How To Quit Your 9-5 And Build Your Dream Business (ft. Ali Abdaal)

Summary

The video features Simon Squibb and Ali Abdaal discussing a practical eight-step blueprint to break free from a conventional 9-to-5 job and successfully build a dream business. The conversation highlights strategies for setting financial goals, choosing entrepreneurial adventures, and managing time effectively. Featuring steps like mastering time management, staying consistent with efforts, and clarifying business intentions, this video is pitched as a motivational guide for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Highlights

• Ali's journey from medical school to YouTuber and entrepreneur is inspired by a desire for freedom and fulfillment. 😎
• Lower your lifestyle costs to increase freedom and lessen the pressure when transitioning from a 9-to-5. 💡
• Introduce a lifestyle business to earn side income and explore entrepreneurship without quitting your day job immediately. 📈
• Set intention by scheduling entrepreneurial tasks in your calendar, like a business meeting at work. 📅
• Test ideas cheaply with waitlists and pre-sales before building products to ensure demand. 💡

Key Takeaways

• Set a clear financial goal like Ali's £3,000 a month to have the freedom to focus on your passions. 💰
• Choose your adventure: Decide between the career stream, side hustle, or full entrepreneurship. 🚀
• Getting started is about overcoming the illusion of certainty; everything is uncertain but that shouldn't stop you. 😅
• Master your time by reframing from 'I don't have time' to 'I'm choosing not to make time'. ⏰
• Increase your chances of success by knowing your audience with accurate, targeted marketing. 🎯

Overview

Simon Squibb chats with Ali Abdaal regarding his transition from working a typical day job in the medical field to becoming a successful entrepreneur. Squibb highlights the comprehensive roadmap Abdaal used which includes setting tangible goals, picking a pathway like side hustling, and mastering time management. This blueprint is framed around Abdaal's real-life experiences and backed by his engaging narrative, inspiring individuals to break free from their current jobs for a more fulfilling life.

The discussion delves into recognizing the power of financial freedom and how setting a modest, manageable income goal is crucial for anyone looking to step into entrepreneurship. The speakers argue that minimizing personal financial needs makes it easier to reach freedom, allowing individuals to build a lifestyle business alongside their careers. This helps them gradually adapt before fully embracing the entrepreneurial journey, hence offering practical steps and relatable stories.

Throughout the video, the duo emphasizes taking consistent small actions over seeking certainty before starting. They advocate for experimentation through small-scale validation techniques like pre-sales or waitlists to assess market interest. Furthermore, they touch upon the significance of creating good time management habits and building a supportive community to remain consistent and motivated towards entrepreneurial goals.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction: From 9-to-5 to Freedom In the introduction chapter titled 'From 9-to-5 to Freedom,' Ali Abdal shares his eight-step blueprint that enabled him to leave his traditional job and create a successful, multi-million dollar business. This chapter aims to inspire those who feel stuck in unfulfilling jobs or educational pathways by showing that it's possible to build a life of freedom and financial independence through entrepreneurship. Ali's story serves as a motivational example of how one can transition from a dreaded day job to a thriving side hustle that generates substantial monthly income.
• 01:00 - 02:30: The Power of Setting Goals This chapter discusses the process and importance of setting goals. It outlines an eight-step strategy to achieve success: setting the goal, choosing your path, beginning the journey, mastering time management, taking consistent action, gaining clarity on your target audience, monetizing, and scaling your efforts. The video emphasizes practical steps derived from personal experience and is sponsored by Shopify to support entrepreneurial dreams.
• 02:30 - 08:30: Choosing Your Adventure In this chapter, the author discusses their journey to medical school and their initial excitement about becoming a doctor. However, upon interacting with practicing doctors, the author developed doubts about the profession's long-term satisfaction. By asking doctors if they would continue practicing medicine after a lottery win, the author discovered that about half of them would quit immediately if they had the financial freedom to do so. This revelation led the author to question their own career path and consider whether this was the right adventure for them to pursue.
• 08:30 - 12:30: The Rule of Just Get Started The chapter delves into the concept of 'Just Get Started,' emphasizing the importance of taking initiative in one's career. It begins with a discussion among medical professionals, highlighting their dilemma of wanting to reduce work hours but being financially constrained. Many doctors express a desire to work part-time, ideally three days a week, but financial obligations, such as mortgages, compel them to maintain a full schedule. The speaker recounts their own experience starting at the age of 18, when they began to question professionals about their reluctance to work part-time. Influenced by the book 'The 4-Hour Work Week,' they set a personal financial goal, recognizing the need to balance work with other life ambitions.
• 12:30 - 15:00: Consistency and Mastering Your Time The chapter titled 'Consistency and Mastering Your Time' discusses the importance of financial independence and personal freedom. The narrator reflects on their past goal of earning 3K a month through a side hustle. This financial target wasn’t about the money itself, but about the freedom it could offer. Achieving this goal allowed them to eventually quit their job and pursue what they truly love.
• 15:00 - 21:00: Finding Fun and Fulfillment The chapter emphasizes the importance of setting a clear, compelling goal as the first step in entrepreneurship to maintain motivation and discipline through its ups and downs. The author advises entrepreneurs and professionals on how a well-defined goal can help avoid dissatisfaction in one's career. The author shares a personal insight on wanting to avoid becoming miserable in a medical career as seen in others.
• 21:00 - 25:00: Leveraging Existing Platforms and Resources The chapter titled 'Leveraging Existing Platforms and Resources' discusses the speaker's goal of achieving a scalable work-life balance by working smarter, not harder. The speaker expresses a desire to work only three days a week to reserve time for personal interests and maintain a healthy life balance. Additionally, the speaker shares personal challenges from their past, including being homeless at 15, which necessitated the need to earn enough money to survive, highlighting the importance of setting reasonable financial goals (like £3,000 a month) to ensure stability and freedom.
• 25:00 - 30:00: Scaling Your Business The chapter 'Scaling Your Business' discusses the motivations behind starting a business, particularly focusing on the financial goals. The narrator shares that their initial drive was simply to make money, regardless of the means, illustrating this with the example of being willing to sell t-shirts if it achieved their financial target. The chapter hints at a personal journey of realizing that the specific path to achieving financial success can evolve, as long as the clear goal remains.
• 30:00 - 34:30: Conclusion: Achieving Balance and Freedom This chapter discusses the concept of achieving balance and freedom in one's life. It starts by addressing the common scenario where someone is stuck in a 9-to-5 job that they don't particularly enjoy. The chapter then explores the idea of 'Point A' (being stuck in an unfulfilling job) and 'Point B' (achieving various forms of freedom). It emphasizes the desire for financial freedom, time freedom, and location freedom, ultimately aiming for the freedom to engage in activities one loves and finds fulfilling.

How To Quit Your 9-5 And Build Your Dream Business (ft. Ali Abdaal) Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 ali Abdal just walked me through the eight-step blueprint he followed to escape his 9-to-five job and build a multi-million dollar business now I know many of you watching feel stuck either in a job you hate or a school system you know isn't preparing you for the real world ali is living proof that anyone can build their dream life and escape the 9 to5 imagine going from dreading your day job to creating a side hustle that consistently makes you thousands of dollars a month by the end of this video you'll have the only blueprint you'll ever need to build a profitable business and live a life of freedom no matter
• 00:30 - 01:00 where you're starting from alli what are we going to learn today so step one set the goal step two is going to be choose your adventure step three is just get started step four is master your time step five is take consistent action step six is get clarity on who you serve seven is monetize and step eight is scale this video is sponsored by Shopify and the money from this video goes to fund people's dreams so how do we set the goals okay well I can tell you what what what worked for me so when I was in
• 01:00 - 01:30 medical school uh I thought I wanted to be a doctor and I thought you know this is this is great going to med school etc etc but then I started meeting doctors in the hospitals and stuff and I was always interested in asking doctors who were a few years ahead of me i was always interested in getting a sense of do they actually enjoy being doctors do they enjoy their jobs cuz this was the thing I'd worked so hard to get into and so I would ask them a simple question around like hey if you won the lottery would you still continue doing medicine and about half the people would say that they would leave immediately one guy
• 01:30 - 02:00 even said he'd leave in the middle of the operation uh and the other half of the people would say that like you know they would still do medicine but they would go part-time maybe like 3 days a week and I would ask them okay what's stopping you from going part-time and the answer was always about money it's like they didn't have enough money you know medicine in the UK and the NHS doesn't pay that much they had mortgages etc etc and so they had to work six days a week as doctors because they didn't have enough money to be able to cut down to three days a week and so pretty much from the age of 18 after I started asking this question and read a book called the 4-hour work week which is really good I realized that I wanted to set myself a goal of about £3,000 a
• 02:00 - 02:30 month in passive income I thought man if I could make 3K a month from a side hustle or whatever it gives me the option to go part-time in my day job as a doctor um and so that was the goal in that sense and the reason wasn't for the 3K a month in particular like I didn't really care about the money i cared about the freedom that the money would provide me and since having this realization and working towards it and now getting you know way beyond the point where I was now able to quit the job and kind of do what I love now that
• 02:30 - 03:00 other entrepreneurs and sort of people with jobs come to me for advice I always say that step one is to set the goal because the goal is the thing that sort of pulls you towards it as you know the journey of entrepreneurship is not easy it's a lot of sort of ups and downs along the way but having a clear compelling goal to sort of pull you through that really helps sustain the motivation and the discipline to actually do the stuff along the way and for me the thing that I was trying to avoid was you know being in my 40s working in medicine and being miserable which was unfortunately what I saw of a lot of the doctors that I met in my in
• 03:00 - 03:30 my day-to-day jobs in that way get trapped later on selling time yeah scalable exactly and so I was like "Okay cool that's going to be my goal my goal is to try and you know I I wasn't like trying to be a millionaire or anything i was just like you know what if I could work three days a week I've got another two days to like do what I love and I can have a healthy and balanced life so okay £3,000 a month was your goal i actually but by the way you know I was 15 years old i was homeless so I had to make money to survive i couldn't get a job so at the same point I had to make enough money to get someone to live and
• 03:30 - 04:00 have food so it's quite a good motivator to have the financial goal but but was there any other element to you at that point was it was it simply money or was there was a was there a hobby was there something you like doing that helps you define how you're going to make that money at the time it was pretty much just money i was like you know what if I if I had to sell t-shirts to make that 3,000 you know I would I would sell t-shirts like I didn't really care about the specific vehicle that would get me there i just knew that that was the spec that that was the clear goal along the way I kind of realized that um and sort
• 04:00 - 04:30 of in in my experience now like you know how how do how do we get from how do we get from A to B let's say someone is at the point where they've got a 9 toive job uh kind of don't enjoy it that much and the point of B usually for a lot of people is this idea of freedom I want to have financial freedom I want to have time freedom and I want to have location freedom I want to have the freedom to do what I love to to do what
• 04:30 - 05:00 I want with the people that I want normally like the people I speak to they're not really seeking the sort of Dubai boy millionaire yacht lifestyle normally they're just seeking security uh a sense of you know I want the freedom to not have to stress or worry about the bills so that was kind of what I was aiming for with this sort of 3K a month i mean 3K a month doesn't get you to full financial freedom or time freedom or location freedom but it's a good start and around some somewhere between 3 and 5K depending on circumstances depending on currency etc usually that's around the point where in my experience you can consider quitting
• 05:00 - 05:30 the job because that then covers a lot of people's bills obviously your mileage may vary if you live in San Francisco in massive house and you have kids like this number might be a bit higher but along the way usually people realize that there's actually two other two other goals here and those are the other two Fs which is fun and fulfillment back in the day people used to work purely for a paycheck and if you'd asked you know our granddads you know do you love your job they would have been like like you know what the hell you talking about ask myself that question yeah it's not a thing that even crosses the mind whereas nowadays what we want from work is not
• 05:30 - 06:00 simply a paycheck what we want is some combination of fun fulfillment and freedom this is why companies can't fulfill this they weren't designed to give you this fun and fulfillment piece they stick a table tennis table in there and try and make it happen but they weren't designed that way yeah it's rare to have fun and fulfillment in a job it's not impossible and you No I know a lot of people that do but it's rare it is rare yeah and I I really like the warning you have at the start of your book which is that like hey look if you're happy in your life and happy in your job don't read this book yeah don't get more knowledge it might upset you yeah that kind of thing um so in terms
• 06:00 - 06:30 of yeah frameworks for setting goals it's like yes it's good to have like a freedom number and this is where the financial the financial goal comes in but increasingly I've realized that it's also important to you know I think of these ones as journey goals and this one more like a destination goal m and that freedom is the destination that everyone is aiming for but along the way you kind of realize that either even though freedom is the goal freedom is not the point freedom by itself is actually not worth
• 06:30 - 07:00 anything just like money by itself is completely worthless money and freedom are only useful when they are being cashed in for something else that you care about you could have all the money in the world but if you're on a desert island with like no one to give that money to to buy stuff it it's completely pointless it's not worth the paper it's printed on you could have all the freedom in the world but unless you have something to do with that freedom you're going to end up depressed yeah because you know I had freedom i didn't work for two years it's worst time of my life i literally lost I didn't know what to do for two years i I've I've got various friends including you have sold companies suddenly made tens to hundreds
• 07:00 - 07:30 of millions of dollars and boom suddenly it's like you kind of need something to do so freedom and money are I think are only useful in so far as you're cashing them in for fun and fulfillment fun I think when it comes to work or business generally comes from work I love with people I love mhm and fulfillment generally in my experience comes from growth and contribution and so this is sort of getting a little bit ahead of ourselves like I think most people when starting out in the context of a day job like
• 07:30 - 08:00 when I had my goal of getting to 3K a month I wasn't thinking and along the way I also want to do work I love with people I love and I want growth and I want contribution i was fixated on the goal of financial freedom which actually is a much healthier way to do it because all of this stuff can come over time yes exactly so once what I found is if you don't have 3,000 a month which we're going to help people try and figure out how to do today if they don't have that they're in fight or flight fight or flight is literally I haven't got time to think about anything but pay the bills yes exactly and so they don't have time to think about fun or fulfillment or growth or contribution because their
• 08:00 - 08:30 mind literally is in fight or flight mode before we move on to choose your adventure one thing I just say about this I want to know if you think this is true part of this is also getting your cost down so goals can be one is get the money 3,000 a month the other is actually get your cost down yeah because your freedom comes from only needing three grand a month yes like I could live on three grand a month now easily but because of my my needs what I've got used to my life uh inflation I couldn't live on three grand now so I've made that happen myself yeah so getting back down yeah 100% like the the lower this
• 08:30 - 09:00 freedom number is the easier it is to get to it's a lot easier to get to three grand a month than it is to get to 30 grand a month if you have the requirement that you get to 30 grand a month while you have a day job good luck i don't I don't know many people who are making 30K a month in the context of also having a day job i know plenty of people who are making like somewhere between 1 and 5K a month as a side hustle while having a day job i I don't know how people do part-time three grand a month even to be honest i I know people are doing it but I couldn't do it i think you know I wouldn't I wouldn't I need good sleep i need a bit of time relaxing you know like that that will
• 09:00 - 09:30 take intensity but we're going to show people how but I do think people need to get their cost down because if you get your cost down to only two grand a month the good news is you can probably get there quicker and that means you'll have freedom ironically quicker yeah exactly um so yeah don't let the things own you and stop you having freedom right next up choose your adventure okay now we set the goal of like we want to get to three grand a month or whatever the financial goal is i have two frameworks should we Yeah [ __ ] it let's Let's go into the frameworks um we can bleep that word out it's all good we were having a discussion off camera
• 09:30 - 10:00 whether or not you guys want one route or the other so we're going to go both routes and try and teach you others i'm I'm even going to zoom a little bit further up so so this is where I don't know this is where you are right now maybe um these are three streams that all can get you to freedom you have firstly the career stream you have next the side hustle stream and you have thirdly the entrepreneur stream now the way I think of this is that when you're choosing your adventure you are like on this little ship and most people are
• 10:00 - 10:30 starting off in the career stream depending I mean um yeah um or like you're you're at college or university training for some some the system wants you to do yeah this is the sort of go to university get a job yeah that kind of thing the default career stream now can you get to freedom within the context of the default career stream you can but it's hard and it takes a long time uh this would be well Tim Cook's done it but in we talked about this over there so I'm stealing your line tim Cook has has this but the reality is you don't
• 10:30 - 11:00 control your destiny this one so this is where you know some people might have come across the fire movement which stands for financial independence retire early the theory behind this being like let's say you're in a career as a software developer and you earn 400k a year let's say your costs are only 50k a year you can now save 350K a year and if you do that for 10 years 12 years you'll have 4 million in the bank with a 4% withdrawal rate 4 million in the bank gets you a salary of 160k that you can take off um you know from the market career Stream of course the only problem with this is that 400,000 people just
• 11:00 - 11:30 won't think they can get that sort of money in a job for quite a while um and yeah the satisfaction side of it yeah I mean it could be it could be a lot less than that but it's like the the thing with the career stream is that if you want to become financially free in the career stream it's pretty unlikely unless you have a massive salary really low expenses and you're willing to wait like a couple of decades to let the money compound in like an index fund or the markets or whatever having said that for some people you know what they're like you know what that's totally cool i don't want to start a side hustle i don't want to be an entrepreneur i just
• 11:30 - 12:00 want balance in my life i don't want to have to work extra hard etc etc and for them the career stream is absolutely perfect yeah by by the way for a lot of people misunderstand me because I I I promote entrepreneurship i'm not actually promoting entrepreneurship i'm promoting freedom of choice so if you choose to do a career you've got all the information of all the other things you could be doing but you choose this i'm all for it great i just don't want people to feel trapped into doing that yes nice yeah that's why I include it in here because it is a viable path it's just it's you know it's stable but it is slower mhm and if you're in a job that
• 12:00 - 12:30 you really like and you have the balance that you want and it's you know giving you the freedom that you want the fun and the fulfillment that you want amazing you do you don't bother trying to trying to be an entrepreneur unless you really feel called to do it mhm yeah okay so side hustle how does that work so then at a certain point if I may you generally jump from the career stream and you're like ah you know it's not quite all of the things that I wanted it to be so you know what let me try and build a side hustle let me try and build some sort of side income so that I can get to my goal of freedom faster now this is faster um but it is you know
• 12:30 - 13:00 it's I I sort of think of it like you're on this like river and you got your ship your like little career stream which is like nice gentle slow and stable waters obviously some some careers are higher risk than others but in general a career stream helps you along the way then you're like "All right cool on the side I want to build a whole extra ship i want to build my boat and wade it into the into the sort of side hustle stream." And then if you really want to go full-time on that now you're like in the entrepreneur stream where there's like rapid rapids everywhere and you're like having to work a lot harder because
• 13:00 - 13:30 most people think entrepreneurs work less hard than people in a career but like how many entrepreneurs do we know who ended up you know you trade your 9 to5 for a 24/7 like kind of thing so in the entrepreneur stream which is stream number three you're really kind of high risk higher reward it is much quicker to get to freedom through a side hustle and then even more quicker to get through full-time entrepreneurship but it's like increased risk but increased reward and that's the thing with entrepreneurship is that it is risky there is all those stats about how the vast majority of businesses quote fail um if your goals
• 13:30 - 14:00 are fairly modest then you're also less likely to fail you're more likely to achieve the goals if the goals are modest which speaks to your earlier point about keeping your costs low if your freedom number is quote only three grand a month rather than 30 grand a month you are much more likely to succeed with building some sort of business if you're not trying to build a billion dollar company you're much more likely to succeed as an entrepreneur i think one of the issues with the entrepreneur thing is that in people's minds entrepreneurship is like oh my god it's terrible like I don't want to be Elon Musk it's like there's like a
• 14:00 - 14:30 zillion stages of entrepreneurship before you get to Elon Musk levels or like Steve Jobs levels or anything like that and it's worth appreciating that there are quite a lot of kind of like what some people call lifestyle businesses where you know you're making a few hundred grand you're able to do what you love you've got a few clients you're like not working too hard you've got a very small team of people that you like hanging out with which is the majority of entrepreneurs by the way that's that's success for majority of entrepreneurs they they have the freedom to work on what they want to work on it's I think Elon Musk because I love I love Elon Musk but in a way that image has ruined entrepreneurship for a lot of people they've misunderstood it yeah
• 14:30 - 15:00 because people think it's like being an entrep like I was speaking to a couple of friends as well who are like you know they are entrepreneurs uh they you know they've got like their own um you know one of my friends has like her own like operations consulting business for businesses but doesn't think of herself as an entrepreneur because she thinks an entrepreneur is someone who goes on dragons a den to get investment or an entrepreneur is someone who's trying to like get us to Mars this is I've been I've been trying to come up with a new word by the way for entrepreneurship to describe like I I know someone who's an artist and she doesn't think she's an entrepreneur but she definitely is cuz she sells her paintings
• 15:00 - 15:30 so she she does what she wants with her time building something she believes in she controls her time and she sells stuff and makes money but she thinks she's an artist not an entrepreneur so it's all I see entrepreneurship is a business framework around what you work on as opposed to like it being a particular thing like an Elon Musk or Steve Jobs type yeah um one one other way of thinking about this is are you a crew on someone else's ship or are you building captaining
• 15:30 - 16:00 owning your own ship and to me this is entrepreneurship so your friend who's an artist might not consider herself an entrepreneur but she is captaining her own ship yep she is responsible for this ship making money she's responsible for putting work out for working as much as she wants all that kind of stuff if you are a lawyer if you're a doctor if you're an accountant generally unless it's your own business you're working as a crew member on someone else's ship it's totally fine being a crew member on someone else's ship like we talked about if you enjoy it and you're you know you you've got informed consent about what the alternative path is like but side hustle is when you're trying to build
• 16:00 - 16:30 both of these at the same time you're trying to maintain being a crew member on someone else's ship to help them get rich so that you can earn a salary while trying to build your own dream and then at a certain point you realize that actually the career is maybe holding you back maybe you want to go full-time on your own dream and now you're happening your own ship and so to me this is the definition of like a business owner or an entrepreneur yeah I I personally had that journey i I at 15 years old I started a gardening company uh eventually it worked and then eventually it failed but I made money before it failed failure doesn't mean you don't make money so I made money but
• 16:30 - 17:00 then it failed and then I actually got a job in a hotel for a little while right and but in that hotel during that time I'd already got the bug of entrepreneurship so I did a side hustle of an accommodation booking service so yeah I I had my own ship and then I got on someone else's ship and then I built a side hustle of this other business that then worked and I jumped ship into my own ship yeah so kind of going back to our sort of career side hustle i think the the other reason I liked growing this out is because it's not static you know to your point exactly you know you might start off in a career
• 17:00 - 17:30 you might build a side hustle maybe you know you spend some time in there you go full-time with it you do it for a while maybe you realize it's actually not for you and you go back into a career and then but along the way you've picked up so many skills which actually help you in that career you probably get a better job yeah you probably get a better job and then maybe at some point you're like you know what actually I don't want the pain of full-time entrepreneurship but I quite like having my own little gardening side hustle while I'm in my career of whatever I'm also doing my my side hustle you know a bunch of people who work with me you know people in my team uh a lot of them have started their own businesses realized that actually entrepreneurship is full-time
• 17:30 - 18:00 entrepreneurship is not for them so now they're just doing it as a side hustle while working for me full-time and by the way again like I I always think the one of the holy grails for this is own equity where you work so you can actually work in a job you'll be surprised how you could get equity everyone on my team has equity in the business so I think that you can you can work in a business if you you can still therefore own a part of the ship to follow through on the analogy so it might not be your ship you might not have even created it but you believe in the ship and its mission and where it's going and you can ask for equity in it so there's a mixture of this um I would say one other thing you mentioned
• 18:00 - 18:30 earlier risk entrepreneur is risky i actually think there's a slight misunderstanding about this i don't think entrepreneurship is as risky as people say it is especially if you're an artist so you're doing what you love it doesn't feel painful you make money out of it of course the risk is you don't make money out of it but hopefully you will if you're working for someone else there's a much they could just get rid of you at any point people don't actually see the risk but you could work for 10 years at Facebook help build that brand and then Mark Zuckerberg let you go and you don't own anything that's it
• 18:30 - 19:00 and you have to go get another job and start earning money somewhere else you don't own equity in something is the problem that's what I think people need to think about a little bit more when choosing their adventure I would say try to own equity on that adventure yeah I agree hey guys this video is sponsored by Shopify we use all the money we make in this video to fund people's dreams so please listen similar to Ali at some point in your entrepreneurial journey you might have some kind of product or service that you want to sell and Shopify allows business owners to do this effortlessly shopify is a powerful set of tools that helps you start and manage your business whether that's
• 19:00 - 19:30 being online or in person and Ali and I both use Shopify to sell our products online i'm not just saying this because they pay for this ad i'm telling you it because I know it can help your business and it's a great product there are so many ways that Shopify has made my life easier shopify Magic is a new AI powered tool which helps you streamline your website processes making it easier for customers to reach that checkout button shopify Magic also features AI powered product descriptions and store design saving you time and getting you the best results the absence of any coding on Shopify allows you to build a website in
• 19:30 - 20:00 a matter of hours saving you valuable time for me I can't code this product helps me get this done without needing to know any of that with Shopify you can grow your business from anywhere in the world and get real time data on your sales at a click of a button using their amazing mobile app millions of businesses trust Shopify for their business including me so what are you waiting for sign up to Shopify using the link on the screen to get a free trial and start your business journey today just get started i think that leads quite well into just get started which I will try to write just get started because a lot of this and a
• 20:00 - 20:30 lot of people that listen to our stuff on YouTube they they they have all this information we've just given them they know their journey they're not doing it so what what do we need to give people to help them do it yeah i mean I think the key thing is to recognize that you're never going to have all of the information that you want i think one of the issues with the schooling system is that it creates the illusion of certainty you know that if you do if you get a certain mark in a certain exam
• 20:30 - 21:00 that you're going to get an A star or an A or eight or a seven or like whatever it's called these days you know what the entry requirements are to universities you kind of have a sense of when you're applying to a mainstream job you know they they say how many UKcast points they need or like what the requirements are you know that if you work your way up the ladder there's like oh 5 years later I'll get a promotion in medicine for example you know exactly what the path looks like it gives you this profound sense of certainty and people love the certainty people would rather be unhappy than uncertain um unfortunately in the world of entrepreneurship you have to you have to
• 21:00 - 21:30 recognize that there is no certainty yeah sure there are things that you can just stack the deck in your favor by you know watching all all the videos you've made about this um but there's no certainty and I think people are waiting for like oh once I have that right idea people people have this this thing of like you know when the right idea strikes me I will just know i will just be so certain that I'll be able to start my business but like you know you've started loads of businesses over the years how many of them have you had like have you felt man this is the perfect idea I have so much certainty that it's going to work zero really I mean no certainty but desperation when I'm
• 21:30 - 22:00 younger that's for sure and then as you get older maybe you know yourself so you're going to enjoy it bit like your book talks about you got to get that feeling of enjoying it that's probably where I but but I already started so I'm not this person because I had no choice but to start but a lot of people unfortunately they've got choices to your point they know certainty through a job get go to university I'll get a job by the way that's not certain anymore more if you actually look at the stats universities promise jobs but they aren't getting the jobs there's so many people coming out with degrees but how do we get people to to just start what's what do you think the framework is for
• 22:00 - 22:30 that yeah um I think okay so if we say for example the content route um actually you know there's a thing that Alexi talks about which is the rule of 100 which is um before you're ready just do the thing 100 times yes you know like if you're starting a service business do 100 called reachouts if you're creating content do 100 pieces of content whatever the thing is i think this is a little bit like overwhelming for most people i call it the rule of seven okay just do seven things so in the world of content for example six minute apps or the fiveminute apps this is much better
• 22:30 - 23:00 only seven pieces only seven yeah 100% so if you're going down the content you know I teach a course parttime YouTuber academy people pay back when we were running it as a live cohort people were paying $2,000 to sign up to my course and like in the final cohort for example we had we had a,000 people sign up so I made a lot of money because they were paying paying like 2,000 $2,000 to sign up but of those thousand this was a this was like a six week course and each week we were just 1 2 3 4 yeah we were just asking we were just asking people to
• 23:00 - 23:30 submit one just create one video it can be as janky as you want filmed on your phone we gave them all the resources and we we're going to give you feedback you've paid for this you're in a community you've got people you know cheering you every step of the way the number of people who submitted the homework for week one was 50% half of the people who paid $2,000 to sign up to my course literally half of them did not even take action on the first week why didn't they do it they've paid the money and they've just not That by the way also validates it's
• 23:30 - 24:00 not always paying there's something else isn't it accountability partly or is it what is Why do people do it i don't know so I I spent ages trying to figure this out cuz we've been running this course for a few years and it like it amazes me how people will pay for the thing and then not actually take action well gym people pay for gym memberships and don't go yeah no exactly and then doesn't actually equal so So I realized that I I also have this like there was a friend of mine who's super into marketing and he he said something interesting he said that around 50% of people who who buy a Pelaton bike never even take it out of the box because when we buy something we
• 24:00 - 24:30 we generally buy to f to fulfill some kind of emotional need i've bought loads of courses on music theory guitar finger style picking like you know how to play by ear on the piano and I buy the course because I'm like rahrh motivation in the moment thinking like oh man I could you know that's a really cool riff that John Mayer played let me just find a course that how to play play this and once I've bought the thing I have this thing of like ah I've taken the first step i've won and then I forget about the thing i even forget I even bought access to the course because now I have to put in the work and so buying the thing fulfills an
• 24:30 - 25:00 emotional need but when you realize that it actually takes work half the people will immediately drop off by the time we get to week six on the course it's down to 15% the last time we ran this 15% of people actually completed the thing that's actually That's a high number it's a high number normally for courses it's like 2% and so we we work really freaking hard we reach out to people we like hop on phone calls with them we message them we email them and we get this number from 2 to 15% but what it goes to show is that I think it's kind of reassuring if someone is at this point in the video you know most people would have dropped off this video looking at our retention curves in the
• 25:00 - 25:30 first 30 seconds by the time we've got to this part in the video the majority of people will no longer be watching so if someone is still here at this point in the video chances are they have more of an ability to actually follow through and take action on so telling them just getting started you are starting they're actually doing it because I I say that in I I didn't say at the intro of this but I normally say if you can't sit and watch this video you're probably not going to make it yeah cuz here is free knowledge from people that have done it are going to help you if you can't even listen to this like but but I wonder though okay
• 25:30 - 26:00 so is there a framework we can give people assuming that people got this far in the video that helps them keep going is there something that you've noticed about this 15% that keeps them going i I want to guess and say uh some sort of commitment or uh accountability but yeah um okay so I spent ages trying to think figure this out like of the people that stay consistent with something you know so first so so firstly there's just getting started just doing the thing seven times just making your first seven
• 26:00 - 26:30 videos putting doing your first colab yeah i think you're trying to build habit here weren't you exactly and then sort of the next thing is how do you stay consistent and the reason we had that as step four is cuz step four is master your time uh this is something I liked in your book you had like the step ladder of excuses and the thing right at the bottom is classic excuse i don't have time that is always the first excuse the the reason this is a very penicious and like evil thing is because it is true none of us has time you don't have
• 26:30 - 27:00 time to fly to Hong Kong and like do this podcast you've got a zillion things on your plate i did not have time when I was working as a doctor and even now to make YouTube videos because there's always better things I could be doing you know I wish I were more consistent at the gym i could tell back in the day I used to tell myself I don't have time i've realized over time that you know I'm not allowed to say that phrase anymore anytime I say to myself I don't have time I reframe it as I am actively choosing not to make the time because we all have time no one is being held at gunpoint and being forced to do things yes I get it you know in a world like I
• 27:00 - 27:30 don't have kids yet i've got a kid on the way i've heard that when you have kids suddenly you realize how much time you squandered when you don't have kids and you're like holy i feel that yeah i had so much spare time I didn't realize it you don't realize it you don't have kids you have you have time more time than you ever imagined i I find myself saying this you know when when I started actually working a job you realize how much time you had at university holy freak and like at school I'm like bloody hell i thought med school was busy but going into the hospital was optional now what you know I'm working full-time it's it's not optional anymore i have to work
• 27:30 - 28:00 60 hours a week otherwise I'm going to get fired and I'm going to lose my license and like what i had so much I so much time I was just squandering it so now any kind of I don't have time I reframe as I'm actively choosing not to make the time this is usually the thing that holds people back at least on the surface people will say "Oh the reason I'm not consistent on YouTube is because I just don't have the time or life got in the way." But the thing is life will always get in the way and but but the reason I said I I said this as number four master your time rather than be consistent everyone knows they should be consistent is that actually time management is a skill and time
• 28:00 - 28:30 management is a skill that can be learned and that is I I've got hundreds of videos about this over the years um someone who's looking at my channel and see like there are a small number of very tangible things someone can do to actually make the most out of their time because if you take two different people they're both trying to start a business this is person one person number two person number one is good at time management person number two is bad at time management they've never read a book about it never implemented any of the strategies never watched a video about it or they've watched the content but then then they're not actually taking action we all have fundamentally
• 28:30 - 29:00 the same 168 hours in the week the same 24 hours in the day obviously there are some people whose time is being used up by taking care of kids or by cooking or by cleaning or whatever you know taking care of a loved one or health issues all all of that stuff aside all else being equal someone who's better at managing their time will squeeze way more value and output out of it than someone who's not and I think people in general what I find is that the people who are more likely to stay consistent generally it comes down to two things number one is that they know how to manage their time and number two they have found a way to
• 29:00 - 29:30 enjoy the process and so the time management stuff is the stuff I've been talking about on YouTube for ages the enjoying the process stuff if my if I may plug my book temporarily is like you know it's called feel good productivity it's about how to do more of what matters to you and basically the thesis is that if we look at the science around this if you can find a way to enjoy the process of doing something rather than simply being fixated on the outcome you're way more likely to stay motivated consistent it's so true and and I I think your book describes this process so so well people won't even notice the
• 29:30 - 30:00 time if they're enjoying it yeah it's kind of like time becomes an insignificant thing like I want to do this podcast i want to be here i want to get this knowledge from you to give to people for free i I I will find the time because you found the time i find the time and I think that Yeah how but when people are listening to this what how do you know if you're managing your time well or not yeah so my barometer for this is it's basically to So okay so to me good time management is simply doing what you intended to do that's all there
• 30:00 - 30:30 is and so that has two bits number one is intention and number two is action so right now we have blocked in our calendar that we're doing this podcast together we have created the intention by literally just sticking in the calendar and we're taking action we're here doing this podcast right so this is good time management like we have mastered our time here cuz we're acting in line with our intention i think the first step is the really easy one which most people don't do which is just set the intention in the first place i've lost count of the number of people I have in my course who ask me a
• 30:30 - 31:00 question like "Oh you know I'm really struggling to be consistent on YouTube." And I'm like "Okay show me your calendar where is the time blocked in your calendar to be consistent to to work on your YouTube channel?" And they're like "Oh well I don't really use my calendar." I'm like "Wait but you know you've got a job like surely you use a calendar for meetings." They're like "Oh yeah i use my calendar for work but I don't use my calendar for my side hustle." I'm like "Broo there's a reason every single professional uses a calendar for their work because it's a way to manage your time a way to at least set the intentions of what you intend to do with your time." I think if we approach the time outside of the 9
• 31:00 - 31:30 to5 with more intention just like we approach the 9 to5 you know building a business is not something that happens easily it's not something that happens on its own you have to make the intention by putting the blocks in your calendar and then the next question becomes okay once I've put the block on the calendar am I actually doing the thing so for example one of my one of my team members 1010en he has a side hustle he's got a YouTube channel but every Monday and every Tuesday evening from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m he's just blocked it out that's the time where he works on his YouTube channel so every single week he guarantees that he's at least got 8 hours cordoned off sometimes stuff comes
• 31:30 - 32:00 up sometimes a friend will say "Hey do you want to hang out?" And what's he going to say he's going to say "Nope I'm sorry i can't do Mondays and Tuesdays." He probably won't tell them cuz that's what I'm growing my YouTube channel but like he knows that that you know obviously family if a family emergency comes up that is something different but I'm amazed as to like 95% of people who ask me about time management or they're struggling with consistency with whatever the thing is they just don't have it blocked in their calendar and I'm like bro that's such an easy first step you know by the way I I think this might sound a bit elitist i don't mean
• 32:00 - 32:30 it to sound but one of the best things I've ever did in the past was I hired a PA and I didn't want PA and I recently hired a PA again I didn't want a PA but I I because I have to show them exactly what I'm doing when I'm doing it and the interesting thing is I've just got a new PA i have to block out when I'm going to the gym block out when I'm having time with my family like am I doing Sunday am I doing Saturday am I when am I available to do the work that she's planning for me so it really helps you if you use your diary properly to literally use it for your life not for work forget forget about work put what you're going to do in the diary and then
• 32:30 - 33:00 set the alarms on your phone so that you basically know this is the time you're letting yourself down if you don't do the action yeah take consistent action so so for me I defined consistency on YouTube as being one video a week to this day I think I still think it works long form shorts you you need to post pretty much daily but for long form videos like landscape videos uh one a week is a pretty good cadence i realized that actually making one video a week is really hard but if I happen to be on night shifts at work and then I would have two days off in those two days I
• 33:00 - 33:30 could film five different videos and then I can just spend the evenings editing them and so that helped me be consistent the thing with consistency as well is that I think there's a couple of other things that really help the first one is accountability the reason why most people don't struggle with consistency in their job is because they have accountability they have someone they have a manager who is looking out for them and looking to make sure they're doing the thing like you wouldn't dream of not showing up to work because you know there are consequences but just I've just done this a colleague
• 33:30 - 34:00 of mine said to me the other day I want to be more famous on LinkedIn i want people to know who I am i'm like "Okay you post every day on LinkedIn every day you don't post you have to give me £100." They haven't stopped there post every single day since Adam Smith every single day since that moment it's not really the money it's also the pride right it's also like an end of like yeah this is so powerful yeah and I think putting money on the line is a a super easy hack for this there's so many people I know who have stayed accountable for doing something by literally just putting money on the line in your case um I think another thing is community which sort of relates to to
• 34:00 - 34:30 accountability yeah um if you have people around you who are also taking consistent action you're just more likely to do the thing i would be way in way better shape if I had people around me who were in good shape because they they'd be going to the gym if you can find a way to build a community around you either in real life or even online um a community of people doing the thing it makes it a lot easier to stay consistent with the thing um I think for example a key one for this is like um podcasts podcasts um videos
• 34:30 - 35:00 etc you know there's that whole thing of like you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with i think it's sort of it it's it is also true that you kind of become the average of the five voices you hear most often so if someone for example has been watching all of your stuff and listening to all of your YouTube videos that you you've ever put out and they buy your book or listen to your audio book or whatever the thing might be you are going to be one of the key voices in their life and therefore the thought of starting that business or staying consistent with it now all of a sudden
• 35:00 - 35:30 it's like it's not that it's not that hard because like they've seen that other people are doing it in my days of trying to stay consistent on YouTube every single day while driving to work and back I was listening to podcasts from other YouTubers talking um there was the video creators podcast I think media podcast later Colin and Samir started doing interviews and then John started doing interviews and I was just absorbing every piece of advice I could possibly around other people doing YouTube and they were all talking about how consistency was really difficult for them and how and how they managed to make it work and so all of those things were I felt like I had this online
• 35:30 - 36:00 community of people they had no idea who I was cuz I was nobody at the time um they had no idea who I was but I got so much inspiration and motivation out of hearing their voices in my headphones and in my car while driving to work and back of like it's so much easier to take action when you have voices around you obviously real life is great but like online this is how you can hack mentorship by the way you just pick who you want your mentors to be and consume their content you don't need them to sit with you necessarily you just absorb their energy yeah no absolutely but how did you have any accountability like if you didn't upload you wouldn't make
• 36:00 - 36:30 money right so the freedom was also not going to happen that's part of Yeah so for me I found that like just committing myself to one video a week and just sort of essentially making it as a rule for myself or like okay I have to upload a video every single week there were some weeks when I was in the middle of like my finals for medical school where I was like am I really going to upload a video this week my mom saw me filming a video cuz I went home for the weekend just you know as a break before finals and she was like "What the hell are you doing like you're filming a video when you've got your final medical school exams like on the Monday what the hell is wrong with you?" And I couldn't really explain
• 36:30 - 37:00 i was I was like "No she knows now." Yeah she knows now yeah it it worked out but not breaking the chain no matter what i I found that actually the a thing that really helps with consistency is lower the bar right so that's one a week that's all don't break that yeah one a week also but also it doesn't have to be good it just has to it just has to exist right so there were a few videos that I posted in that time that were really crap for example going to the gym some you know people who are more consistent with with with the gym say that if you don't feel like it you just go you do a
• 37:00 - 37:30 jumping jack or like one stretch or you just look at yourself in the mirror and you walk back out again the point is you haven't broken the streak you've just lowered the bar of what counts as a win oh my god I've got some great news guys thanks to you and your support of this channel and what we do this book just became the number one book on the Sunday Times bestseller list number one because you bought it and you supported our mission to fund people's dreams and help people do what they love you can now go review it on Amazon if you enjoyed the book go review it the link's down below it will make a hell of a difference thank you so much for supporting what
• 37:30 - 38:00 we're doing let's get back to the video next one is get clarity on who you serve like this one this subject I've always found interesting on YouTube as well trying to figure out who's actually watching your content and so on but yeah when you're you know big like you then it's like really hard to figure out yeah like me thank you you're bigger than me in the in the early days of my channel when I had like 63 subscribers it was very it was fairly easy to figure out who who I served in that I was serving other people trying to get into med school right did you know that those 63 subscribers could just be you know 63 people in in India that accidentally got the video you know or slept overnight
• 38:00 - 38:30 and video kept playing i mean yeah it could be but like it was a video about how to get into med school it's like it's unlikely that someone who's not in that audience but did you label it out that way did you yeah yeah yeah i mean I wasn't trying to title it like this video will change your life or anything cuz trying to title things like that makes gets it very broad and you don't quite know i was just like super focused on like okay what's the point of me making YouTube videos well the point is to get people to buy my course so the thumbnail said how to get into medical school the title said how to get to med school right and the thumbnail said BMAT section one or whatever the thing like it was i was just like super super targeting on YouTube for that person who
• 38:30 - 39:00 would need that to watch that that feels quite hard to make sure that person you put it in the group you posted a video in the group no I don't even like but the the YouTube algorithm that's the whole point of the YouTube algorithm it serves the right video to the right person at the right time so there's some interesting insight it's niche but like you know someone's trying to get into an MBA program they are guaranteed they're going to be searching on YouTube for a GMAT exam right leverage search yeah leverage search search right at the start these days now it's more like you know we try and go broad try and get on
• 39:00 - 39:30 the homepage right but getting on the homepage versus search is like two very different strategies for YouTube but the reason I mentioned because you know coming back to our whole thing it's like the goal is to is to understand the whole 3K a month thing generally my model for this which I I now teach to my students in YouTuber Academy in the content stream you want to try and sell something for $300 and sell 10 of those a month and now you're making 3K a month that works in the service space too because you can get if you're a social media manager for helping someone post up social media and you say I manage your posts for you 300 £300 a month 10 people that's it same exactly same i
• 39:30 - 40:00 mean to be honest like so I I had a good I had a good chat with a mutual friend Dan Priestley about this and he was saying for services he doesn't go any less than 2,000 he tries to get I don't know 1.5 a month like if you can get three clients every two months paying you two grand then you're making you're making he's more famous than a lot of our listeners mind you but yeah I think I think he is he is but like you can the thing with two grand is that two grand is not very much for a business it's a lot for an individual so to I you know doing B2B services um yeah two two grand
• 40:00 - 40:30 is generally much more affordable whereas for a normal person a consumer $300 is more affordable in terms of like buying a course or whatever the thing is absolutely true i I actually sold to CNN a million pound service and and and originally I priced it at £450,000 and they said it was too cheap in fact they were worried I couldn't do the work oh wow so so it's it's absolutely true sometimes it is we I I'm actually going to retract what I just said there i think people should think bigger than they think they think should yeah and I think the reason people don't is because everyone watching this is that you are a
• 40:30 - 41:00 consumer right like I'm a consumer like we buy stuff yeah so that's expensive as a consumer yeah exactly businesses is a tax write off yeah exactly when you start thinking like a business it's like one of my team members realized this the the other day um I I hired a graphic designer to do a rebrand of our stuff and I thought I was going to pay him £500 quid and a few months later like 2 months later he sends the invoice and turns out you know he he was charging like5 £5,000 instead of £500 and I looked at the invoice i was like and I looked at the original message and I realized I'd misread what he said and so
• 41:00 - 41:30 Tinton one of my team members was in the room and I was like "No 5 grand whatever." Right and Tinten said his mind was blown in that moment because he realized that to me as a business owner there is no difference between £500 and £5,000 especially if the service is good yeah exactly the service was good for Tinten £500 is £5,000 is like an entire 2 years worth of savings that's how much different it is between £55 grand for a consumer but it's like a meaningless tax write off for a business that's so true and when people realize this you realize holy [ __ ] if I sell if I'm trying to sell gardening services to a homeowner I
• 41:30 - 42:00 probably can't sell sell sell that for two grand unless it's sort of like in Hamstead even then probably not if I'm trying to sell tutoring for kids trying to get into med school that's price anchored because they're consumers but if I'm trying to sell social media content marketing services to a private practice sort of doctor surgery that I know is doing millions in revenue two grand is absolutely nothing totally you know if I'm trying to sell content creation as a service to a startup where I can look up their records and I can see that they've raised 50 million in funding two grand is an absolute drop in
• 42:00 - 42:30 the ocean it's almost too cheap and so shifting from thinking in terms of selling to consumers to selling to businesses that seems to be the hack for most people I know who do service based businesses my favorite story is the lady that designed the night logo right she charged $300 to charge the night logo really and then later I might have got the number wrong it might be but around a very small amount of money and then of course Knight blew up and it did really well and the Knight founders went back and gave her shares stock in the company worth millions so it's it's kind of interesting because as a company as a startup company
• 42:30 - 43:00 actually this was their budget but because the company became so valuable they feel like that they undercharged she'd been underpaid and they went back and compensated her properly even though they didn't have to so that £5,000 example also there's an element of like well if he delivered it doesn't matter even if it was personal if they actually delivered what you needed and it created the value of £5,000 then it doesn't matter anymore so next is monetize but the thing the thing with monetization is that the mistake people make is that they they think it's like okay build the
• 43:00 - 43:30 product or whatever the thing is and then step number two sell the product uh this is actually the wrong order to do it in you want to first sell the product and then build it so um the easy thing here is a weight list this is what our friend Dan Priestley also talks about before building anything you know you want to validate that the demand for the thing actually exists so you get people to sign up for a wait list let's say I was writing a new book and I was like I'm not really sure i I don't want to spend all the time writing a book because it takes ages before knowing
• 43:30 - 44:00 that people actually want this or building a new course or a new piece of software by the way so why have you not done this um I have enough con I have a large enough audience and put a link down below why don't we do it the link a link wait list for your book too down below let's do it i am okay the the the more pertinent is that I am building software and for for software I have a lot less conviction because I'm kind of new to the software thing okay so step one is to build software by the way just to to share with um we are building a product called life compass which is
• 44:00 - 44:30 going to help you figure out what to do with your life and take consistent action towards your dreams for for that Izzy my wife is in the process of creating a sales page which is going to have some text on it and it's going to have an email sign up which is like "Hey if you're interested join the wait list." Mhm now this costs us basically nothing to put together it is just one page that says "Okay we're building this app that will do X Y and Z if that sounds interesting join the wait list." And then we're going to mention this to our audience in my newsletter and Instagram Izzy's Instagram whatever the thing is and we'll see we'll be able to measure how many people actually clicked
• 44:30 - 45:00 clicked on this and then how many people signed up so this would be like the conversion rate and based on this we can get a sense of okay did three people sign up did like 100 people hit the weight list page but three of them signed up that's a terrible conversion rate for a free free weight list if 100 people hit the weight list page and like 90 of them signed up we're like damn okay there's something here if we email it out to our audience and 10,000 people join the weight list that's a very different result than if three people join the weight list and it's super easy
• 45:00 - 45:30 to create a weight list so you so you create the weight list first it's also by the way if you wanted to raise money for your business and you can go we did this with Helbank by the way we put a weight list up and 11,500 people signed up wanting the product nice so that's how you find out you can go to investors and say "We know people want this product look these people have said they want it." Exactly um step number two from the wait list is the pre-sale so I'm going to use the example of my wife Izzy was going to create a course on how to learn Mandarin because people kept asking her for about it asking her about it she built a wait list by saying "Hey I'm working on some
• 45:30 - 46:00 resources for learning Mandarin you know enter email to sign up." She got about 5,000 people to sign up then what she did was that she you know after after a while after lots of sort of being talked into it and you know struggling to kind of get over the fear of selling uh eventually she created a page which was a checkout page that was like saying "Hey look this is going to be 50% off um and it's only going to be for the f I think for the first uh like 30 people or something like that and there was a buy
• 46:00 - 46:30 button and she emailed the weight list saying "Hey would you like to be a beta tester for the course i'm going to give it to you for 50% off." And you know along the way I just love your feedback and she got about $10,000 worth of sales from purely the pre-sale she had not actually made the course at that point but the pre-sale was enough to validate that hey $10,000 worth of people so like what was that or whatever that is she was selling for $300 whatever $10,000 worth of people are willing to actually put money on the line cuz if you go and ask people hey would you be interested in this product people might say yes but
• 46:30 - 47:00 if you ask them to get out the credit card and pay for it all of a sudden you're getting a sense of what's what's the real demand on this thing so $10,000 was enough to validate the idea and then she spent like 6 months actually making the course build and now she and now it's on sale for her audience um but if she hadn't done these first two steps you know this is the mistake so many people make it's like they spend months and months and months building the product and then realize that actually there's no demand for it whereas you can make a wait list in like half an hour you can build a checkout page in like a day and now you've saved
• 47:00 - 47:30 months and months and months of effort just to validate the idea in the first place scale a lot of people are scared to scale my experience has been a bigger business is easier to manage than a small business oh really yeah a lot easier 15 people well no there's a gray area isn't there we both We're talking about this off camera for you guys to know but I think there is a gray area which is like small companies really lifestyle fun of course there are businesses anomalies like Telegram that will have maybe 20 people and somehow they're a billion dollar company but most companies not going to be massive
• 47:30 - 48:00 revenue the small team but you can have a good life middle ground small team gets a bit bigger 15 20 30 people wow that's a lot of work to manage that team you can't afford middle management and you're having to be there to make it work and it gets quite scary but I got to 60 70 people full-time it was actually quite good i could afford middle management eventually I brought someone else in to run the company yeah and that that for me was like wow I should have scaled it earlier it took me about 10 years to realize that oh nice yeah i'm on about 20 people at the moment and I'm and I'm like in the
• 48:00 - 48:30 process of sort of scaling back a little bit because we've got a few team members who are leaving and we probably won't replace them cuz I'm feeling the pain of like around the 15 to 20 people thing where we do have middle management but fundamentally I'm still like the I guess running business which is like there's a listen in there i think it's also you've done what you like and you've brought a lot of value but you're the face of the company which is when people are listening i think personal brand is has its downside it's it's not really easy to flip it into letting someone else do the content for example right so it's
• 48:30 - 49:00 you carrying potentially that as the face of the company all the content yeah in many ways like I often think like I don't really have a business i I just have a a very high paying job because if I stop doing stuff the business doesn't grow m and then if you know if I suddenly stopped making YouTube videos you know it would last for a little bit with the revenue from the old back catalog and like core sales trickling in but it would fall off a cliff pretty quickly i think I think people should actually understand this concept of running a bigger business is easier than running a small business so when they go into the business they should actually
• 49:00 - 49:30 have a framework do they want to have pain for a few years to grow a business big so they can have time off or do they want a lifestyle business yeah yeah yeah so I'm very keen on the lifestyle business approach where you know keeping it smallish keeping it very profitable um and focusing on the business serving me rather than me serving the business and I know that you know I I I I've heard a lot of other entrepreneur friends kind of say this that like at a certain like beyond about 40 people 50 people when you've got the proper
• 49:30 - 50:00 professional structures in place it becomes super chill and you can just be an owner rather than the operator personally for me at this stage in life I don't think I want to go through that pain um cuz the end destination of also like the business is bu built around my personal brand can't imagine a unless I try to go down the Tony Robbins route which seems seems like a lot of work to me the reason I started this was to buy my freedom and now I have the freedom and it's like one thing I've been thinking about a lot is that at the start of the journey freedom comes from making money
• 50:00 - 50:30 because you make enough money to buy an appropriate you know a sufficient amount of freedom quit the job quit the job for for example but beyond a certain point freedom actually comes from leaving money on the table right now you know we'll do a couple million in profit USD this year probably like 1.8 1.9 something like 2 million who knows depending on how the last couple of months go um if I if I'd made twice as many videos and done twice as many sponsorships I could have made an
• 50:30 - 51:00 extra million quid but do I want to be tied into that lifestyle not really i'm happy to leave that million quid on the table for the sake of my freedom m I could always launch new products and new courses every month and all this kind of stuff but the price of freedom at a certain point is leaving money on the table and so I think this is the thing with lifestyle businesses is that lifestyle businesses give you freedom where you have a small team and you're very profitable in your case having a team of 60 and hiring someone to run the business also gives you freedom but on
• 51:00 - 51:30 the other side I don't want that again by the way there's a lot of pain that you're going through i now have a team of 18 but they're all owners or in control of the business themselves so but yeah I don't have pain at 18 which is I've just realized that I I have a team of 18 but I don't have that much pain but the freedom point interesting though because in a way using you as a case study like you are still you're not as free as you could be yeah right so you kind of it's both you have to accept the lack of freedom in some respects making $2 million a year profit you're
• 51:30 - 52:00 the head of it that that's not total freedom it's not total freedom but it's freedom you've accepted as balance yeah if I was content to make 200 grand I would be a lot more free but I don't want to drop from 2 million to 200 grand and so I'm willing to pay the price of pay the price of doing a certain number of videos every month and like showing up for my courses and communities and like doing doing the stuff conveniently I also happen to mostly enjoy the process there are times where I don't where I'm like it's kind of annoying but I think every job has bits of it that
• 52:00 - 52:30 are kind of annoying and you just sort of I I I sometimes think would I choose to go back to medicine absolutely not would I choose to go work for someone else absolutely not so I broadly I love what I'm doing but there are days where I'm like do I really feel like filming this video not really but we got to do it anyway but it kind of goes back to the point you were uh mentioning earlier you know are you learning are you growing i that I think this is why purpose is so important because if like I I don't need to work i I had total freedom and it made me miserable but now
• 52:30 - 53:00 I'm building something and I do want to build a big big company that helps a lot of people but my freedom is definitely getting taken away from me but what I'm doing is I'm giving up equity i'm giving I'm leaving money on the table you could argue it's another form of leaving money on the table i'm giving up equity however to empower other people for them to do it not just me nice yeah and and I think that that that putting money on the table there's different forms of it but in a way you're you're saying I'm
• 53:00 - 53:30 willing to do less content and have a better life still making profit that's fine the way I'm doing it is I'm giving up the profit that we are making because we're doing more to other people to do the work yes exactly and like an accountant might say to you Simon what are you doing you've got a big audience you you don't need to incentivize these people with equity why would you bother and you're like well I'm leaving the money on the table because I want more freedom cuz I want them to feel more empowered to feel ownership they're going to do a better job they're going to take more responsibility on they're going to land Richard Branson of the guns or whatever totally without me having to be the one driving the whole thing and you're making that decision
• 53:30 - 54:00 this is also a moral code thing for me at this stage is like I want to make everybody rich not not I I I made myself rich how you actually make people rich how you make yourself rich is you figure out a way of how to make everybody else rich that's it so if I can make my whole team rich well that's more people helping more people with their dreams isn't it cuz they can afford to do that if I can give everyone financial freedom then they're free to go and help people for free right but I I think it's really hard like I know a lot of entrepreneurs that won't give up equity and they want scale and they give up a lot of freedom for it and and they don't understand
• 54:00 - 54:30 this concept that leaving money on the table isn't just the amount of money you could make it's also ownership in the business yes yeah i think another thing interesting thing about leaving money on the table is like let's say I was still working in medicine 5 days a week these days you can actually go down to 4 days a week or three days a week you just make less money right and so if you're comfortable leaving that money on the table or you're physically able to leave that money on the table you've actually just bought your freedom without having to start a side hustle by just being comfortable with less and so like yeah at a certain point the cost of freedom is the money you leave on the table i think there's also stages in life like I
• 54:30 - 55:00 think to our young audience when I was younger I didn't mind not having freedom i wanted financial security yeah so I will sacrifice freedom to get to that £3,000 a month but once I got to the £3,000 a month the hardest thing is actually being happy with that back to keeping your cost down i don't need to own a boat i've got a friend who owns a boat so but would I like to own a boat and you know show off my boat there's something about me would but I'm not willing to give up my freedom for that possession so I think a lot of people it's very discipline at this stage is
• 55:00 - 55:30 quite important for people right yeah I think so i think also for young people like when I was young I was willing to trade off a lot of freedom knowing that I could buy freedom later knowing that like at this season of life when when when I'm in my 20s and you know it's co and I have nothing to do I may as well just grind super hard on the business to try and get that to you know a few million in revenue a few million in profit whatever the thing is knowing that once CO lifts once I get you know hopefully end up in a relationship get married have a kid at that point I will value the freedom the time freedom much
• 55:30 - 56:00 more than the freedom to play more video games when I was in my 20s and so I sort of predicted that which is why I was willing to sort of have a more of a season of grind when I was in my 20s whereas now that I'm 30 and I've got a kid on the way I'm like I still I like the kid hasn't popped out yet so I'm still like all right but you're enjoying the process of being pregnant and you're enjoying you know being pregnant but we are being pregnant sure my wife my wife and I still always say that we we are pregnant as I'm clearly not pregnant um look this knowledge is so valuable thanks for sharing it i hope you guys got a lot of value for it we're off to
• 56:00 - 56:30 have some chicken now see you later bye i keep meeting people who feel stuck they're tired not because they're lazy but because nothing feels meaningful they overthink everything and still don't know what they want they bounce from one thing to the next hoping that this one will finally feel right and deep down they start believing there's something wrong with them i've seen this over and over and I know what's missing on May 14th I'm doing something I've never done before i'm hosting a free live session where I'm going to teach you what that missing link is and how to
• 56:30 - 57:00 finally have all the essential pieces to start building the life you've always dreamed of i'm not selling you anything i don't want anything in return i just want you to have free mentorship i want you to have the help you need and if you show up I promise you I'll show up for you it's not motivation it's not hype it's the one thing that finally made life make sense for me and the thousands of others I know that are building something they love if you ever felt you're missing something this is for you join me live