeah, I agree with you that there is, like, we are at a time in history where we can’t see around the corner. We don’t know what society will look like. But here’s a few things I do know about. I do know that as it stands right now, humans are great at context and AI is good at content. And if you can provide AI with an amazing context as to what it’s meant to be doing, it will fill in all the blanks, but it needs the context first. I know that vitality versus functionality. AI is great at functionality, but it needs someone to breathe life force into it. It’s the human life force that we breathe into things. So it still needs vitality, even though AI does a lot of functionality. And the warning that I have for people is that AI is very good at turning you into a creator or a consumer. So it essentially figures you out and it says, oh, TikTok, huh? How about we get you to spend 16 hours on TikTok and hypnotize you into spending way longer than you thought on this thing? And the AI is really good at saying, we’ll drive you down to the edges of how much someone can consume. But it will also drive you to the edges of how much someone can create. And one thing that is going to happen in the next few years is everyone is going to have to make a conscious decision. Do I want to be a creator or a consumer in relationship to AI? Because if you allow AI to use you, it’ll just turn you into a consumer. You’ll listen to more stuff, watch more stuff, spend more money because AI is good at that. Or if (Time 1:40:41)
  • Work-Life Balance and Asset Creation
    • Work-life balance is often touted by those who achieved success through intense work.
    • Sustainable work involves creating assets and income simultaneously. Transcript: Steven Bartlett Balance. Is it a thing? Is it possible to be wildly successful and not work exceptionally hard? The people who talk about work-life balance as an important thing, they normally worked their asses off to the extent that they almost themselves out. Daniel Priestly Then they had a come to Jesus moment. And then they now espouse work-life balance in hindsight, after having a massive breakthrough from the massive amounts of work that they did. And that is typically the pathway towards the work-life balance guru. So here’s the unfortunate thing. You’ve got to look at what, you’ve got to look at the statistics. People who earn over a hundred grand typically work 55 hours per week, but there’s work and there’s work. So you and I work enormous amounts of hours, but we’re not digging up roads. We’re not laying cables. We’re not doing boring, repetitive stuff. In most cases, our work is creativity. It’s publishing things. It’s pitching deals. It’s sitting there in Dragon’s Den, analyzing what’s going on. It’s doing interviews. So there’s a new style of work. So when people get angry about work-life balance and they say, damn it, work-life balance has to be a thing, it’s normally because their association to work is that work is such a negative Thing. And work is something you have to do in order to make money. And when people say, oh, I do 55 hours a week and I love it, they go, well, something’s deeply wrong with you. It’s like- You’re toxic. Yeah, you’re toxic. Well, actually- It’s apples and oranges. Yeah, I’m enjoying, I’m doing something that’s deeply fulfilling and passionate. And I can do it from home. And I do it online and it’s digital. And I see my kids all the time while I’m doing it and I actually don’t feel like I even work that hard. I’m just enjoying it but I am doing that stuff. Keep in mind this, if you’re doing a lot of hard work that doesn’t develop an asset simultaneously, it’s probably going to end up toxic. You may burn out. If you do a lot of hard work that simultaneously develops asset, the asset value eventually takes over and then you’re working completely by choice. So simplify that as if I was a 10-year If you create podcasts and those podcasts go onto YouTube and that people can watch them a year later, two years, three years later, you’ve developed Something that has a life of its own and it’s going to continue to create value without you having to physically be there. So if your work is creating a byproduct of an asset, if you own the company that you started and you own the shares in that company, and that company becomes more and more successful and The equity value becomes more and more valuable, you’re building, your work is creating a valuable asset. If, like my wife, you renovate horrible properties into amazing properties, her work creates income and an asset simultaneously. Steven Bartlett What’s the opposite of that? Where you’re working, but you’re not creating any assets? Well, an Uber driver. I used to work at McDonald’s for two days. Daniel Priestly I worked in McDonald’s as well. I loved working at McDonald’s. The asset that I created was a deep appreciation for systems. But the problem with being an Uber driver is that you can actually do 16 hour days. However, at the end of 16 hour days, that’s it. You’ve earned that amount of money and you’ve not developed any additional asset. You’ve just performed a role. So you’re not building simultaneously an asset. The people who love their work and don’t burn out are the people whose work creates income (Time 1:47:28)